REVIEW ARTICLE 55 The same independent evolution holds for British historical tradition. The Annales was no doubt very much in the air (although its influence beyond medieval and early modem European socio-economic history seems doubtful) when the Past and Present was founded, but it is as well to remember that the Economic History Review was bom in 1929, the birth-year of the Annales. It was in the USA and in the UK, that new grounds were broken in feminist history in the early decades of this century and later.12 Furthermore, instead of abandoning political history as the French did, the British sought to make a more meaningful study of it and in the process developed the method of prosopography.13 This method was put to skilful use by Robert K. Merton in the USA in reconstructing the history of science. It is the continuity of the British tradition that Peter Burke had in mind when he wrote: 'Both Stone and Thomas have studied the work of French historians and profited from them. Yet they have learned more from R.H. Tawney and Christopher Hill, from Max Weber and Thorstein Veblem, from Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Evans-Pritchard'.14 Thus, before the influence of the Annales began to spread out from France, grounds for its reception had already been prepared—it is arguable that such preparedness was a necessary condition of its success. In fact, what we see at work is not so much the influence of one on the other as a process of cross-fertilisation that improved the breed of all. Aymard and Mukhia devote little space to the manner in which Annales historians have profited from other traditions, which is natural given their assumption. But one has only to look up Ladurie's piece on the history of climate in Vol. I of the French Studies to see that such a process has been there. To say all this is not to question the dominance the Annales school has enjoyed in France among the social sciences, especially since 1945. Such a success of new history is unrivalled. It is not necessary, however, to deny historiographical achievements elsewhere to explain this: the particular institutional set-up in which Annales history flourished seems sufficient for the purpose,15 apart from the genius of individual historians. What the institutional set-up has done for the Annales the attraction of Marxist theory and ideology has done for Marxist history. Despite its late beginnings, it is Marxist historical tradition alone that can match the achievements of the Annales tradition. Aymard and Mukhia have not been fair to this tradition. This comes out in seeing the works of E.P. Thompson and of Eric Hobsbawm, the Past and Present and the History Workshop Journal in terms of the systematic application of the Annales model abroad (Vol. II, p. 6), but more forcefully in the manner in which Marxism is compared to the Annales history. According to them, while some Annales historians have been influenced in varying degrees by Marxism, Annales historiography has 'refused to organise a permanent hierarchy of casual sequences'. (Unlike Marxism) Annales history does not believe in the