Immortal Malthus

This chapter provides an overview of the ideas of the eighteenth-century population theorist Thomas Robert Malthus. In a brief polemic, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus presented “two fixed laws of our nature,” the necessity of food for existence and “the passion between the sexes,” as unavoidable and constant. According to Malthus, without proper restraint among those who could not afford their own maintenance, humankind was likely to remain locked within a perpetual cycle of biological peril and necessary famine. The conservative establishment in Britain embraced Malthus as a valuable truth-teller and, remarkably enough, his essay helped to bring about a complete overhaul of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, accomplished in 1834. More crucially, his principle of population lived on as the foundation of scarcity in formal economic terms, applied with shocking disregard across the colonial world and enshrined in later nineteenth-century neoclassical economics. By training the gaze upon eighteenth-century food production and its environments, the chapter explains that the book's treatment of Malthusian ideas focuses on the structural inequality at the heart of Malthusian thinking.