Eric Jones

Eric Jones

Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Business School of the University of Melbourne.
Born in Andover, UK, in 1936 († 2024)
NIAS Guest of the Rector (Fall 2005)

CULTURES MERGING: A HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC CRITIQUE OF CULTURE

I worked on two main topics and also gathered material on my continuing interests in world economic history and economic development. Firstly, I finalized the materials for a book called Cultures Merging: a historical and economic critique of culture to be published by Princeton University Press in May, 2006. I was thereafter able to read widely on the general matter of cultural explanation and in particular with respect to how it bears on the causes and consequences of economic development in East Asia. Secondly, I focused on environmental history which I approached partly through the somewhat unusual lens of my own family history, thus concentrating on developments in south-central England since the sixteenth century. A minor product was a note for the NIAS Newsletter, ‘Tumbledown People: has family history any use?’ but I also completed a paper with this title to present at a seminar in the Department of Family and Community History at the University of Exeter in January, 2006. More importantly, I started to write my book on the subject Tumbledown People: ancestry and environment in southern England and was able to reach the third chapter while still at NIAS.