Henry Hobhouse was born in Somerset, England in 1924 and was educated at Eton. He worked as a journalist for The Economist, Daily Express, and The Wall Street Journal and was one of the first directors of CBS-TV News. In 1954, he returned to his farm in Somerset. He died in 2016.
Cortes set forth from Spain in 1518 with some 30 horses. Multiplying in Mexico and Texas, horses altered the plains' ecology and turned many once-agricultural Indians into hunters who followed buffalo all year long. This switch, suggests Hobhouse ( Seeds of Change ), precipitated whites' deliberate extermination of the buffalo herds, sealing the fate of Indians and buffalo. This maverick history of the past five centuries comprises a mixture of insight, speculation and oversimplification. Hobhouse's main thesis is that the dynamics of population growth, disease and food supply shape the course of history. He throws sharp light on the effects of the bubonic plague on pre-modern Europe, and on disease (smallpox, influenza, measles, etc.) as an ``agent of imperialism'' that decimated native peoples with whom whites came in contact. Japan's 200-year isolation, he argues, saved the country from European domination and made possible a modern resurgence. Hobhouse's closing futurist scenario embraces recycling, environmental cleanup, nuclear fusion and genetic engineering. (May)
Students of the world ecosystem, as well as those of comparative world history during the last 500 years, will find this cleverly written survey informative and provocative. It is a discussion of the Malthusian proposition that humankind always multiplies faster than the available food supply, but population is held in check by disease, war, and natural disaster. Based on wide reading, rich in interesting material drawn from all parts of the globe, the book explores the question as to how countries have solved the problem of equitable food supply. Since others have tackled this problem, the book is not so ``unorthodox''; Hobhouse's tendency to measure everything against the standard of English development is very insular. Yet, the questions resulting from the fourfold increase in world population in the last century and the massive threats to the environment posed by the greenhouse effect, acid rain, etc., deserve the informed attention this study offers.-- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.
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