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IN 1929, two French historians founded a journal called Annales d’Histoire economique et sociale and began writing a new kind of history.

Their predecessors had chronicled the doings of kings and presidents: wars, treaties and personality clashes. Annales historians dismissed most of that as trivial “events”, mere “headlines of the past”. The Annales’ star Fernand Braudel wrote: “Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness.”

The Annales school focused on the long term: lasting forces such as a region’s climate, geography, its mentalite, or social and economic trends. These were the factors that shaped human existence.