From Publishers Weekly
Neither cultures nor their economies can be fully understood independent of each other, yet specialists in both fields persist in trying; Jones, a celebrated economic historian, examines how culture influences economics, and vice versa, in detailed but occasionally dry prose. The "merging" of the title refers to what happens when, for example, U.S. soap operas are exported, with rapturous reception, to Brazil. Jones sites studies that show that "transmitting 'soaps' was more powerful than a family program was likely to have been," leading to a cultural and economic trend towards American-style soap-opera lifestyles: bigger income and smaller families. Meanwhile, the rising profile of economically attractive fast food restaurants in East Asia has led to cultural changes "by importing an unfamiliar conception of manners ... East Asians are socialized to queue, keep the lavatories clean, and give up ... spitting in public. Westerners off the farm once had to learn these things too." While lay readers might wish for more of these clear-cut examples, students and economists will find the book thorough and thought-provoking.
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Review
Jones's scholarship is enormous, and the book is full of fascinating facts. . . . He writes clearly with an absence of jargon, which makes the book accessible to a wide audience. Economists could certainly benefit from the way it opens up a wider set of perspectives. And . . . there is more than enough interesting material to make the book worthwhile for the more general reader. -- Paul Ormerod, Times Higher Education Supplement
Jones' book is important because it links our economic past and future with our ideas about culture. -- Mark Trahant, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
An accessible, illuminating, and inspiring book. -- Avner Greif, EH.net
Eric Jones is intelligent, literate, and eclectic. His comments range over many fields besides economic history, and he writes in a sprightly manner. The book is fun to read, and it engages one of the big issues of economic history: the role of culture in economic affairs. -- Peter Temin, Economic History Review
Eric L. Jones has written an interesting and well-argued critique of two positions that he believes are well entrenched in the economic history literature. The first, which he terms 'cultural nullity', is widely held by economists and assigns no or at best a trivial role to culture in explaining economic outcomes. Second, Jones criticizes those (often historians) who think of a 'cultural fixity', in which an unchanging culture dominates every other aspect of life. . . . Jones marshals an impressive and at times amusing range of illustrations of the fluidity of cultures. -- Harold James, International History Review
Cultures Merging is a remarkable historical tour de force presenting a wealth of argument to indicate the role of economic forces in the modification of culture and vice versa. -- Arthur Webb, Journal of Cultural Economics
Jones . . . makes a compelling argument for the special place of literature in understanding these dialectics of poverty. -- John Marsh, The Minnesota Review
Jones writes in a vivid, attractive manner, expressing sometimes trenchant arguments on specific topics. . . . His book has a syncretic and eclectic feel, and conveys a sense of its author as someone who, having established his standing in his previous, more focused work, now revels in his ability to survey that of another generation or two of scholars, and to tell his readers which leads to follow and which to consider useless. -- Gianfranco Poggi, Sociologica
