Growth Recurring is about the conflict in world history between economic growth and political greed. Eric Jones proposes two fundamentally new frameworks. One replaces industrial revolution or great discontinuity as the source of change and challenges the reader to accept early periods and non-western societies as vital to understanding the growth process. It shows that growth occurred independently in Sung China and Japan as well as in Europe. The second framework offers a new explanation in which tendencies for growth were omnipresent but were usually - though not always - suppressed. The `obstacles to growth' are reviewed and those of general significance identified. Finally, the erosion of these negative factors is discussed, explaining the rise of a world economy in which growth has recurred and East Asia takes a prominent place.