Why did modern states and economies develop first in the peripheral and late-coming culture of Europe? This historical puzzle looms behind every study of industrialization and economic development. In his analytical and comparative work Eric Jones sees the economic condition forming where natural environments and political systems meet: Europe's economic rise is explained as a favoured interaction between them, contrasting with the frustrating pattern of their interplay in the Ottoman empire, India and China. For the second edition Professor Jones has added a new introduction and an updated bibliographical guide.

Why modern states and economies developed in Europe first, and later in India and China.

The idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that there was a natural progression from Antiquity through Feudalism to Capitalism which could not have taken place elsewhere. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West. In this short book Jack Goody systematically dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world. He argues that we need to look, not for a European miracle, but rather for a Eurasian miracle that went back to the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, that affected the Near East, India and China well before Europe and that was much advanced by the adoption of writing. Under these conditions we find a long-term exchange of information between East and West, and the dominance of one followed by the dominance of the other - in other words, alternation rather than dominance. There were measures during the Renaissance in Europe that made for continuous growth, especially the secularization of learning, but it appears that the period of Western supremacy is now coming to an end and that we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the East.

This influential book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time--that Europe rose to modernity and world dominance due to unique qualities of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world resulted from the diffusion of European civilization. J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of the world from its 16th-century origins to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization, and new world order.

Golf fans will not forget the 39th Ryder Cup in a hurry. Staged at the Medinah Country Club just outside of Chicago, the 2012 event has already gone down as the most remarkable competition in its 85-year history. The American team had home advantage, and a golf course unapologetically set up to suit its own players. Supported by tens of thousands of loud and proud fans, the USA's star-studded line-up dominated the first two days and ended the Saturday with a seemingly unassailable 10-6 advantage. No away team had ever won the Ryder Cup from such an unpromising position. Sunday was singles day, traditionally the forte of American teams. The situation looked bleak, especially when European team member and number 1 golfer in the world, Rory McIlroy, very nearly missed his tee-off time. Yet slowly but surely, the European team - who had top-loaded their line-up in one last throw of the dice - started to turn the scoreboard blue. With inspirational captain Jose Maria Olazabal stiring European blood with thoughts of the late Ryder Cup magician Seve Ballesteros (whose silhouette was emblazoned on the players' sweaters and bags), the tide turned and the previously dominant American players started to crumble in the face of the onslaught. Suddenly European players were holing miraculous putts to win holes out of the blue. Something very special was happening. When German Martin Kaymer sank his putt on the eighteenth green to clinch the point that retained the Ryder Cup, the most astonishing comeback in the event's long and distinuished history was complete. Miracle at Medinah is the compelling narrative of those amazing three days in Illinois, a fitting chronicle of an unbelievable sporting story.

What makes countries rich? What makes countries poor? Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland seeks to answer these questions, and many more, through a study of one of the biggest, and least heard about, economic success stories. Over the last twenty-five years Poland has transitioned from a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country to unexpectedly join the ranks of the world's high income countries. Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow. It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt to grow and catch up with their Western counterparts. Poland's economic rise emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth- institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders- in economic development. It demonstrates that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, can be the key to economic success. *IEurope's Growth Champion asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe with the West, and help to sustain the region's Golden Age. It also acknowledges the future challenges that Poland faces, and that moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland's developmental character.

As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. Particularly, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars, and other conflicts are vivid testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of noncombatants. Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages. Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentalite. This work expands our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that colored and shaped it.