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

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...