Cultures Merging A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture
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Eric L. Jones is Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne; Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University; and Visiting Professor at Exeter University. He is the author of The European Miracle and numerous other books and articles on economic history, economic development, international affairs, and environmental history."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 "Jones' book is important because it links our economic past and future with our ideas about culture."--Mark Trahant, Seattle Post-Intelligencer "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 ... makes a compelling argument for the special place of literature in understanding these dialectics of poverty."--John Marsh, The Minnesota Review "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
"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