This is an original and challenging work. It seeks to explain Irish development dilemmas by looking at the role of pastoral production throughout human history. It requires vigorous-minded, non-timid readers, who will find it both unusual and exciting.

- Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel Center, Yale University,

This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary man...Once in a blue moon, backgrounds like this enable someone to write a book that we professors, weighed down by disciplines and schools of thought, could never write...this book is an original...a must-read...Crotty uses his distinctive brand of biological and economic materialism to very powerful effect...all social scientists and historians with broad comparative interests, especially in the economy, demography, and human health of the South of the world, should read this book and reflect long on it.

- Michael Mann, University of California, Los Angeles, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 2

This is a highly original and engaging book...It offers nothing less than a philosophic history of humanity.

- John A. Hall, McGill University, American Historical Review