This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.

Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

The first major study of population size and its tremendous importance to the character and quality of society, this classic examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources.

Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.

This is a fascinating insight into the work of one of our greatest thinkers. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) is best remembered today for his theories on the menace of over-population; this first ever full-length biography shows him also in his role as one of the founders of classical political economy, still a controversial figure in the history of economic thought. Based on exhaustive research among contemporary sources, it gives an account of Malthus’s two careers, as an economist and as a professor at the East India College. Patricia James describes how, at the East India College, Malthus was influential in the establishment of an incorruptible Civil Service and the modern system of written examinations, in circumstances which seem almost farcical today. She gives an account of his family and social life, which was full of warmth and variety, with an abundance of ‘characters’ as well as many famous men. People nowadays are inclined to argue in a vacuum whether Malthus is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about population outrunning subsistence, and about the adequacy of aggregate demand in a capitalist society. Patricia James shows him in his historical setting, so that the book is a study both of the man and of the age in which he lived. She believes that, paradoxically, if we view Malthus’s works as the period pieces they are, it becomes more and not less easy to see their relevance to our own problems. Although Malthus’s search for basic principles in a changing world was confused and erratic, his ideas are still illuminating to those who prefer investigation and reappraisal to the mere reiteration of dogma. This text was first published in 1975.

This book, first published in 1951, focuses on the hitherto ignored contemporary critics of Malthus, giving them the attention they so rightly deserve. Dr Smith traces the Malthusian controversy step by step, from 1798, the date of the First Essay, to the death of Malthus in 1834. Investigating the precursors of Malthus and the genesis of the Malthusian Theory of Population, the book subjects the theory to a searching analysis in the light of not only contemporary criticism, but also subsequent developments and modern ideas. In addition, the book examines the application of the theory to the doctrine of perfectibility, to wages, to the poor laws, to emigration, and to the birth control movement. Fully annotated and written in an easy style, this work is indispensable to serious students of both population problems and the development of economic thought. Broad in scope, The Malthusian Controversy presents a new perspective on the most urgent of modern issues, the problem of world population.