With the efflorescence of palaeoscientific approaches to the past, historians have been confronted with a wealth of new evidence on both human and natural phenomena, from human disease and migration to landscape change and climate. These new data require a rewriting of our narratives of the past, questioning what constitutes an authoritative historical source and who is entitled to recount history to contemporary societies. Humanities-based historical inquiry must embrace this new evidence, but to do so historians need to engage with it critically, just as they do with textual and material sources. This article highlights the most vital methodological issues, ranging from the spatiotemporal scales and heterogeneity of the new evidence to the new roles attributed to quantitative methods and the place of scientific data in narrative construction. It considers areas of study where the palaeosciences have “intruded” into fields and subjects previously reserved for historians, especially socio-economic, climate, and environmental history. The authors argue that active engagement with new approaches is urgently needed if historians want to contribute to our evolving understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Fishing, the last practice of exploiting nature based on the large-scale predation and commercialization of wild animal resources, has not always received the attention it deserves from the social sciences in terms of its ecological, anthropological, and historical significance.1 Studies devoted to the subject, long confined to narrowly specialized and spatially compartmentalized subfields of research such as maritime history and anthropology, have remained comparatively niche.2 The fact that a generalist journal such as the Annales has devoted an entire special issue to the history of fishing worlds is therefore significant. It is a sign of the increased recognition and visibility of the many studies currently being carried out on the subject, and also an indication of a new interest in the ocean, or at least of a different way of looking at it.3 Until recently, most historical accounts were written about or from dry land.4 This “default” land-based perspective began to be criticized and then countered in the 2000s, particularly in the context of reflections on the Anthropocene. Over the last two decades, the liquid part of the globe has become an object and a field of investigation in its own right, to the point that this decentering (or refocusing, depending on one’s perspective) has been described by its proponents as a genuine “oceanic turn.”5 The novelty, amplitude, and radical nature of this shift still need to be qualified. Nevertheless, as the anthropologist Hélène Artaud has shown in a recent book,6 studies “of the sea” are currently demonstrating a hitherto unprecedented level of reflexivity, contributing to a different perception of the ocean: no longer an empty, virgin, and threatening space, but an inhabited, transformed, and threatened environment.

This article is based on an analysis of some thirty fishing experiments carried out on the coast of the English Channel between the 1680s and the 1860s. It describes the early development of an experimental way of governing marine resources under the ancien régime, followed by its gradual normalization over the course of the nineteenth century. As the article shows, the fishing policies designed to ensure the conservation of these resources were the result of negotiation between the French ministry of the Navy and fishing communities, whose monopoly on the production of fishing knowledge enabled them to defend their technical and legal specificities.

This article explores the ways that social groups represented political strife in the late medieval Low Countries, considering how these events were remembered but also how they could be recycled and manipulated. It has already been shown that late medieval politics must have been generational, with those involved in revolts actively maintaining the memories of their predecessors’ struggles. This study argues, however, that the forms of these cyclical memories were also shaped by the fundamental social and religious matrix that was Christian liturgical time, as reflected in the telling names—such as “Good Friday” or “Evil Wednesday”—that urban craftsmen gave to their uprisings. This practice of remembering political conflicts through days of the week that seem to be allusions to the Passion cycle is frequently attested, especially in fourteenth-century Flanders. The study of such name-giving, along with the performance and use of liturgical symbols in revolts, shows that late medieval citizens were not merely passive receptors of ecclesiastical categorizations of time imposed from above; they also actively reinterpreted chronological elements as they shaped and altered the representation of events, political and otherwise, with specific audiences in mind. Ways of naming important political events thus offer an indication of how social groups constructed ideology to represent common pasts within a “social time” relevant to their group identities—even if those discourses were based on a widely shared Christian conception of historical time influenced by liturgical practice.

This article analyzes the emergence of the paradigm of “piracy” and “fighting pirates” among the urban elites of the Hanse city of Lübeck in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While recent studies of maritime conflict management in this period have questioned the use of the term “piracy,” this study shows that towns such as Lübeck instrumentalized a discourse on “piracy” to criminalize and marginalize their competitors at a moment of structural economic change. A close reading of the records of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer, a guild of merchants trading to Norway, demonstrates how this concept was mobilized to justify actors’ own vio-lence as a struggle against so-called pirates and thus to stabilize group identities. The notion of “fighting pirates” gradually became a paradigm for urban elites like the Bergenfahrer, representing their social coherence as communities of violence.

This article discusses ab intestat succession within the Republic of Venice as a way to analyze the interaction between legal procedure and political economy. By focusing on those who died intestate on Venetian vessels, and contextualizing intestate succession rules within the political economy of the Republic, it argues for the importance of mobile wealth in both economic and social terms. In so doing, it discusses the ways in which regulations and procedures concerning intestate succession were designed to protect credit networks and trade interests, from the dealings of rich merchants to the small-scale transactions of seamen and seafarers, commenting also on how this affected their wives. The essay argues that Venice utilized reciprocity in these matters as a way to support its economic goals. Finally, it suggests how this documentary evidence can enable future research to reevaluate the material wealth and micro-entrepreneurial activities of seamen in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the commons in two broad regions of medieval southern Europe: northern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula’s Duero Plateau. Recent scholar-ship on different regions of northern Europe has highlighted the centrality of common lands to both agrosystems and the organization of communities, drawing on the economic theories of Elinor Ostrom and generally focusing on the early modern period. It has also suggested a contrast between resilient communities in northern Europe, where the presence of stable commons helped absorb social inequality, and those of southern Europe, where less solid commons supposedly resulted in lower cohesion among communities. Our longue-durée comparative study of these two regions shows, however, that commons existed in southern Europe from the early medieval period on. It also reveals how they evolved and adapted throughout the High and late Middle Ages, in tandem with the documentary practices that recorded them. This resilience took different forms in each of the areas studied, reflecting the influence of a range of different factors across southern Europe. The commons endured because they were part of a “moral economy” of collective use, which, in constant dialogue with notions of property and ownership, helped forge lasting identities in both rural and urban contexts and on different scales.

This paper applies to ancient Greece an approach developed by Pierre Rosanvallon: the integration of philosophical texts with the most everyday documents to better grasp a society’s understanding of its political life. For the ancient polis, this means focusing on the more pro-saic evidence offered by cities’ inscriptions, especially their collective decisions published on stone. It is used here to consider the changing ideas about the nature of political and private life—and especially the space between them. In a very influential model, Classical Athenian democrats and philosophers tended to insist on a sharp binary distinction between public/ political life and private life, leaving little room for a notion of an intermediate third space of polis life, similar to a “social sphere” or “civil society.” This pattern remained dominant in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but, especially after c. 150 BCE, some Greek citizens and intellectuals developed, above all in inscriptions, a much more explicit, complex, and subtle notion of “social life” as something between politics and private life. The article concludes by asking what the different ancient concepts discussed can contribute to current historiographical debates about the nature of the Greek city after c. 150 BCE, especially when it comes to moving beyond the traditional picture of “depoliticization.” It also calls into question the orthodox narrative of the development of ideas of “the social” over many centuries up to the present.

This article focuses on an exceptional primary source—nearly eighty letters addressed to the crew of a single French ship captured during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) but never read, as their still-sealed envelopes attest. Letters to sailors, which helped maintain relations endangered by distance and uncertainty over whether they would return, offer clues to the resilience of familial bonds in wartime. Rather than interpreting these documents as a sign of the emergence of the nuclear family and modern intimacy, they are here approached as an object of social history. This correspondence played a key role in the circulation of information and the survival of familial unity. Letters were not markers of personal, private, and intimate exchanges, but rather part of the very fabric of complex social relations structured by both family ties and neighborliness. Both their writing and their reading engaged multiple individuals well beyond their signatory and their addressee. Ultimately, the article highlights, in their very materiality, the social dynamics that formalized the expression of emotions.

Prehispanic antiquities from the Americas became a recognizable aesthetic, scientific, commercial, and legal category over the long nineteenth century. This article maps out the actors, sites, and material and ideological configurations involved in its creation and development. The first section examines the Iberian antiquarian tradition that brought preconquest artefacts into circulation as epistemic objects from the mid-1700s, against the backdrop of growing interest in material vestiges as objects of investigation. The article then turns to the collecting scenes in the newly independent Spanish American countries, where creole elites, local museums, and foreigners competed for antiquities, driven by their own diverse interests. The third section explores the ways in which, by the mid-1800s, “paper technologies” functioned as heuristic tools for knowing, organizing, and interpreting antiquities, affording ontological density to specific objects and groups of objects and leading to the construction of regimes of knowledge and expertise devoted specifically to them. Finally, the fourth section reconstructs the national and international institutionalization of the preconquest past in the late 1800s and early 1900s—through the consolidation of national museums and the establishment of archaeology and ethnography as scientific disciplines—to consider how these processes entrenched these antiquities’ significance and meaning.

In contrast to other scientific renaissances, the culture forged in seventeenth-century Europe became an enduring phenomenon rather than dissipating within a few generations. In an effort to understand the persistence of European science, this article uses the case study of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to argue that men of letters played a crucial role in the legitimation of the nascent scientific movement. These men of letters enjoyed a social, intellectual, and aesthetic affinity with the “new science” and developed a narrative of scientific change that foregrounded the idea of a radical break with the past. They diffused this narrative among the cultural elite, mobilizing recent thinkers, discoveries, and scien-tific instruments as they participated in wide-ranging debates, regardless of whether they supported modern innovations or classical models. In so doing, they invented the narrative of a “scientific revolution,” a construction that has wielded a profound influence over the social and cultural history of European science.