It comes as a bit of a shock, if a pleasant one, to grasp that JPS has reached its half-centenary of publication. My own intellectual trajectory has been so tied to JPS, especially in the period 1973–2000, and to some degree since 2009, that reminiscences of its history inevitably have key elements of personal biography.

I subscribed to JPS from its beginning and my first journal article was published in its inaugural volume, a review essay co-authored with a former student of mine. It is difficult to express adequately for subsequent generations the impact of JPS. Its first issue included contributions by such diverse luminaries as Eric Hobsbawm, Hamza Alavi, Claude Meillassoux and Sidney Mintz, and the first of two instalments of Teodor Shanin’s ‘The nature and logic of the peasant economy’; the second issue Rodney Hilton and the emerging luminary Juan (now Joan) Martinez-Alier, the second part of Shanin and the first of a two-part article by P. C. Joshi; the third issue Basil Davidson, Sidney Mintz again, the second part of Joshi, and so on. For younger readers who know little of those luminaries it is worth googling them, as well as checking out their articles in JPS.