For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus—whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic—this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new "population bombs" are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations and contemporary debates.

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.

Though Robert Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. Robert Mayhew offers at once a major reassessment of Malthus’s ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment, giving historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a pioneer in demography, economics and social science more generally whose ideas prompted a new 'Malthusian' way of thinking about population and the poor. On the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, New Perspectives on Malthus offers an up-to-date collection of interdisciplinary essays from leading Malthus experts who reassess his work. Part one looks at Malthus's achievements in historical context, addressing not only perennial questions such as his attitude to the Poor Laws, but also new topics including his response to environmental themes and his use of information about the New World. Part two then looks at the complex reception of his ideas by writers, scientists, politicians and philanthropists from the period of his own lifetime to the present day, from Charles Darwin and H. G. Wells to David Attenborough, Al Gore and Amartya Sen.

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.

Hollander investigates the relation of Malthusian economics to that of the other great classicists - particularly Smith, Ricardo, J.B. Say, and the French physiocrats. He redefines our common perception of Malthus's method and character.