A Modest Little Book with an Immodest Title

This chapter reflects on the collaboration between Eric (E. L.) Jones, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell in a seminar on very long-term social processes at the University of Exeter in 1988, out of which grew their immodestly titled joint book The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process and Civilisation [Goudsblom et al., The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe (1996)]. Goudsblom and Mennell were adherents of the sociology of Norbert Elias, who is most famous for his theory of civilising and state-formation processes, first set out in his book Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, first published in 1939, but not widely known until decades later. That book, linking the development of ‘civilised’ manners to the growth of states in Europe since the Middle Ages, was in itself very much at odds with the dominant spirit of post-war sociology: Elias criticised ‘the retreat of sociologists into the present’. Moreover, in his later work, Elias extended his vision to the whole development of human society. Goudsblom was at the time of the seminar following Elias’s lead, writing his great book Fire and Civilization (1992)—an interest which neatly connected with Jones’s own writing about the history of fire. Jones’s contention that the ‘European miracle’ owed a great deal to catastrophes elsewhere in the world also chimed with Elias’s and Eliasians’ scepticism about free-floating cultural influences (such as Weber’s Protestant ethic, so worshipped by mainstream sociologists) as a driving force in history.