Welsh Journals

agrarian economies. Thus Malthus emerges as a proponent of economic growth, but equally as an analyst of the structural and technical limitations which constrained growth. Reading Malthus in this way challenges traditional intellectual histories of political economy. Firstly, it reclaims Malthus for the mainstream of political economy. Secondly, it does full justice to the attempt to respond to the specific challenges of wartime conditions. Thirdly, it demonstrates the distance between the Malthus of the Essay on the Principle of Population and the Burke of 'Thoughts and Details on Scarcity' a distance which too often has been diminished. Fourthly, and most suggestively, Winch's reading underscores the paradox of Malthus's being attacked most vigorously by Romantic poets and similarly-motivated critics who, in fact, shared his preference for balanced economic growth and agricultural protection. Malthus's objection to economists and politicians being blinded by 'the shewiness of commerce and manufacturing' into seeing them as the sole or principal sources of wealth, power, and prosperity, was remarkably close to the position of Southey, Coleridge, and a whole host of High Tory protectionists. This leads one to speculate that, had Southey not blocked Malthus's appointment as the Quarterly Review's principal economic commentator, 'Malthus's agrarian sympathies and persistent attempt to theorize and provide remedies for Britain's unbalanced growth' (p. 332) would have found a wider and more receptive readership. As it was, Malthus remained shrouded in the demonology of 'Nature's Feast' for most Tories, and was suspect on the Corn Laws for most Ricardians. The consequences for the development of political economy and for the economy itself were, as Winch reminds us, profound indeed. DAVID EASTWOOD Swansea OUR DAUGHTERS' LAND: PAST AND PRESENT. Edited by Sandra Betts. University ofWales Press, Cardiff, 1996. Pp. 228. £ 12.95 This mysteriously titled volume, a companion to Our Sisters' Land and Our Mothers' Land, is described as 'the first book to examine the gendered nature of childhood within a specifically Welsh context' from the middle ages to the present. It is in fact a good deal more modest than this. Eight of the ten papers deal with the twentieth century, and all but the first and the last are focused on educational issues. There is nothing about infancy, almost nothing about parent-child relationships, about children in the