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The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap.

Publication: Albion
Publication Date: 22-SEP-04 		Format: Online - approximately 1087 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap.(Book Review)

Article Excerpt
Alan Macfarlane. The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap. New York: Palgrave. 2003. Pp. xxxv, 427. $24.95 paper. ISBN 1-4039-0432-4.

What are the origins of industrial civilization? Why was England the world's first, and Japan Asia's? Independently of one another and in different ways, England and Japan waged Kipling's "savage wars of peace." Taking up the "White Man's burden," they "fill[ed] full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease"; each moved early and definitively toward biological regimes of low fertility and low mortality. Had they not done so, Alan Macfarlane suggests, the accumulation of wealth, of social stock necessary to industrialize, would have been impossible. To be sure, England's industrialization was "spontaneous," while Japan's was self-defensive and "mimetic" in character. But both were first in their respective spheres, so the larger point and problem remain, and the intellectual gains from comparison multiply. How were these "firsts" possible at all?

Macfarlane first outlines the "Malthusian trap"--the "powerful tendency...

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