A fast multipole boundary element method (FM-BEM) was applied for the analysis of microcracked solids. Both the computational complexity and memory requirement are reduced to O(N), where N is the number of degrees of freedom. The effective elastic moduli of a 2-D solid containing thousands of randomly distributed microcracks were evaluated using the FM-BEM. The results prove that both the differential method and the method proposed by Feng and Yu provide satisfactory estimates to such problems. The effect of a non-uniform distribution of microcracks has been studied using a novel model. The numerical results show that the non-uniform distribution induces a small increase in the global stiffness.