Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0691171041
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Economists agree about many things--contrary to popular opinion--but the majority agree about culture only in the sense that they no longer give it much thought." So begins the first chapter of Cultures Merging, in which Eric Jones--one of the world's leading economic historians--takes an eloquent, pointed, and personal look at the question of whether culture determines economics or is instead determined by it.
Bringing immense learning and originality to the issue of cultural change over the long-term course of global economic history, Jones questions cultural explanations of much social behavior in Europe, East Asia, the United States, Australia, and the Middle East. He also examines contemporary globalization, arguing that while centuries of economic competition have resulted in the merging of cultures into fewer and larger units, these changes have led to exciting new syntheses.
Culture matters to economic outcomes, Jones argues, but cultures in turn never stop responding to market forces, even if some elements of culture stubbornly persist beyond the time when they can be explained by current economic pressures. In the longer run, however, cultures show a fluidity that will astonish some cultural determinists. Jones concludes that culture's "ghostly transit through history" is much less powerful than noneconomists often claim, yet it has a greater influence than economists usually admit.
The product of a lifetime of reading and thinking on culture and economics, a work of history and an analysis of the contemporary world, Cultures Merging will be essential reading for anyone concerned about the interaction of cultures and markets around the world.
Readings in Italian Mannerism (American University Studies)
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820
Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics (Expanded 2nd Edition)
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Since it does not envisage the people involved as 5 As is persuasively described by Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 56 CULTURE AS MEDIOCRITY ever being capable of graduating to less harmful practices. They stand condemned to the frozen choices of their ancestors. The power and status of elites, including shamans or the priestly caste, accreted around motifs, totems, and rituals chosen in earlier times. Customs were elaborated to the.
Exactly fifty years later.15 In the meantime the topic was commonly an appendage to histories of ships, railways, aircraft, telephones, and the like, or occasionally added to accounts of institutions such as post offices. The acceleration in information handling and transmission was not, however, directly measured by the increased speed and reach of this or that technological innovation. Graphic anecdotes of the speed of communications at different periods may readily be found: news of the battle.
Completely insulated but were generally proof against major incursions of foreign practices. Information costs were too high for the average person to learn much in detail about the other systems. There was too much inertia and there were too many vested interests to expect a wholesale adoption of novelty, short of conquest by the ardently religious or takeover by the ideologically driven. Even today many governments resist alien information flows and use technological countermeasures to protect.
Arrival. In the frontier circumstances of the New World, some British institutions seemed unnecessary or undesirable. While there were occasional exceptions and later revivals among them, craft guilds, sumptuary legislation, and common-field agriculture never established more than a tenuous presence in the American colonies. Standard explanations refer to a weaker sense of hierarchy than in Britain, the scarcity of labor relative to opportunities for work, and (what was almost but not exactly the.
Grander scale than do the regions of Britain or Europe. In the terms used on the dust jacket of Albion’s Seed, American regional cultures still control attitudes toward politics, education, governance, gender, and violence. The differences among American regions are greater than those between some European nations, though the fact that most Americans speak English helps to disguise the fact. Fischer 138 CULTURES OF IMMIGRATION argues for the persistence of regional cultures right from the time.