26

Looking back over the history of the French Annales school, one enduring trait clearly emerges: attentiveness to what is happening in other disciplines and the appropriation of concepts promoted by sister sciences. This transdisciplinarity could almost be the school’s visiting card. A shift can nevertheless be discerned between the early years, when ideas captured from outside the school’s historic discipline tended to be the most changeable and adaptable, and the period that began at the “critical turning point” in 1988, which ushered in the practice of interdisciplinarity predicated on a historical identity that was founded on the plurality of reasoning over time.