The New Worlds at the Heart of T. R. Malthus's Principle of Population

Malthus’ current omnipresence in discussions of the globe beyond Europe contrasts strangely with the historiography on him that emphasizes his significance as a moral philosopher and political economist within England, influencing the Poor Laws and Corn Laws. But any sense that his work somehow focused on England, only later to be exported to the extra-European world, is in fact false. From the start, with the 1798 first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, North America was his essential case study of the rapidity with which humans could multiply, given enough land to farm and with which to feed themselves. Malthus had good reason to emphasize the former British colonies, given that he was citing Benjamin Franklin’s assessment of demographic haste in those places. His fascination with new worlds was even more apparent in the 1803 edition of his work, which added the populated islands and continent of the South Pacific to his analysis. In the process, the Essay dealt directly with questions of colonialism and emigration, and integrated existing work on indigenous people in the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific. This lecture analyses Malthus’s use of eighteenth-century explorers’ accounts, Jesuit and French histories of the Americas, and colonists’ reports of life and land in distant worlds. These were the new worlds that made the Essay both a global and a colonial study from the start.