The Economic Basis of Peace is a wide-ranging and often innovative text including six main chapters and fourteen informative appendices. After a brief introduction, Mott examines the historical perspectives on the relationship in chapter 2, explaining that “[a]lthough obscured by the haze of time, it is clear that a linkage between growth and conflict existed nearly five millennia ago” (11). He goes on to describe the links between commerce and conquest in premodern times, before running through some examples of trade-related conflict and the role of industrialization. This chapter provides some fascinating reading. The difficulty, of course, is in attempting to analyze such a vast swath of history in just under thirty pages. For the author the only hope is that he can give his readers a taste for the subject that will set the foundations for his later study, while at the same time providing the reader with adequate notes to ensure that they can be directed elsewhere for further information. This, in large measure, the author achieves, although the text is lacking in some of the more contemporary historical examples.

In the following chapter on theoretical approaches, Mott provides an ambitious analysis, concluding that “political-economic orthodoxy remains equivocal about the relationship between economic growth and international conflict” (93). Although often insightful, this examination at times lacks the clarity that might have added to Mott’s approach. The reader is left with no clear sense of the real contribution of the theoretical literature to the economic growth–international conflict debate, but instead receives a catalogue of various literatures that have, over the years, added to the existing research. This is unfortunate, as it is obvious that Mott has the broad understanding of the theoretical literature often missing in other analyses. Indeed, this knowledge contributes to the evolution of the book’s fourth chapter on empirical approaches, which is an altogether clearer and more cogent analysis.

Chapter 4 addresses such issues as the use of data sets in international conflict analyses, as well as outlining the literature analyzing modern economic growth. Mott then offers his own original, empirical analyses of the “relationships between economic growth and international conflict over long periods, as well as the processes that link them” (128). This is an interesting and novel analysis. However, the difficulty with basing such a large part of his final thesis upon an empirical analysis performed specifically for the text, and sometimes ignoring other existing empirical literatures, it that it tends to concentrate too much upon the author’s own assumptions regarding the international conflict–economic growth relationship. Any difficulty in the manner in which the analysis is performed, regardless of the validity of its conclusions, then affects the entire approach. As Mott himself notes in chapter 5, “[I]n disclosing a large portion of the politico-economic theory of the dynamics between economic growth and international conflict, which is the object of this study, disjunction, however, creates its own dilemma of determining which growth-conflict relationship is relevant, why it is active and what to do about it” (171).

Tellingly, Mott discovers that there are two distinct growth-conflict relationships that result from two fundamentally different types of growth. The final chapter of The Economic Basis of Peace attempts to explain the meaning of this with some specific proposals. These include the notion that “[t]he contribution of dynamic growth to aggregate growth influences the national level of international conflict,” and that “[l]evels of international trade can reflect the contribution of static growth to aggregate growth” (228).

The Economic Basis of Peace is an ambitious project. Although at times it does not quite fulfill its promise, nevertheless it is well worth reading for the insights that it gives into the international conflict-economic growth relationship, as well as for the thoroughness of its analysis. That “this study has raised, suggested, and perhaps ignored as many questions and issues as it has addressed” (228) is not surprising given the complexity of the subject matter, but still it is a worthy and worthwhile contribution to the existing literature.