Today while I was preparing a little critique of the concept of ‘culture’ I discovered that, very sadly, the economic historian Eric L. Jones died last year. He was, of course, a subscriber to Social Science Files. I say ‘of course’ because he wrote an extremely nice review of my book on ‘Capitalism’. So, I enlisted him as a subscriber as soon as I began Social Science Files in March 2022. According to Wikipedia he died 1 March 2024. He was still reading his Social Science Files emails during February 2024.
Below I display his obituary from University of Buckingham, UK. My emails to him were addressed to La Trobe University in Australia, though he was simultaneously a professor at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. Also, I display the Princeton University Press review page for his 2006 book Cultures Merging.
First, though, I will quote what he generously wrote about my critique of culture. I was rereading it today, which is why I discovered he had died. I wish to thank him.
An attempt to see how capitalism may take root in less developed economies inspires this gloss on Max Weber and other top-flight scholars. Of itself it is not an inspiring prospect. Those of us who have read widely in the literature on economic development will approach further work on the subject with our senses dulled, anticipating more of the social science mumble in which the debate is conducted. A rehash of the sacred texts sounds especially unpromising. Furthermore, in this part of the world, we have been lulled by East Asian success stories into thinking the development problem is more readily soluble than it is. Why do other areas not just get on with it? But world poverty is likely to take a turn for the worse before it gets better; hence, we ought to give any serious new approach a fair go. And Michael Heller, a political scientist at the University of Technology, Sydney, is nothing if not serious.
First, he sees nothing wrong with promoting capitalism, which at once puts him offside in development studies. Second, he is a universalist, seeking to distil an all-round formula from the classical work of Weber and others, notably Joseph Schumpeter. He wants no truck with the frustrating uniqueness of each country, thus putting himself offside again—this time in the realm of area studies. Perhaps he decided he may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Heller compounds these sins by demolishing the notion that something called culture is responsible for the way new institutions fail to ‘take’ in poor countries.
This last position is a brave one when those around him take it for granted that culture is a key explanatory, indeed self-explanatory, variable because at any one moment they see something with that label stuck on it, as well as superficially the same assemblage of traits stretching back in time. But, as Heller observes, if culture explains under-development, every country squatting at the bottom of the league table of corruption and governance should share the same culture. This is the opposite of what cultural explanation implies. Heller suggests instead that culture is a front for variables like patronage, cronyism, strong-man politics, and so forth. These are determined by power relations and the political system, and should be analysed and amended in political terms. He thinks the specific antidote would be to establish impersonal procedural rules in today’s ‘facade democracies.’ He is particularly concerned about the absence of dispassionate law enforcement, which he is convinced (surely correctly) that most people would prefer over existing arrangements, if only they were offered it.
Cultural norms may seem ever-present but they do not enforce themselves. Law, Heller insists, is what guarantees they will be maintained. Again and again, he presses the case for impersonal bureaucratic behaviour and established procedural rules. [Eric L. Jones, Policy, Vol. 25 No. 4, Summer 2009–10 — pdf here]
Remembering Eric Lionel Jones, 1936-2024
18 April 2024
Professor Eric Jones was an eminent English-born economic historian who pursued an academic career on three continents. In 2001 he retired from formal academic positions and moved to Fairford, Gloucestershire. Thereafter he became a regular participant in the seminar programme of the Department of Economics and International Studies at the University of Buckingham, where his contributions were widely valued and admired. In 2019 he was appointed Senior Fellow at the University’s Max Beloff Institute.
Eric was a graduate of the universities of Nottingham and Oxford, and taught at Oxford and Reading universities. From 1970 to 1975 he was Professor of Economics at Northwestern University in the United States. From 1975 to 1994 he was Professor of Economics and Economics History at La Trobe University in Australia. He was then appointed Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Business School of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and part-time Professor of Economics at the Graduate Centre of International Business of the University of Reading. Throughout his career he held many international visiting positions.
His reputation rests principally on his book The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, whose first edition was published in 1981. It aims to explain how from the fifteenth century Europe rose to world prominence and eventually achieved, for the first time in human history, steady long-term growth in per capita incomes. As the book’s subtitle suggests, many factors were in play, and together they generate a strong contrast between Europe and four Asian empires: the Ottoman, the Indian Mughal, and the Chinese Ming and Manchu. Of central interest is the institutional factor. Europe was not an empire but a set of independent states of moderate size. Competition between the states acted as a restraint on government power and facilitated innovation and the emergence of secure private property rights: factors that came to fruition in the Industrial Revolution. The common cultural heritage of Europe’s states sharpened interstate competition and enhanced its benefits. Meanwhile the Asian empires remained poor and stagnant, a condition Asia began to emerge from only in the twentieth century.
The European Miracle is a ‘Eurocentric’ work by design, and in the twenty-first century Eurocentrism has somewhat fallen out of favour. In an Afterword in the book’s third edition, published in 2003, Eric responds robustly to some of the criticisms it had received from this angle. In 2008 he was invited to give two lectures at universities in Tokyo, Japan: one on ‘Industrial Revolutions and Economic Growth’ at Soka University, the other on ‘Regional Change and Industrialisation in England and Japan’ at Waseda University.
Eric wrote two books that developed themes in The European Miracle. In 1988 Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History was published, and Barriers to Growth: English Economic Development from the Norman Conquest to Industrialisation appeared in 2020. By this time the main focus of Eric’s work had moved towards a theme that reflected more his personal and recreational pursuits: the land. Eric loved rural landscapes, and he became an active member of the Richard Jefferies Society, founded in honour of the nineteenth-century Wiltshire-based journalist and writer on natural history and agriculture.
Eric’s later books bring together, in different ways, his deep knowledge of English economic history and his aesthetic appreciation of rural England. In Landed Estates and Rural Inequality in English History: From the Mid-Seventeenth Century to the Present (2018) he describes how the landed classes consolidated their economic dominance and used it in such a way as to deprive rural working populations of much of their customary access to the land and its bounty.
Middle Ridgeway and its Environment (2016) is arguably the most accessible record of the sheer breadth of Eric’s approach to his chosen topic. Its subject is the ancient trackway’s middle section, which runs along the North Wessex Downs in the counties of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The book draws on economic and natural history and ecology to provide an account of a unique and attractive English landscape. The book’s coauthor, Patrick Dillon, an academic ecologist and environmentalist, had first met Eric in 1972, after which they regularly collaborated in researching southern England.
Landscape History and the Rural Society in Southern England: An Economic and Environmental Perspective (2021) uses a range of case studies to explore the interconnections between the history of landscape and the rural economy. Eric’s final book, A History of Livestock and Wildlife: Animal Wealth and Human Usage (2023), returns to the agricultural economic history with which he began his academic career. It argues that the stress on cereals and industrialisation as sources of growth has overlooked the crucial role played by the marshalling of wild animal resources and the development of livestock husbandry.
As people came to know Eric, they would marvel at his productivity: not just his steady output of academic publications but his pursuit of several personal interests to high levels of achievement, notably bird watching, genealogy, and painting. Eric himself recognised how much his academic success owed to the constant support of his wife Sylvia. At their eightieth birthday celebration in 2016, Eric paid tribute to her: without her research and general assistance, he said, he ‘could have achieved nothing’.
Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture, by Eric L. Jones (Princeton University Press, 2006)
"Jones's scholarship is enormous, and the book is full of fascinating facts. . . . He writes clearly with an absence of jargon, which makes the book accessible to a wide audience. Economists could certainly benefit from the way it opens up a wider set of perspectives. And . . . there is more than enough interesting material to make the book worthwhile for the more general reader."—Paul Ormerod, Times Higher Education Supplement
"An accessible, illuminating, and inspiring book."—Avner Greif, EH.net
"Eric Jones is intelligent, literate, and eclectic. His comments range over many fields besides economic history, and he writes in a sprightly manner. The book is fun to read, and it engages one of the big issues of economic history: the role of culture in economic affairs."—Peter Temin, Economic History Review
"Eric L. Jones has written an interesting and well-argued critique of two positions that he believes are well entrenched in the economic history literature. The first, which he terms 'cultural nullity', is widely held by economists and assigns no or at best a trivial role to culture in explaining economic outcomes. Second, Jones criticizes those (often historians) who think of a 'cultural fixity', in which an unchanging culture dominates every other aspect of life. . . . Jones marshals an impressive and at times amusing range of illustrations of the fluidity of cultures."—Harold James, International History Review
"Cultures Merging is a remarkable historical tour de force presenting a wealth of argument to indicate the role of economic forces in the modification of culture and vice versa."—Arthur Webb, Journal of Cultural Economics
"Jones writes in a vivid, attractive manner, expressing sometimes trenchant arguments on specific topics. . . . His book has a syncretic and eclectic feel, and conveys a sense of its author as someone who, having established his standing in his previous, more focused work, now revels in his ability to survey that of another generation or two of scholars, and to tell his readers which leads to follow and which to consider useless."—Gianfranco Poggi, Sociologica
"Eric Jones is one of the world's foremost economic historians and in this book he turns his attention to one of the most difficult puzzles of all: how much does culture matter for economic development? Culture often seems to be a constraint on what individuals and societies can do, yet in some circumstances cultures can change at remarkable speed. This book provides an erudite and thought-provoking guide for the culturally perplexed."—Paul Seabright, University of Toulouse
"One of the most fascinating and promising developments in thinking about the economy during recent years is the attempt to reintroduce the concept of culture into the analysis. This time around, however, an effort is made to use cultural explanation in such a way that it does not promise too much-but still delivers. Eric L. Jones's new book represents an excellent introduction to this debate. It also contains a wise as well as a suggestive solution for where to draw the line between using culture to explain everything and excluding it totally from the analysis."—Richard Swedberg, Cornell University
"A landmark treatment of economics and culture."—Tyler Cowen, author of Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding
"Jones, among the world's leading economic historians, marshals here a lifetime of scholarship to take on the enemies of globalization—especially the cultural relativists who defend as 'traditional' a life of ignorance and patriarchy, material poverty, and female circumcision. The book is beautifully and amusingly written, and Jones is wonderfully wide in his reference, ranging over anthropology, history, economics, social psychology, film, recent journalism, and the history of medieval China. He uses his personal experience, when relevant, which adds to the charm of the book. But the argument is grounded in economics and economic history: culture matters, Jones argues, but it is not eternal; in fact, it is quite changeable, and can be either an economic drag or enabler."—Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois, Chicago, author of The Rhetoric of Economics
Eric, RIP.