Prophet of the Past

For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about the encroachment of wild animals and forests on crops and pasture. Nature was taking its revenge for the great land colonisation movement of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and renewal. Acknowledging his intellectual debt, Le Roy Ladurie pointed out the irony that the ‘Malthusian curse’ should lift just as it was being discovered in England in 1798. ‘Malthus was a clear-headed theoretician of traditional societies,’ he conceded, ‘but he was a prophet of the past; he was born too late in a world too new.’

Yet the spectre of Malthus continued to haunt industrial modernity. No sooner had the Great Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible seams. ‘We shall begin as it were to see the further shore of our Black Indies,’ he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented energy consumption, economic prosperity and demographic growth, produced its own peculiar versions of Malthusian catastrophism, from the neoliberal to the cosmological (the American scientist Garrett Hardin seriously entertained ‘interstellar migration’ as a solution to ‘the population problem’). When the first edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in 1798 there were just over ten million people in Britain and life expectancy was under forty. We are a long way from Malthus’s Britain, and further still from Le Roy Ladurie’s Languedoc. Why does a theory of scarcity endure in an age of abundance?

Malthus was born in 1766, the sixth of seven children in a prosperous family. His education was indulgent and progressive, thanks to a father obsessed with Rousseau and a series of reform-minded tutors who remarked on the contrarian temperament of ‘Don Roberto’, his love of ‘fighting for fighting’s sake’. He studied mathematics and natural philosophy at Cambridge, and decided at the age of twenty to take orders and find ‘a retired living in the country’. In 1789, as revolutionaries in Paris abolished feudalism and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Malthus was appointed to a curacy near Dorking. He moved back in with his parents and settled into a humdrum rustic lifestyle: recycled sermons for Surrey parishioners, the occasional holiday in the Lake District. But the enthusiasm with which contemporaries celebrated the events in France eventually reawakened the intellectual ambitions of his youth, as well as an adolescent passion for picking fights with the Enlightenment. Supporters of the revolution like Price, Paine, Condorcet and Godwin believed that misfortune and misery were the products of arbitrary social institutions that could be reformed out of existence. For Malthus, this kind of thinking was not only utopian but harmful. Violence, oppression and distress were generated ‘by laws inherent in the nature of man’; to pretend otherwise was only to cause further unnecessary suffering. Inspired by ‘the fantasy of reason’, the revolutionaries in France had stirred up ‘disgusting passions of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness and folly, as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age’.

The task Malthus set himself in writing the Essay on Population was to prove the existence of the natural law that radicals had ignored at such great cost. Drawing on his Newtonian training at Cambridge, he put this law in simple mathematical terms. People need food, and are also impelled by sexual passion to reproduce. Because land is finite, agricultural yields can only increase (by extending cultivation) in an arithmetic ratio: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Population, however, can increase exponentially: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. At such rates of increase, it was clear that the population would soon outstrip the means of subsistence: assuming intervals of 25 years, in two centuries the proportion would be 256 to 9, in three centuries 4096 to 13. Fortunately, such a scenario could never actually materialise. War, famine and pestilence acted as ‘positive checks’ on population, which was condemned to maintain an uneasy balance with the food supply. This ‘great restrictive law’ was at odds with the Enlightenment’s faith in the ‘perfectibility of man and of society’, its belief that reason could eradicate poverty, vice and inequality. Where Godwin argued that institutions such as private property and marriage caused avoidable suffering, Malthus’s law showed that they kept greater catastrophe at bay – the former by encouraging responsible stewardship of the land, the latter by restraining sexual passions within monogamous relationships. There was very little the government could do to help the destitute; if anything it was already doing too much. Even the meagre provisions of the Poor Laws encouraged the lower classes to marry early and have more children, thereby swelling the numbers of the ‘redundant population’ and making each of them worse off in the process.

These conclusions were, as Malthus himself later admitted, rather harsh. But they were quickly taken up by an embattled ruling order. A decade of food riots, rebellion in Ireland and war with France had stoked concerns about the nation’s reliance on its colonies and overseas trade for basic necessities. Since 1793 the Scottish baronet John Sinclair had been conducting surveys, commissioned through his newly established Board of Agriculture, to compare grain imports with estimates of marginal land which, if ‘improved’ and converted to arable land, might make up the shortfall. The goal of these surveys and of the board in general was to demonstrate the need for ‘wasteland colonisation’ and the enclosure of the commons. The Essay on Population, with its simple model that forecast the population of Britain outstripping its food supply within fifty years, offered scientific validity to a movement that wanted to turn every inch of land over to property and plough. It also instilled a remorselessness into the enclosure debate. Where some of the more charitable members of the Board of Agriculture had advocated compensating commoners with money or land, Malthus argued that such measures would only put further pressure on resources. Instead, the dispossessed should learn the discipline of the wage and contribute to an economy funding war across the continent. ‘Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta,’ Sinclair told Parliament in 1803, ‘but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement!’ Almost one hundred acts of enclosure a year were passed between the publication of the Essay on Population in 1798 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The immediate success of the pamphlet cleared a path for Malthus into the Whig establishment. He was appointed professor of political economy at Haileybury College, a training school for the East India Company. He became a member of the King of Clubs, a dining society for Whig luminaries, and was friendly with the editors of the Edinburgh Review. His fame grew with the publication of a vastly expanded second edition in 1803, which substantiated the basic principle of population with references to 18th-century travel literature and statistics gleaned from the latest censuses, but which also elaborated on a moral dimension of the Essay’s otherwise abstract, mechanical reasoning. To the positive checks of war, famine and pestilence Malthus added the ‘preventive’ check of moral restraint – man’s unique capacity to abstain from ‘promiscuous intercourse’, save money and delay marriage. This exception to the otherwise implacable laws of nature signalled an anthropological turn in Malthus’s argument, but also, as the historian Boyd Hilton put it, an ‘evangelical creep’. Some reviewers had objected to the theological implications of the first edition. Why would God make man too prolific, land too barren, and suffering a necessary condition of the world? Now Malthus could recast the population principle as a kind of ‘ecological trap’ designed to stimulate prudence, both sexual and financial. In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence, nature rewarded self-denial, and the market provided spiritual if not material gratification.

Malthus’s vision had always been grand. The first edition of the Essay asked readers to imagine an alternative universe with no limits, in which ‘the germs of existence’ were left unchecked to colonise ‘millions of worlds’. Five years later, Malthus swapped science fiction for armchair ethnography, as new chapters documented the ways the principle of population worked throughout the world. Much of this material drew on literature produced by functionaries of the British Empire – Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance of preventive over positive checks. Hunter-gatherers and semi-pastoral nomads in the New World resorted to war, abortion, infanticide and cannibalism to manage resource scarcity, while civilised Europeans enclosed and improved property, avoided sex, and married rich and late. Malthus would grant in a later edition that the forced removal of indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia could be ‘questioned in a moral view’. In a practical view, though, these populations were doomed.

With his professorship at Haileybury and his interest in ‘new worlds’ across the Atlantic and the South Seas, Malthus was a thoroughly imperial thinker. His life began as Cook set sail on the Endeavour and as the East India Company acquired the right to collect taxes in Bengal; it ended as Edward Gibbon Wakefield was developing schemes for the ‘systematic colonisation’ of Australia and New Zealand. In 1750, around 12.5 million people lived under British dominion. When Malthus died in 1834 that number was at least 200 million, roughly a quarter of the global population. He lived in the age of what Christopher Bayly called Britain’s ‘imperial meridian’, when colonial elites became preoccupied with property, settlement, improvement and population. Which is another way of saying that they became more Malthusian. Malthus’s influence can be seen after 1815, when government ministers and private labour speculators, faced with an economic slump and fears of proletarian unrest, began sponsoring schemes that dispatched the newly ‘redundant’ crofters of the Western Highlands to southern Africa and the St Lawrence Valley. And it prevailed in Delhi in 1876, when the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, laid on a week-long feast for 68,000 officials and maharajas (‘the most colossal and expensive meal in world history’, according to Mike Davis) while 100,000 people died of starvation in Mysore and Madras. Lytton blamed the Great Famine of 1876-78, which caused an estimated 8.2 million deaths, on the tendency of the Indian population ‘to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil’. His administration withheld the distribution of grain to the starving to avoid setting a precedent for long-term relief – an Indian Poor Law.

A defining feature of empire, in Bayly’s account, was the way colonial elites sought to impose order on their new territories, from the permanent settlement of land revenues in Bengal to Stamford Raffles’s land rent system in Java. The ‘agrarian patriotism’ of the enclosure movement was exported to the colonial periphery, and anyone who wasn’t tied to the land found themselves, like the commoners of Finchley, designated as a threat to the social order and an obstacle to improvement. Across the Middle East and South Asia, private armed traders became ‘pirates’, free cavalry soldiers were reclassified as ‘ferocious banditti’, and nomads and semi-pastoral peasants were forcibly domesticated and settled. According to Deborah Valenze, this too can be understood as a legacy of Malthus. Land accounted for one half of the principle of population, but Malthus had very little to say about it, beyond its finitude. Instead, he assumed that subsistence was best secured through private property and agriculture – and particularly the cultivation of grain. Once this assumption had been incorporated into the ideology of the British imperial state, a whole range of ‘marginal forms of rural life’ such as hunting, herding, fishing, gardening and gleaning were condemned to obsolescence, making way for a conception of nature as a ‘permanent field’.

Valenze is right to point out that when we think about Malthus, we tend to follow him in focusing on the dynamic side of his equation, population. Detractors see his influence in the colonial famines of the 19th century and the forced sterilisation campaigns and racial eugenics of the 20th century. More generous readers stress his sensitivity to cultural difference and the attention he paid to gender relations and reproductive labour. But we don’t really interrogate his assumptions about the relatively fixed variable, land. It’s a striking oversight, particularly in light of how frequently his argument has been invoked by environmentalists. From the Club of Rome’s report on the ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972 to Hermann Daly’s more recent attempts to popularise an ‘ecological economics’ that operates within the biophysical constraints of the earth, Malthus has over the past fifty years been revived as a far-sighted theorist of planetary boundaries. Valenze has no time for this view. Her Malthus is pathological, an ‘angry young man’ motivated by physical disability (he was born with a cleft lip), sexual frustration and Oedipal revolt to regard nature as cruel and unforgiving. And her message to environmentalists is clear: Malthus is the problem, not the solution.

In the summer of 1799​ Malthus took a trip to Norway with William Otter, a friend from Cambridge. The first edition of the Essay had appeared the previous year, and Malthus, eager to find empirical evidence for his theory, wanted to observe how other societies managed reproduction and resources. With the continent at war, Scandinavia was the most accessible destination. In the picturesque valleys around Trondheim, Malthus found support for his belief in the benefits of the preventive check. The locals married older, so were richer; compared to their British counterparts their children were ‘fatter, larger and had better calves to their legs’. Further north, the Sami reindeer herders of Lapland offered a glimpse into the past. In the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer ‘Lapps’, a Scandinavian safari complex that enabled Enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a primitive mode of existence which endured at the edge of European civilisation. Malthus, his head full of tales about the noble savage of the South Seas, spent a day with a Sami family and their six hundred reindeer, observing their pastoral duties (herding and milking the deer), eating their cheese and trout, and listening to their music. But the experience doesn’t seem to have had an effect on his ideas. His chapter on Norway in the 1803 edition made no mention of the Sami and focused entirely on the far more familiar, affluent inhabitants of the fjords.

Malthus was unable to fit the Sami into the rigid categories of his political economy, which ranked societies according to the way they became subsistent: agricultural, pastoral, nomadic and, at the lowest stage of civilisational development, hunter-gatherer. The Sami relied on reindeer for food, clothing and labour, but they didn’t own them, and the animals weren’t fully domesticated. What Valenze calls the ‘interspecies industry’ of the Lapps was therefore a confounding mixture of the pastoral and the nomadic. Malthus had grown up reading Gibbon, from whom he learned that history began with settled agriculture and that roaming herders were good only for ‘deep gaming and excessive drinking’. In Europe, progress had been achieved through property and the cultivation of grain, not dependence on animals. Neither the Sami nor their reindeer conformed to this narrative of civilisation, so they had to be erased from the Essay on Population.

In other words, Malthus had a very narrow appreciation of the ways people lived off the land. Only big agriculture could feed a developed, complex society. Valenze wants to recover alternative and altogether less intensive ways of extracting food from the earth, not just the reindeer economies of the northern Lapps but also methods that thrived in England under Malthus’s nose, from cottage industries like apple orchards and small-scale dairies to activities such as fishing, hunting and foraging for berries. It might be easy to dismiss these activities as relics – Malthus did, if he saw them at all. But as the pioneering agrarian historians Joan Thirsk and Jeanette Neeson showed, well into the late 18th century they remained vital parts of efficient, even flourishing communal agricultural systems that were being destroyed by enclosure. On other continents they survived European colonialism and endured into the late 20th century. The Danish economist Ester Boserup exposed the narrow-mindedness of neo-Malthusian postwar development economics – which held that societies in India, Africa and China were incapable of agricultural improvement, so any further population increase would exhaust the land – by pointing out the many subsistence activities beyond cultivation that local communities adopted to feed themselves. Like Boserup, Valenze thinks that Malthus and his many followers ‘knew nothing about agriculture’, and so ignored and foreclosed alternative ‘paths to the present’ that existed in gardens, wastelands and forests.

A sceptic might point out that our present has been achieved through developments in agriculture and subsistence that were unimaginable to Malthus. By 1815 Britain imported thirty thousand tonnes of bones a year as fertiliser; within decades it was also shipping in coprolites (fossilised dung) and Peruvian guano, and experimenting with using the excrement of urban settlements as manure. The invention of chemical fertilisers in the early 20th century loosened the organic constraints of the nitrogen cycle, but by that point Britain was already heavily reliant on the rest of the world to feed its population. According to the environmental historian Chris Otter, Britain in 1930 ‘imported 99 per cent of the world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63 per cent of its butter, 62 per cent of its eggs, 59 per cent of its beef, 46 per cent of its cheese, and 28 per cent of its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.

Neo-Malthusians are adamant that the escape from hunger and constraint has only ever been partial, and can’t possibly last for ever. Paul and Anne Ehrlich claimed in 2013 that if everyone on the planet ate like an American, we would need five Earths. The space available for global food production declined from just over an acre per person in the 1960s to half that amount four decades later. What if Malthus was right in the long run? Valenze turns the question on its head. What if all of this is Malthus’s fault? In the early 19th century the quest to turn the world into a permanent field displaced Fenland commoners and Bengali peasants, who then needed to be fed, which justified yet more enclosures. Today the same logic is driving a ‘new global land grab’ in areas such as the Guinea Savannah Zone, the vast expanse of grasslands south of the Sahara which is, according to the World Bank, ‘one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world’. It is also home to 600 million herders and peasant farmers. Speculators like Richard Ferguson, author of African Agriculture: The Other Eden, hope to turn the Ethiopian bush into ‘industrial-sized farms of a million hectares’ – all to feed a newly redundant population, uprooted from the land.