Gilbert Geoffrey - An Essay on the Principle of Population

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Introduction, Note on the Text, Select Bibliography,
Chronology, Explanatory Notes
Geoffrey Gilbert 1993

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1993
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

Reprinted with revisions 2004

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Malthus, T. R. (Thomas Robert), 17661834.
An essay on the principle of population / Thomas Malthus: edited
with an introduction by Geoffrey Gilbert.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Population. I. Gilbert, Geoffrey. II. Title. ID. Series.
HB861.E7 1993 304.620 9311126
ISBN 0192837478
7

Printed in Great Britain by
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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS MALTHUS

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

GEOFFREY GILBERT

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION

THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS was born in 1766 to a cultured, middle-class family in the rural south of England. He was privately tutored to the age of 18, then enrolled at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics, science, and the classics. At graduation in 1788 he was Ninth Wrangler (ninth best mathematician) of his class. Shortly thereafter he was ordained in the Church of England and made curate of a chapel in Surrey. Publication of the Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 brought him immediate fame. Several years of travel and research enabled him to produce a new, much-expanded edition of the work in 1803. Controversial from the start, the Essay marks a milestone in the history of economics, population studies, and social thought. Malthus wrote several other works of economics, notably An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815) and Principles of Political Economy (1820). The latter anticipated by over a century Keyness macro-economic concern about stagnation in the capitalist economy.

Malthus did not marry until the age of 38 but eventually had three children, none of whom left descendants. In 1805 he became a professor of economics and history at the East India College in Hertfordshire, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was an original member of the Political Economy Club in London (1821), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1818), and twice testified before Parliament. He died in 1834 while on a visit to his father-in-law in Bath, and is buried at Bath Abbey.

GEOFFREY GILBERT is Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York. A graduate of Dartmouth College and The Johns Hopkins University, he is the editor of Malthus: Critical Responses (Routledge, 1998).

Every year the worlds human numbers increase by a figure equal to the combined populations of Bolivia, Canada, Cambodia, Sweden, and Zambiaover 70 million people. With world population already past the six billion mark, several more decades of growth are virtually locked in by the youthful age structure of the worlds present population. Demographers estimate, for example, that even if the fertility rate in India continues its decline of recent years, that nation will add more than half a billion people to its population by the middle of the century.

The prospect of nine billion people worldwide by the year 2050a recent UN estimatemight be a matter of indifference, even celebration, if one could anticipate that most of the nine billion would be living at least as well as their parents and grandparents had lived, in a natural environment no more degraded than it is today. Demographic optimistsand such there are, as we shall seeargue that these are reasonable prospects. But there is a long tradition of concern and apprehension about the consequences of rising population, a tradition that dates from the publication of Malthuss Essay on Population in 1798. An undisputed classic of social thought, the Essay has put successive generations on notice that if no other causes intervene to hold population in check, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague [will] advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands (p. 61).

In the late 1790s Thomas Robert Malthus was the Anglican parson of a small country church, a bachelor in his early thirties who probably spent much of his time at his parents home. At some point he and his father got into a friendly argument over the future course of society. Daniel Malthus followed the French thinkers Condorcet and Rousseau and the English anarchist William Godwin in the conviction that society was on a path toward perfection. Political, social, and scientific developments were opening new avenues of advancement on all sides, and the further progress of mankind seemed virtually assured. This buoyant prospect, however, the younger Malthus could not bring himself to accept, for a reason announced in the title of his hastily but brilliantly written pamphlet,