The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap.(Book Review)

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 ...

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