During the recent years, the writing of the history of economic thought as well as the territories explored have been characterized by deep evolutions. One of these evolutions is to be found in the marriage with the history of science, a marriage at work in the historical investigations of authors such as Giorgio Israel, Philip Mirowski, Mary Morgan and Margaret Schabas. Such a work have made possible the identification and the analysis of analogies which have accompanied the development of economic thought (its tools, instruments, theories and models). It has then been possible to afford new light on the origins and nature of mathematical economics, the so-called marginalist revolution, or econometrics, and to understand the way pivotal moments of the elaboration of economics were the result of linkages with other sciences, more specifically the natural sciences. This special issue of the Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines follows such a path. The authors analyze original moments of the development of economic thought and the crossed influences between economics and other sciences (the natural sciences and the social sciences). They visit key moments of the history of microeconomics and finance ; they question the nature of time in economics and its influence on the tools such as graphical tools ; they analyze the role of animal metaphors in economics ; and the disciplinary movements between economics and sociology and between economics and demography. As a whole, they suggest that economic thought was elaborated at the light of referents of very different nature and that in return economic theories could practice exportation in other social sciences. Finally, these papers raise the question of the adequacy of tools, that are still used in economics but which are the product of historical conditions that strongly differ from the contemporary ones.