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The European Miracle and beyond: Essays in honour of Professor E. L. Jones Edited by Gary B.Magee and KentDeng. Palgrave Macmillan. 2025. 267 pp. £179.99 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐3031902475. £143.50 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐3031902482

Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: NoelMokyr's judgement in A Culture of Growth (2017) that Jones was one of the "four giants of economic history" (p.8). His reputation rests principally on his bookThe European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, first 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.Jones argues that the crucial explanatory factor is institutional: in contrast to the several poor and stagnant Asian empires, Europe was a set of independent states of moderate size.Competition between the states restrained government power and facilitated innovation and the emergence of secure private property rights, which came to fruition in the Industrial Revolution.Europe's common Christian heritage sharpened interstate competition and increased its benefits.The essays in the collection under review cover a wide range of topics of varying proximity to the themes and topics that concerned Eric Jones.But taken as a whole, they go a long way to rebut the main current intellectual challenge to The European Miracle, which is that the work is 'Eurocentric'.The central essay in this respect is by John Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield.The charge of Eurocentrism has been made by the late James Blaut in his book Eight Eurocentric Historians (2000), where on page 74 Blaut calls The European Miracle "the truly canonical work" of "extreme Eurocentric world history".On the empirical side, Blaut stresses the underplayed significance of the European
DOI: 10.1111/ecaf.70025
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7128909367
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