By the mid-twentieth century, scholars were working to breach the artificial boundary lines separating these scholarly disciplines. Historians drew inspiration from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and other social theorists in developing new approaches to economic and social history. When they looked beyond literary, religious, and philosophical texts, historians and orientalists discovered that Asian societies had indeed undergone change and historical development. Historians and anthropologists also began a process of rapprochement: it became clear that the supposedly isolated and primitive societies studied by anthropologists were in fact the products of interaction with Europeans and other peoples, and historians realized that modern industrial society itself had a cultural dimension that they could best study using the insights and vocabulary of anthropologists.