The Enduring Riddle of the European Miracle: The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
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"The Enduring Riddle of the European Miracle: The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution" (2002) is an essay by Joel Mokyr on the European Miracle.
Incipit:
- Eric Jones’s European Miracle was published over twenty years ago. It was not the first, and certainly not the last work to raise the difficult questions of European exceptionalism, yet it seems to have attracted the most attention and has been made into the whipping boy of those who have resented what they viewed as historiographical triumphalism, eurocentricity, and even racism. Some historians have felt that Jones and others have overstated the degree of difference between Europe and non-European regions on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. [Footnote: This is true for the more moderate scholars in the so-called California school such as Wong (1997), Pomeranz (2000), and Goldstone (2002) as well as for the more extreme proponents such as Blaut (2000). Goldstone (2002, p. 330) feels that to even repeat such beliefs that have been “abandoned by virtually all historians and sociologists” [with the minor exception of such obscure figures as David Landes and Jared Diamond] is “embarrassing or seemingly absurd.”]
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