Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation

Abstract

Edward Barbier, the John S. Bugas Professor of Economics at the University of Wyoming, explains that he wrote this book to provide a historical perspective on his earlier study of contemporary natural resources and economic development. Barbier predicts a future "Age of Ecological Scarcity" caused by global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, water shortages, land deterioration, and the loss of other ecosystem "services," his economic term for ecological functions (666).

Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation. By Edward B. Barbier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.766 pp., $49.99, paperback, ISBN 978-0-521-70165-5.

This massive book surveys world economic history to describe the ways people have acquired and used natural resources, broadly conceived. It also provides a detailed introduction to recent and important older literatures on economic and agricultural history and related theoretical economic studies.

Edward Barbier, the John S. Bugas Professor of Economics at the University of Wyoming, explains that he wrote this book to provide a historical perspective on his earlier study of contemporary natural resources and economic development. In his theoretical introduction. Barbier focuses on societies' efforts to overcome scarcities by seeking new frontiers as a key component of economic development. He surveys expla- nations of this concept in historical studies by Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter Prescott Webb, and Gavin Wright and economic writings by Evsey Domar, Guido di Telia, and Stanley Engermann and Kenneth Sokoloff, who provided different explanations as to why and how individuals and governments would invest in and assimilate frontier lands.

Barbier divides human history into eight periods and describes and analyzes frontier expansion and resource use from early humans and civilizations to nation states, empires, and developed and developing countries. Among several main themes, perhaps the most important is the transition from the conquest of "horizontal frontiers," mainly for agricultural land, to the exploitation of "vertical frontiers" of minerals and especially fossil fuels (31). Along the way Barbier provides interesting historical details and often illuminating economic interpretations of his- torical topics. These include a description of China's domestic and inter- national economic peak in the Song dynasty and his economic analyses of the importance of key events in the formation of the modern world, ranging from the Black Death to European early-modern imperialism to the Great Depression. He also critiques the view of Kenneth Pomeranz and others that China and western Europe were relatively equal until the nineteenth century, arguing that Europe had important economic advan- tages by the sixteenth century, if not earlier.

Scarcity and Frontiers is a vast book, so it is understandable that one comes across a few errors-for example, the reference to the "Sino- Russian" war when the author meant the Russo-Japanese war-and disputable points (423). In the book's last chapter. Barbier predicts a future "Age of Ecological Scarcity" caused by global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, water shortages, land deterioration, and the loss of other ecosystem "services," his economic term for ecological functions (666). Barbier clearly understands these problems, but writes as though he is trying to persuade skeptical conservative economists. He also explains these problems mostly by reference to institutions and incentives, only once referring to actual people when he discusses the "perverse fossil fuel subsidies" that "do not benefit the poor but the rich" (691). This focus on large-scale trends, institutions, and global patterns is hard to overcome when dealing with such a broad topic and from the field of economics. Many of the problems that Barbier identified in this last chapter were in fact the results of actions by small and identifiable groups of people who were fully aware of the potential consequences of their decisions. Nonetheless, this book is a major accomplishment, and for agricultural historians it helps balance a narrow focus on specific events and places with a global and long-term perspective.