MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT (1766– 1834)

MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT (1766– 1834)

Robert Malthus is known as the originator of ‘Malthusianism’, a doctrine of population growth according to which the human capacity to multiply at a geometric rate is contrasted with a natural limitation of the means of subsistence to an arithmetical rate of growth. He has therefore become known as an early exponent of the problem of world overpopulation, pointing to an inherent tendency of a population to increase at a rate faster than its means of support. This idea was first outlined in his Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798), a single volume expanded into two in a new edition of 1803, with subsequent revisions and additions in 1806, 1807, 1817 and 1826.

There are many qualifications that can be made to this received idea of ‘Malthusianism’. Today, the problem of poverty and world population growth is firmly linked to the idea of the demographic transition, the phases of population growth linked to interlocking patterns in the rates of birth, infant mortality and adult life expectancy combined with the deliberate promotion of economic growth by national governments. This understanding of the ‘population problem’ is a firmly twentieth-century one, but should be noted here since Malthus lived through a period in England’s population history that is now understood to be a phase in a long-term transition. How far Malthus appreciated the significance of contemporary changes to Britain’s population dynamics, and in what way, will be considered below. Second, Malthus was not so much an ‘early demographer’ as a late exponent of a link, familiar in the eighteenth century, between national welfare and the size of a population. Malthus, by invoking this linkage, aligned himself with the discourse of eighteenth-century political economy, and was consequently understood by his contemporaries to be a ‘political economist’. His There are many qualifications that can be made to this received idea of ‘Malthusianism’. Today, the problem of poverty and world population growth is firmly linked to the idea of the demographic transition, the phases of population growth linked to interlocking patterns in the rates of birth, infant mortality and adult life expectancy combined with the deliberate promotion of economic growth by national governments. This understanding of the ‘population problem’ is a firmly twentieth-century one, but should be noted here since Malthus lived through a period in England’s population history that is now understood to be a phase in a long-term transition. How far Malthus appreciated the significance of contemporary changes to Britain’s population dynamics, and in what way, will be considered below. Second, Malthus was not so much an ‘early demographer’ as a late exponent of a link, familiar in the eighteenth century, between national welfare and the size of a population. Malthus, by invoking this linkage, aligned himself with the discourse of eighteenth-century political economy, and was consequently understood by his contemporaries to be a ‘political economist’. His

Malthus was born on 13 February 1766 in Surrey, the son of Daniel and Henrietta. His father enjoyed a private income, enabling him to live as a cultured gentleman. In his travels he had met Rousseau, whose work and character he greatly admired; and his freethinking credentials are underlined by his decision to send Robert at the age of 16 to Warrington Academy, a ‘Dissenting Academy’ run by Gilbert Wakefield. When the Academy closed in 1783 Robert continued to be tutored privately at Wakefield’s home, proceeding then in 1784 to Jesus College, Cambridge, where Wakefield had been a Fellow. The fact however that Robert then graduated in 1788 as Ninth Wrangler, the ninth best mathematician of the year, implies that he had, by this time, distanced himself from the influence of Dissent, for until 1856 all graduates of the University of Cambridge had to submit to a religious test of their adherence to the Church of England. Ordained immediately on leaving Cambridge, he was given a curacy by the Bishop of Winchester in 1789 in a small Surrey parish close to his parents’ home. His religious conformity was further underlined by his election in 1793 to a non-residential fellowship of Jesus College—a politically significant step given the ill repute into which Jacobinism thereafter fell, further underscored by the outbreak of war between Britain and France in that year. Despite this open avowal of Church and state, and by extension disavowal of Dissent, Jacobinism and Enlightenment culture, he remained living at home when not in college, arguing occasionally over such matters with his father. This we know from the fact that the Essay, whose subtitle runs: ‘with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M.Condorcet, and other Writers’, was prompted by an argument over the perfectibility of mankind that Robert had with his father some time in 1797. Malthus’s exposition of over-population as an ever-present threat is part of a larger argument concerning the prospects for the improvement of human welfare. Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice of 1793 and Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrés de l’esprit humaine of 1795 represent his foils, works espousing a conception of human perfectibility whose attractions Malthus acknowledged, but which he

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Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 434

considered unrealisable. The inherent tension in which Malthus placed population and means of subsistence represents his sober rebuttal of such utopian thinking. The stance is also suggestive of the name later given to political economy—the ‘dismal science’—as a source of sombre argument deployed against a sanguine faith in the prospect of a better world.

The relation between the size of a population and its general welfare had been a constant theme since the first estimates of population made in England during the later seventeenth century. Some writers suggested that a simple advantage of numbers sufficed to render a ruler more rich and powerful than his neighbours, so that the larger nations would inevitably be richer, absolutely and proportionately, than smaller nations. Others pointed out that Holland was certainly smaller and far less populous than France, but was in important respects as wealthy as France thanks to its location and its place in the world’s trading system. The contrast between Holland and France also served to further discussion of the degree to which income from trade and commerce might sustain populations, instead of a reliance on domestic agricultural produce. In turn, once this point had been raised, the cultural consequences of a reliance upon trade became an issue—whether the substitution of commerce for agriculture undermined the moral order of an economy, replacing traditional virtues with those of the market-place. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) drew a line under these arguments, identifying the role of the division of labour in the improvement of human productivity, suggesting furthermore that the commercial spirit furthered, rather than undermined, civil virtues. Smith’s Wealth of Nations became a standard text around which the political economy of the early nineteenth century took shape, and Malthus himself used it as the core textbook in his teaching at East India College.

But the critical issue of commerce and civilization that Smith’s writings addressed was quickly superseded by mechanical argument over the relation of the price mechanism to the value of human labour, and the distribution of income between the classes of society. Malthus’s original Essay preserved much of the political argument implicit in Smith, a work that Maynard Keynes in his important biographical essay pronounced much the best of all the editions. The argument is bluntly stated in the first chapter—that the growth of the food supply is constrained to an arithmetical progression, while the unchecked growth of population obeyed geometric proportions. In the second, Malthus demonstrates that efforts to ameliorate the growth of poverty associated with unchecked population increase merely promote further population increase, and hence deepen the misery of the poor.

The Essay did not argue that populations did in fact expand geometrically, rather that this potential was everywhere constrained by the much slower growth of means of subsistence. He distinguished, and in later editions elaborated, different kinds of checks to population growth, including changes in life expectancy, poverty, birth control, late marriage and simple restraint. Checks to population growth there had to be; having introduced the tension between subsistence and population growth, the issue became how this tension was in practice resolved. The second edition of the work was more than twice as long as the first, adding evidence in support of the basic theses, seeking to demonstrate that across the world social and moral arrangements were built around this ineluctable tension. Whatever the variety of human institutions, they were ultimately all subordinated The Essay did not argue that populations did in fact expand geometrically, rather that this potential was everywhere constrained by the much slower growth of means of subsistence. He distinguished, and in later editions elaborated, different kinds of checks to population growth, including changes in life expectancy, poverty, birth control, late marriage and simple restraint. Checks to population growth there had to be; having introduced the tension between subsistence and population growth, the issue became how this tension was in practice resolved. The second edition of the work was more than twice as long as the first, adding evidence in support of the basic theses, seeking to demonstrate that across the world social and moral arrangements were built around this ineluctable tension. Whatever the variety of human institutions, they were ultimately all subordinated

Despite the range of evidence adduced in the Essay, its theses presuppose an isolated, agrarian economy. The work appeared between two periods of acute grain scarcity, highlighting the crucial role of grain supply in the welfare of the national economy. His demographic arguments presupposed a national population supported entirely from national agriculture, enjoying none of the benefits of commerce outlined by Smith. In modern parlance, Malthus presupposed a closed economy, an autarchic order that consumes all that it produces without trading connections to the rest of the world. Given Malthus’s emphasis upon the problem of subsistence, the longstanding argument over the problem of reliance upon other countries that free trade in grains brought with it and the growth of Britain’s overseas trade in consumer goods and luxuries, this was not a serious limitation. But at the time Malthus wrote the first version of his essay, these conditions no longer held. The Lancashire cotton industry was beginning its meteoric rise, based on the importation of raw cotton and the export of finished textiles. And since 1793 Britain consumed more grain than it produced, initiating a reliance on net imports of corn that would last for almost 200 years. The population was increasing rapidly, and Britain was quickly becoming an urban, manufacturing nation. Trade and commerce, not subsistence agriculture, would in future provide the mainstay of the population.

In 1800 Malthus published a pamphlet directed to the relation between the level of labouring wages, the level of prices and the effects of welfare provision, themes that belong more obviously to political economy. An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions follows the line of argument already established in the Essay, that efforts to improve the condition of the poor through poor relief succeeded only in increasing the price of staple foodstuffs, such as bread, rendering the poor entirely dependent upon relief. Since the supply of grain was fixed in the short run, Malthus argued—here again we have the assumption of a closed economy, but one which had some validity in the light of the disruption to trade arising from the Napoleonic Wars— increasing the purchasing power of the poor simply resulted in a rise in prices, wiping out the initial impact of relief. The first British census was conducted the following year, its results showing that the population was much larger than had been assumed, not least by Malthus himself. This rather suggested that the ‘Malthusian trap’ was less effective in limiting population than had hitherto been thought; indeed more recent study of European population data indicates that in this period individual welfare improved as population expanded, confounding the principle of population equilibrium that had prevailed down the centuries. Population, nutrition and economic data suggest that, across Europe, a rapid rise in population was linked to increased levels of economic activity, hence contributing to the development of trade and commerce. When in 1814–15 Malthus published three essays on the Corn Laws, arguing for the importance of a domestic surplus in grain and agricultural protection, the argument had moved away from the relationship between population and means of subsistence to a more direct confrontation of agrarian and manufacturing interests. The new theory of political economy was generally linked to argument over the relationship between social classes; Malthus firmly supported the landed interest, distancing himself from the more radical tendencies of his contemporaries.

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Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 436 The appointment as Professor of History and Political Economy to the newly founded

East India College however reflected Malthus’s high reputation in the early 1800s. The College had been created to train the future administrators of India during what proved to

be the last 50 years of the East India Company’s private monopoly of trade and government. Throughout his tenure, to his death in service in 1834, Malthus appears to have used as his main teaching text Smith’s Wealth of Nations, despite the appearance of more didactic works from the likes of David Ricardo, JAMES MILL and J.R.McCulloch. Malthus long harboured an ambition to produce his own edition of Wealth of Nations, his own Principles of Political Economy of 1820 being constructed as a critical appraisal of some of Smith’s key concepts. There is however little evidence that either this work, or smaller treatises written in the 1820s, were related to his regular teaching. In 1836 a posthumous second edition of the Principles was published, edited by his friend William Otter from notes rnade in the 1820s. Malthus continued to write and discuss political economy for almost 40 years after the first publication of the Essay—but the impact that this work made has always overshadowed his later writings.