Eric Jones (economic historian)

Eric Lionel Jones (21 September 1936 - 1 March 2024) was a British-Australian economist and historian, known for his 1981 book The European Miracle.

Jones received a doctorate in economic history from the Oxford University. From 1970 to 1975, he was professor of economics at Northwestern University in United States. From 1975 to 1994 he was a professor of economics and economics history at La Trobe University, in Australia. Jones has also had visiting appointments at Yale, Manchester, Princeton, University of Berlin and the Center for Economic Studies at Munich.

As of the early 2000s, he was Emeritus Professor of Economic Systems and Ideas at La Trobe University, and he held a half-time Professorial Fellow position at the Melbourne Business School of the University of Melbourne in Australia and the part-time Professor of Economics position at the Graduate Center of International Business of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Jones has also acted as a consultant for businesses and international organizations such as the World Bank.

Eric Lionel Jones died on March 1, 2024 at age of 87.

Work
Eric Jones specialized in economic history, global economics, international affairs and economic systems, particularly in those of the Asian-Pacific region.

Eric Jones is the author of numerous articles and several books.

His most notable work is The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia book (published in 1981). The work popularized the term European miracle, but it also proved controversial, with some scholars describing his interpretation as 'Eurocentric'.

In Growth Recurring (1988) Jones focused on the states system theory as the decisive factor in the development of the West.

Books

 * Seasons & Prices: the role of the weather in English agricultural history (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964)
 * Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (Basil Blackwell, 1974)
 * The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
 * A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters 1500-1900 (Geo Books, 1984) [with S. Porter and M. Turner]
 * Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Clarendon Press, 1988)
 * Coming Full Circle: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim (Westview Press, 1993) [with L.E. Frost and C.M. White]
 * The Record of Global Economic Development (Edward Elgar, 2002)
 * Cultures Merging: a historical and economic critique of culture (Princeton N.J., 2006)
 * Locating the Industrial Revolution: inducement and response (World Scientific, 2010)
 * The Fabric of Society and how it creates wealth (Arley Hall Press, 2013) [with Charles F. Foster]
 * Revealed Biodiversity: an economic history of the human impact (World Scientific, 2014)
 * The Middle Ridgeway and its environment (Wessex Press, 2016) [with P. J. Dillon and illustrated by Anna Dillon].
 * Small Earthquake in Wiltshire: Seventeenth-century conflict and its resolution (Hobnob Press, 2017)
 * Landed Estates and Rural Inequality in England: From the mid-seventeenth century to the present (Palgrave Macmillan series on economic history, 2018)
 * Barriers to Growth: English economic development from the Norman Conquest to Industrialisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
 * A History of Livestock and Wildlife: animal wealth and human usage (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023)