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Eric Jones (1936–2024), who was one of the founders of comparative long-term global economic history, pursued an academic career in Britain, the United States, and Australia. On retirement he returned to Britain, where he became a regular contributor to Economic Affairs and a valued participant in the economics seminars at the University of Buckingham. The contributors to this collection of essays in his honour are former students or colleagues on whom Jones exerted a strong, and in some cases decisive, influence. In their Introduction, the editors – Gary Magee (Professor of Economics at Monash University, Australia) and Kent Deng (Professor of Economic History at London School of Economics) – quote Noel Mokyr'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 book The 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 discovery of the Americas as a source of the wealth that propelled Europe to world hegemony. But his central critique of Eurocentrism focuses on the presumption, first articulated by the sociologist Max Weber, that European civilisation was inherently more enlightened and rational than that of the East. As a result, episodes of genuine economic progress in the East have been overlooked or downplayed. Against this, Hobson maintains that Blaut fails to fully appreciate Eric Jones's 1988 book Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History, which Hobson regrets “never received the acclaim that it surely deserved” (p. 46). In Growth Recurring Jones articulated two methodological assumptions that were implicit in The European Miracle. One is the distinction between extensive (total GDP) growth and intensive (per capita income) growth. The other is the assumption that explanations of economic growth should focus not so much on its immediate sources as on the obstacles to it (that is, their presence, absence or removal). This implies that the industrialisation that constituted the European miracle (which is now more widely known as the ‘Great Divergence’) was a particular manifestation of growth rather than its unique cause, and so alerts us to other, non-industrial forms of growth and to the factors that allowed growth to emerge. With these assumptions Jones identifies two periods of intensive growth in Asia that preceded Europe's industrialisation. In Japan, the Tokugawa state (1600–1868) achieved a level of economic development that renders the modernisation and Westernisation that followed the Meiji Restoration in 1868 a continuation of Japan's indigenous progress rather than the sudden transition from feudalism it is usually taken to be. China under the Song dynasty (960–1279) likewise experienced intensive growth, which included technical innovations from which Europe was to benefit some centuries later. Hobson concludes his essay by attempting to answer the ‘Needham Question’ in the spirit of Jones's approach. Joseph Needham was founding editor of a continuing multivolume study titled Science and Civilisation in China whose publication began in 1954. Hobson frames its ‘question’ thus: “why did China, which had long been a technological pioneer, not take off into full industrialisation whereas Britain, which had been a technological laggard for several millennia, did?” (p. 56). Hobson's answer focuses on cotton, the resource with which Britain's industrialisation began. He estimates that in 1750 Chinese households produced 6 billion yards of cotton textiles, a figure that Britain matched only in 1900 (p. 58). China had no reason to industrialise before the nineteenth century. But Britain had two reasons to do so. British textile workers lacked the skills of their Chinese (and Indian) counterparts, and needed machines like the spinning jenny to compensate. As well, the machinery allowed Britain's small textile workforce – about 220,000 mill employees in 1830, against 6 million Indian and 26 million Chinese adult equivalent producers – to produce cotton exports that exceeded those of India by the 1820s (p. 61). Britain's favourable economic policy regime allowed this growth in productivity and per capita incomes to continue over the long term, a development that Asian countries began to emulate only in the late twentieth century. Hobson's stress on Jones's study of episodes of Asian growth forms a powerful defence against Blaut's claim that Jones's work displayed ‘extreme’ Eurocentrism. In another essay, Kent Deng elaborates on this aspect of Eric Jones's achievement by further investigating how growth in Song China emerged and why it did not lead to sustainable long-term intensive growth. Deng maintains that both the beginning and the end of the period had nonlinear origins: they were entirely the result of accidental external events. In the tenth century the Little Ice Age that afflicted the northern hemisphere resulted in massive crop failures in northern China. These forced numerous technical, institutional and economic innovations leading to the expansion of industry, urbanisation, and markets, and, of most interest to Deng, the emergence of a cash economy and experimental currencies. But the resultant economic growth never ‘took off’ into the long term, and Chinese wealth instead became in the thirteenth century one of the factors motivating the Mongol invasion and subjugation of China. However, Kent Deng precedes this essay with one that highlights the limits of the comparability of European and Chinese economic history. Deng is joined by Patrick O'Brien, Professor of Global Economic History at London School of Economics, in a critique of studies of Chinese economic history in the debate about when the Great Divergence began. The authors maintain that relevant data going back several centuries are difficult to obtain and cannot be reliably translated into the modern terms needed to carry out credible comparisons. The Great Divergence debate must therefore remain inconclusive. But to help advance the debate, O'Brien and Deng conclude their essay with two detailed appendices: one summarising the defects in the available data from China's historical records, the other calculating detailed margins of error in the estimates Shi Zhihong provides in his 2017 book Agricultural Development in Qing China: A Quantitative Study, 1661–1911. Two of the essays confirm that global economic history was not the only topic that attracted Jones's interest. Lionel Frost recounts Jones's research on the role of natural disasters in stimulating innovation and economic growth. The two economic historians had collaborated in identifying a ‘fire gap’ that emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, North America, and Australia as growing urban populations benefited from a falling absolute number of fires. More recently, expanding suburbs have become more vulnerable to wildfires; and larger factories and warehouses have introduced new fire hazards. Foster speculates that “Eric Jones would stress the importance of economic growth as a means of creating the resources (new technology and tax bases) to address these challenges” (p. 36). Stephen Mennell, Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin, begins his essay by reporting that Eric Jones said in 1988 “that his reputation among economic historians would never recover from having collaborated with two sociologists” (p. 69). Mennell is referring to The Course of Human History: Civilization and Social Process (1996), which he co-authored with Eric Jones and the late Johan Goudsblom, who was Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. The sociologists and the economic historian found a surprising degree of overlap in their approaches. Jones's analysis in The European Miracle is a very far cry from that of Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but in their shared publication Mennell found especially useful Jones's reliance on the distinction between extensive and intensive economic growth and on path dependency, which usefully undermined “all single-factor ‘magic bullet’ theories of social development” (p. 78). The final three essays in the collection lie beyond the scope of Eric Jones's published work, although their authors believe they are operating with general themes and approaches that typified that work. In the one furthest removed from Jones's oeuvre, Gary Magee joins Wayne Geerling (Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin) and Russell Smyth (Professor of Economics at the Monash Business School, Australia) in a study of the spectacular rise in Germany in the early 1930s of support for the Nazi Party, which won 37.4 per cent of the vote in the July 1932 Reichstag election, up from 2.6 per cent in 1928. The authors find positive correlations in electoral precincts between the level of the party's organisation and voter turnout, and between voter turnout and the election of Nazi candidates. The latter correlation was enhanced by the Nazis' violent intimidation of supporters of the Marxist parties, which reduced these parties' votes. The authors support their argument that the party's grass-roots activism was the decisive factor explaining its success by citing other research that finds that “high-profile campaigning by Hitler and other leading Nazis appear to have played a negligible role in the electoral success of the party” (p. 180). Philip Chang (Principal Director of EconWorx) and Jeffrey Hole (Honorary Research Fellow at Deakin University, Australia) collaborate in a study of trade between Australia and China, which has increased enormously since 1972. In classic cases of ‘growth recurring’ following the removal of obstacles to growth, China reformed its communist command economy and Australia dismantled the protectionist regime it had adopted early in the twentieth century. The two economies' comparative advantages have produced highly valuable trade complementarities: Australia's exports to China of primary products and some services (notably tertiary education) have boomed, as have its imports of Chinese manufactured goods. Meanwhile Australian intensive economic growth has been accompanied by deindustrialisation as previously protected sectors like automobile manufacturing have vanished. More recently, China's continuing economic development has diminished the countries' trade complementarities, and geopolitical tensions have presented some obstacles to growth. If trade between China and Australia is to keep growing, it will require deft diplomacy as well as economic openness. The final essay is by Geoff Raby, a former postgraduate student of Eric Jones and Australia's ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011. Raby challenges the notion that the West is facing a hostile ‘axis’ of autocratic regimes, principally those of China and Russia. He views the present de facto alliance between the two countries as purely transactional. It masks different approaches to world domination: Russia resorts readily to military force, while China prefers to use trade and diplomacy where it can. As well, China still nurses long-standing grievances arising from the ‘unequal treaties’ in the nineteenth century which transferred territory to Russia from China; Russia continued to threaten the Chinese provinces of Manchuria and Xinjiang, and succeeded in detaching China's “lost” territory of Outer Mongolia (p. 243). Raby believes that China is destined to become the first great power to solely dominate Eurasia, and that the West will need to find a more imaginative response to it than the ‘containment’ strategy that won it the Cold War. In the Introduction to the collection, the editors recall how as students they were inspired to pursue academic careers not only by Eric Jones's consummate scholarship but also, in Gary Magee's words, by “the generous hospitality, encouragement and sage advice” they received from Eric and his wife Sylvia (p. 6). Having known Eric for many years, I would add that the combination of his unrelenting drive to widen the scope of human understanding and his approachable and genial personality made him a highly rewarding friend. This collection of essays is a fitting expression of the contributors' gratitude, respect and admiration for their esteemed colleague.