Welsh Journals

writing from middle England this reviewer can only envy the Welsh interest in their eighteenth-century communities! J. V. BECKETT Nottingham Riches AND POVERTY. AN Intellectual HISTORY OF Political ECONOMY IN BRITAIN, 1750-1934. By Donald Winch. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xi, 428. £ 50 (hardback); £ 16.95 (paperback). In conception as well as in execution, this is a magisterial book. Its central path leads the reader from Adam Smith's attempt to reconcile the mechanisms and appetites of the market with the moral imperatives of civic virtue through to the emergence of a largely autonomous, even self- regarding, tradition which came to be known as 'classical political economy'. Put like this, of course, the trajectory of Winch's analysis is not unfamiliar, but its precise textures and its treatment of the Malthusian moment most certainly are. At times Winch is revisiting themes he has treated elsewhere Adam Smith's politics, the evolution of Malthusian economics but he does so with freshness and a still broader sense of context. This is a book with which all serious students of political economy will have to reckon. It is not, however, always an easy book to digest. As ever Winch writes elegantly, refuses to be hurried by impatient readers or parsimonious publishers, and savours texts and their meanings. The effect is to lend a perhaps unintended density to the book. Paradoxically sheer subtlety sometimes occludes the broader architecture of argument. Winch's methodology is unflinchingly that of the Sussex School of Intellectual History, moving from texts to contexts, and eschewing both post- modernism and what Winch calls somewhat mystifyingly 'the social history of ideas'. Texts here have precise meanings. In what follows, I will attempt to rivet a similarly precise meaning to Winch's own text. Perhaps Winch's central ambition is to reposition Malthus, not as the 'demoralizer' of political economy but as its modernizer. Pace Gertrude Himmelfarb, Winch argues that Malthus did not repudiate the Smithean project but sought rather to refine and reconstruct Smithean political economy in the light of wartime conditions, widespread poverty, and rapid population growth. Here Winch harnesses Wrigley's work on the pre- industrial economy to a re-reading of Malthus arguing, rightly, that Malthus's understanding of the pace and limitations of economic growth were determined by pre-industrial conditions and the limitations of