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THIS is not exactly a bedside book, but, come to think of it, it is the most enlightening "western" I have ever read. Even the cacophony emanating from the TV room faded and diminished into nothingness as I plodded on. I had often wondered what all the feudin' and shootin' was about. Now I know.

Mr. Jones has performed the difficult and delicate task of presenting to us in a volume of less than four hundred pages a surprisingly comprehensive review of the economic, social and political life of the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Moreover, he has done so in such a way as to show the interrelating significance of the exploitation (in more senses than one) of virgin territory, industrial expansion, tariffs, chattel slavery, poverty, war, "boom and bust."

We see how the abundance of land and resources actually retarded the growth of American towns - leading to a widespread dependence on Europe for a whole range of consumer goods - although securing for the workers real wages of from 30 to 100 per cent higher than those in Britain. "Poverty was the exception rather than the rule . . . there was always plenty of land and an open frontier."

The distribution of land was always a problem. Under the Land Ordinance of 1785, for instance, the basic unit of sale was to be the square mile lot (640 acres) at one dollar an acre. This low price, however, coupled with the amount of land required to be taken, was too great for small farmers to handle. Privately organised joint-stock land companies were formed and bought up huge parcels of land - up to five million acres each. Not only did these land companies profit handsomely, but as big purchasers they were able to demand that Congress provide orderly government in those territories to attract settlers and so speed up the re-sale of land.

It is interesting to note, also, how railway construction often preceded settlement, the railway companies themselves organising migration from the East and from Europe to the areas flanking their lines. Enormous land grants were made to the transcontinental lines after the Civil War, and it is shown how to connect these facts with the wild land investment bonanzas and their subsequent collapses.

As the Northeast (the eastern seaboard and its adjacent territory) became industrialised and built up, vested interests "generally favoured high-priced public lands and feared a labour shortage might be caused by the westward drain of manpower if the government made land too easy to buy. On the other hand, northeastern businessmen did not want Washington to make so much revenue out of high-priced public land sales that the government would no longer need or favour high tariffs. So they cleverly demanded that land should be more highly priced, but that the profits from land sales should be allocated to individual states on the basis of population."

As to the Civil War, there is not space to discuss at length even one of the causes, but "patterns of monoculture in Dixie failed to bring about sustained regional economic growth. For example, over-concentration on cotton, rice, or tobacco production restricted the proliferation of division of labour and growth of specialised skills in other sectors of Southern economic life; and this inhibition, taken with the legal enslavement of over one-third of the total population, kept large numbers of people virtually outside the market economy." Thus the South, in being forced to pay tariffs, was literally subsidising Northern industries.

Speaking of war, it is ironical, indeed tragic, that much of the expansion and development of the United States has been due to conflicts raging elsewhere. "From 1793 to 1807" says Mr. Jones, "real income per head … reached levels not later regained until the mid-nineteenth century. Did it not depend entirely on the fact that Britain, France and the rest were totally occupied with wiping each other out . . .? Each threat of peace brought economic setback." In 1846 there was the Irish potato famine and the urgent British demand for American foodstuffs; also in the 'forties and 'fifties Anglo-Chinese wars threw part of the China trade out of British and into American hands. The poor harvests in India and Europe in 1896-7 provided another outlet for American abundance and a trade stimulus, the Great War of 1914 geared American industry to unprecedented activity, and as to 1939, it is impossible to disregard the positive stimulus that that war's outbreak gave. One can, of course, say much the same thing of the other belligerents in that upheaval, initially at any rate, since they were all still floundering in the shallow end of the worst depression of the century.

"Does a financial crash cause a depression?" asks Mr. Jones. "The answer usually is No. Most stock-market panics seem to follow rather than to initiate downward trends in the wider economy; there have to be fundamental weaknesses in the economic structure for the panic to exploit." How very shrewd. And shrewd also is his message to Malthusians: "The population expert is a professional pessimist and the (father ineptly styled) population 'explosion' since the 1940s has brought us a crop of neo-Malthusians, scared and stimulated by the spectre of dwindling world food supplies. We would be foolish not to listen to them, but unimaginative not to look around for some factor they might have again ignored." The italics in both these passages are mine.