Zombies un-slayed: Malthusian Myopia in Lapland

I.

On the sesquicentennial of T. R. Malthus’s second and much enlarged edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), the retired doctor and public health official George F. McCleary published a short book entitled The Malthusian Population Theory (1953).¹ Aside from assessing the relevance of Malthus’s theory against one hundred and fifty years of evidence, McCleary included several biographical chapters, culminating in a chapter entitled ‘Mistakes about Malthus’. One of the most persistent mistakes, he noted, was the idea that Malthus had been a ‘gloomy prophet’ who predicted an inevitable future catastrophe brought about by excessive population growth. Although this error was as old as William Hazlitt’s attack on Malthus, it was easily shown to be false. ‘His chief concern’, McCleary insisted, ‘was with the present not the future’.² Moreover, the problem that concerned Malthus was less about population size than about the proportion between population and food, which was often most unfavourable in small populations.

A related mistake was the idea that the modern decline in the birth rate in Western countries, connected to the widespread use of birth control, somehow contradicted the Malthusian theory, especially its famous ‘geometrical ratio’ of population growth. This was also easily shown to be false, since Malthus had been perfectly aware of contraception as one among many ‘preventive checks’ to population, albeit he had labelled this one as a vice. And the geometrical ratio would only manifest itself in a population without any such preventive checks, as approximated in colonial America, and as imagined in the utopian society of William Godwin.

Malthus was neither an enemy of population nor an enemy of the poor, McCleary insisted. And insofar as he had been wrong, it was mostly in regard to the ‘arithmetic ratio’ of food production and the theory of diminishing returns, which this ratio morphed into. This theory – as espoused by David Ricardo and J. S. Mill as well – prevented Malthus from foreseeing the enormous increase in wealth that was to occur in the century and a half after his death. But the question remained whether the Western experience of a falling birth rate could be replicated on a global scale, especially in Asia, where population was growing fast, not least due to the work that doctors like McCleary were doing in bringing down the mortality rate. As a specialist in child and maternity welfare, who had occasionally advised the UN on these matters, McCleary was concerned, in other words, that improvements in medicine and health would not be accompanied quickly enough by a reduction in the birth rate, a prospect that risked turning modern medicine into an agent of starvation. To prevent this, a Western-like process of industrialisation had to occur in order to generate the same preventive checks that served to lower the birth rate in developed countries. Contraception, McCleary emphasised, was only a means to an end; the real cause of the decline in the birth rate was the desire and opportunity to better one’s own condition, a desire which had shown itself to be more effective in checking population than Malthus had imagined.³

With views such as these, McCleary represented a moderate voice within a growing choir of modern neo-Malthusians, a movement whose concern for the rising populations of India and China intersected in complex ways with the ideological battles of the Cold War. According to the Marxist historian Ronald Meek, the ideological struggles of the 1950s could ‘perhaps not unfairly’ be summed up as a controversy ‘between Malthusians and Marxists’.⁴ As an orthodox Marxist and an ardent enemy of neo-Malthusianism, Meek was less interested in the historical Malthus than McCleary. For the sesquicentennial in 1953, Meek thus instead collected the scattered remarks that Marx and Engels had written about Malthus and published them together with an introduction directed against modern neo-Malthusianism.⁵ Commenting on the second edition of the Essay, Meek simply dismissed its significance and stuck to the Marxian script, denouncing Malthus as a ‘bought advocate’ for the rich and an enemy of the poor:

The Essay was swollen by the addition of a great deal of historical and statistical material (much of it of very dubious validity), but there were no really radical alterations in the theory itself. Whatever the intentions of its author may have been, the Malthusian theory of population remained to the end what it had been at the beginning – an apology for the condition of the working people, and a warning against all attempts to ameliorate the condition of society.⁶

In stark contrast, McCleary was greatly interested in Malthus’s intentions, and insofar as Malthus had issued a warning, he argued, it was not against attempts to ameliorate poverty as such but against attempts that were counterproductive and self-defeating, such as the Old Poor Law. ‘Malthus hated poverty’, McCleary insisted, ‘not only on account of the misery it causes but for its demoralising effect upon those who suffer from it’.⁷ To realise this, one simply had to read as far as Book IV of the second edition, in which Malthus presented the ‘only effective’ remedy for reducing poverty. ‘The object of those who really wish to better the condition of the lower classes of society’, Malthus there wrote, ‘must be to raise the relative proportion between the price of labour and the price of provisions’. Yet this could only be done by increasing the quantity of provisions at the same time as the population was kept ‘at such a distance behind as to effect the relative proportion which we desire’. To achieve this required moral and prudential restraint on the part of the poor, which in turn required a system of public education. ‘We must explain to them the true nature of their situation’, Malthus insisted, because ‘the withholding of the supplies of labour is the only possible way of really raising its price’.⁸ Only this two-part approach – production and restraint – would help the labourer attain a larger share of the necessities and comforts of life and, in consequence, produce a ‘state of society in which squalid poverty and dependence are comparatively but little known’.⁹

In spite of this clear plan, however, one of the ‘most remarkable’ misconceptions about Malthus was, according to McCleary, the ‘strange allegation’ that he had actually recommended ‘war, famine and disease as remedies for over-population’.¹⁰ This accusation had frequently been made in Malthus’s own lifetime, most notably by James Grahame, yet despite several denials and clarifications by Malthus himself, the mistake was still repeated from time to time in the modern literature. McCleary provided two striking examples of this, both from the 1940s, one of them explaining that ‘Malthus himself felt that the only safeguard against this unhappy possibility [over-population] was to allow the “natural checks” of war, famine and disease to operate to remove surplus people’.¹¹ Examples such as these were merely representative of a much larger collection, McCleary assured, yet he refrained from labouring the point further. If he had done so, however, he could arguably have included Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), in which it is stated that Malthus made the ‘social forces’ of war, pestilence and vice ‘responsible for achieving the balance required by Nature’, and that ‘the laws of competitive society were put under the sanction of the jungle’.¹² He could also have included examples from the American environmentalist William Vogt, whose apocalyptic post-war bestseller The Road to Survival (1948) warned of imminent famine and war caused by global over-population, in itself a result of the failure to heed the lessons of Malthus, in whose name he advised against efforts to lower the mortality rate in countries such as China. ‘From the world’s point of view’, he argued, ‘these [future famines] may not only be desirable but indispensable’.¹³

Vogt’s book marked the beginning of the modern marriage between Malthusianism and environmentalism, and alongside similarly alarmist books in this genre, notably Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), it served to further associate Malthus’s name with dire predictions and draconian remedies, including the idea of salutary famines. Perhaps for this reason, the idea that Malthus recommended war, famine and disease has proven near impossible to purge from the popular mind, despite a growing body of scholarship pushing against this misconception.¹⁴ The idea of Malthus as an essentially evil person, who cruelly told the needy poor to ‘be gone’, is still very much alive today. Take for example Helen McCabe’s otherwise well-researched book on John Stuart Mill from 2021. In order to distance the ‘socialist’ Mill from the ominous shadow of Malthus, McCabe makes it clear that:

Mill was “Malthusian” only insofar as he adopted Malthus’s population principle; he rejected Malthus’s solutions to the problem (infamously, war, famine and disease; or, alternatively support for “delayed” marriage).¹⁵

To account for the persistence of errors such as these, McCleary suggested some likely explanations: First of all, many mistakes could simply be attributed to people ‘setting out to criticize his book without having read it’.¹⁶ Second, much ignorance about Malthus was the result of a lack of familiarity with the second edition of the Essay, published in 1803 and frequently revised thereafter. Third, even if people had read the second edition, some modern editions (notably the popular Everyman Edition from 1914) unfortunately omitted the appendices attached to the 1806 and 1817 editions of the Essay. These appendices were important because they contained Malthus’s replies to the most frequent misunderstandings and objections to his arguments.¹⁷ For this reason, McCleary preferred the edition of the Essay from 1890, which was a reprint of the final edition published in Malthus’s lifetime, the 1826 edition, with an introduction by George T. Bettany.

McCleary’s book was the first substantial attempt to give a sympathetic and scholarly account of Malthus and his Essay since James Bonar’s Malthus and his Work from 1885, and as such it constituted a preliminary highpoint in the historical reappraisal that had begun with John Maynard Keynes’s short biographical essay on ‘Robert Malthus’ from 1933.¹⁸ Keynes, it should be remembered, had been moved to write this essay after he had read (as one of the first) the ‘lost’ letters of Malthus to David Ricardo, letters which had been discovered in London in 1930, and which Keynes found so congenial to his own way of thinking about the economy that he saw them as embodying a lost tradition of economic thought. ‘If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded’, Keynes wrote in the aftermath of the Great Depression, ‘what a much wiser and richer place the world would be to-day!’¹⁹

To McCleary, however, these letters also hinted at the potential for additional discoveries, and since so many questions about Malthus were still unanswered and controversial, he began making inquiries. From Piero Sraffa’s introduction to the Ricardo-Malthus letters, published as part of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo in 1952, he learned of the existence of Mr Robert Malthus, a distant relative of T. R. Malthus living on the Isle of Wight, who had been in possession of the Ricardo-side of the correspondence.²⁰ Being almost completely blind, however, McCleary couldn’t make the journey alone, so he brought along with him his neighbour, Patricia James, who at the time was one of several local women who occasionally read aloud for him. In May of 1960, the two of them enjoyed a pleasant afternoon in Mr Malthus’s home, where they were shown a variety of Malthus memorabilia, including the portraits of the Malthus family by John Linnell. What was remarkable about the portrait of Malthus, James later noted, was the tactfulness with which Linnell had handled Malthus’s facial disfigurement – his harelip being barely visible.²¹

Although they left the island empty-handed, about a year after their first visit, in June of 1961, a package arrived from the Isle of Wight. ‘I have come across a diary which is definitely his’, Mr Malthus informed, although he couldn’t say anything regarding its content.²² ‘My interest in Political Economy is entirely surpassed by my interest in locomotives’, he explained to Patricia James, ‘I consequently should much prefer that the Doctor should do the reading of the little books on my behalf!’²³ It quickly became apparent that what Mr Malthus had found consisted primarily of travel diaries written by T. R. Malthus during three separate travels abroad, the earliest and longest of which documenting his journey through Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Russia in the summer of 1799. These journals thus provided remarkable new insight into the development of Malthus’s thought, especially in the crucial years between the first and the second edition of the Essay. For Patricia James, however, to whom the task of editing these diaries fell when George McCleary died in 1962, they were especially valuable for the light that they shed on the character of Malthus, a topic very close to her heart.

From the many hours spent with McCleary, James had become something of a Malthusian herself, and she wholly inherited his strong desire to rescue the real historical Malthus from the cloud of calumny and suspicion that enveloped him. In a speech she gave at Haileybury College in 1965, she explained the peculiar challenge of her task thusly:

[S]omething Freudian seems to happen to people who write about population, all mixed up with racial preferences and every kind of social and economic wishful thinking; hardly anyone bothers about the Malthusian theory, they use him as a peg on which to hang their own theories – and nobody bothers about Malthus himself. (…) The standard life of Malthus has still to be written – and that’s why when I came to write what I thought would be a simple biographical introduction to his Scandinavian journal, which I’m editing, I found that I had to start from scratch.²⁴

Starting from scratch, from 1962 to 1966 she applied her available hours to the effort of bringing the real Malthus into focus, using all the evidence she could gather, both from these new diaries as well as from other sources located in Guildford Museum in Surrey, which nobody had yet bothered to consult. She even went so far as to engage Dr Manfred Lowengrad, a specialist in graphology, who then gave his expert opinion about the character of Malthus from his handwriting, knowing only that it was written by an eighteenth-century English country parson. The notes that survive from this session, however, suggest that James was less than impressed with this method; the words she jotted down were all platitudes such as ‘hard worker’, ‘quite artistic’, ‘certainly no fool’, ‘very honest’, ‘independent in his views’, ‘soft spot for the opposite sex’, etc.²⁵

When The Travel Diaries of Thomas Robert Malthus was published in 1966, just in time for the bicentennial of Malthus’s birth, James emphasised how it revealed his ‘interest in the care of children, and his knowledge of the condition of the cottagers of his own country’.²⁶ Having also discovered that Malthus, as a young man in the 1790s, had been curate of the chapel at Okewood (and not at Albany, such as the Dictionary of National Biography claimed), she speculated that it was this experience, at this remote woodland church, that had given him his rare, realistic perspective on the poor and their children, especially given the sheer number of baptisms that she could tell had been performed there. Malthus was, in other words, speaking from personal experience and compassion when he commented in the Essay that the children of the peasants ‘will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life, as they are described in romances’.²⁷ And this same experience, James argued, was what made him interested in carefully comparing the conditions of children in Scandinavia and Russia.

The reviews that the Travel Diaries received in 1966 tended to agree on the significance of the discovery. The Cambridge historian Peter Laslett, who had recently abandoned political history in favour of demographic history, was particularly thrilled to be able to read Malthus’s notes on Norway, which were of special importance. ‘It is with great expectation that we pick up this record of what he actually saw, heard, and read in that sparsely populated country’, he wrote, explaining that it was the.

observations he made in Norway [that] particularly persuaded him that his original formulation had been incomplete. To the checks of misery and vice … had now to be added the prudential check, the exercise of restraint, the postponement of marriage, the choice of celibacy.²⁸

Indeed, Norway played a key part in the enlarged Essay of 1803, providing an example of how population was kept in check in modern Europe by preventive rather than positive checks. As Malthus explained, Norway had for a long time been spared the scourges of war and epidemics, yet despite its low mortality rate it had not experienced any rapid growth in population for over a century. Notwithstanding its poor soil and challenging climate, the lower classes appeared to be in a good condition (much better than in Sweden), a fact which Malthus attributed to the absence of large towns and unwholesome manufactures as well as to the ‘very strong obstacles’ thrown ‘in the way of early marriages’.²⁹ In Norway, although there were some troubling signs on the horizon, the operation of preventive checks and the exercise of prudential restraint had for a long time banished the positive checks of famine and disease. Norway thus came to occupy a special place within Malthus’s thinking, and for this reason it has been a central focus for intellectual historians interested in understanding his ideas and intentions. As Niall O’Flaherty has observed, it was the contrast between Norway and Sweden that led Malthus to the profound discovery that the ‘order of mortality’ was highly variable, and that it depended on circumstances that are, to some degree, amenable to human control.³⁰ Similarly, Robert Mayhew has found in Malthus’s notes from Norway the indication of a ‘Trondheim moment’, which helps to explain the significant methodological change between the simplistic generalisations of the first Essay and the complex web of causality presented in 1803. ‘The entries Malthus made in his diary in Trondheim in the middle of July 1799’, Mayhew argues,

pioneered a more complex, multifaceted approach to the interrelation of economy and environment than that which had made Malthus’s name thirteen months earlier. … [T]he rest of Malthus’s career was to be spent working out the intimations of an environmentally astute, physically grounded form of economic and social analysis that is presaged in Trondheim more than in Okewood.³¹

After the publication of the Travel Diaries, Patricia James continued her research into Malthus’s character, and after another fifteen years of plodding through archives, she published Population Malthus: His Life and Times (1979), which immediately became – and has remained ever since – that ‘standard life of Malthus’ she found wanting in 1965. Within the pages of that biography she also wondered aloud why nobody had ever ‘produced an annotated edition of the second version of the Essay simply as an excuse for the pleasure of thoroughly studying the sources’.³² Having already traced many of these sources, this then became her main preoccupation for the rest of her life, and before she died in 1987, she handed in the manuscript of a two-volume, fully annotated edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population. The source-text for this scholarly edition was the second edition from 1803, yet it incorporated the variora and appendices of all the subsequent editions, effectively producing a new ‘patchwork’ edition that had never existed before. For one thing, this meant that it included certain passages that Malthus had removed, most famously the controversial paragraph about nature’s mighty feast being a closed affair, which only appeared in the 1803 edition. James defended this decision on the basis that everything Malthus had written, including his deleted passages, was of ‘permanent significance’. For the same reason, she was pleased to be able to replace the Everyman Edition from 1914, which by excluding the appendices was responsible for the fact that ‘about 22.000 words of Malthus’s views on population have been virtually supressed, at least as far as most twentieth century readers are concerned’.³³

With these three scholarly contributions – the diaries, the biography, and the variorum edition – Patricia James left a remarkable legacy for future historians. Although she was an amateur historian, she singlehandedly prepared much of the groundwork for the academic revisionism that began to gain momentum in the 1980s.³⁴ The intellectual historian Donald Winch in particular had a profound appreciation for the work of Patricia James and came to see the controversy surrounding Malthus as the origin of a much larger schism about the status of political economy or ‘economics’ within modern society.³⁵ Borrowing a phrase from Arnold Toynbee, Winch described this as the ‘bitter argument between economists and human beings’, an argument that had begun in the early nineteenth century and continued well into his own time through the works of R. H. Tawney, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson.³⁶ Political economy, Winch argued, had generally not been given a fair hearing by the self-proclaimed defenders of humanity, yet this was in part the result of the insular way that economists had written and understood the history of their own discipline, all too often exhibiting a flagrant disregard for the wider intellectual and cultural context of economic ideas. His own distinct mode of historiography, developed in close conversation with Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School, was an earnest attempt to make the debate less bitter and, as a result, much less prone to perpetuate misrepresentations.³⁷ For this to succeed, however, historians had to anchor their interpretations in authorial intention and combine two seemingly opposite virtues: distance and sympathy.³⁸ Without some degree of both, the result would be an unhappy choice between hagiography and hatchet job.

II.

Deborah Valenze’s new book The Invention of Scarcity – Malthus and the Margins of History (2023) undoubtedly fits into the latter category, and as such it perfectly demonstrates the dangers of a lack of sympathy in the historian. By painting a portrait of Malthus that can best be described as an ‘Inverse Linnell’, with an unusually close focus on his harelip and cleft palate, Valenze manages to reproduce many – if not all – of the misrepresentations identified by McCleary and, indeed, adds a few of her own as well. But aside from a lack of sympathy, it should be noted straightaway that the book is to some degree a casualty of its choice of text, a decision based on the highly contestable notion that the 1803 edition is, as Valenze writes, ‘now considered the standard text of the Essay’.³⁹ Unfortunately, Valenze is not referring to the variorum edition produced by Patricia James, but to the 1803 edition pure and simple, such as this was republished by Yale University Press in 2018 in a student-friendly version, to which Valenze contributed an essay.⁴⁰ As a consequence of this choice of text, Valenze is deprived of Malthus’s own answers to many of the questions and criticisms that she poses, answers which could have improved her analysis significantly, regardless of how much she would have ultimately chosen to take Malthus at his word. To give just one example, Valenze speculates that Malthus perhaps partook in a peculiarly British understanding of the divine command to multiply and replenish the earth (Genesis 1:23), one that substituted agricultural cultivation for human reproduction.⁴¹ Valenze seems unaware of the fact that Malthus was heavily criticised for contradicting precisely this command, which evidently troubled him so much that it was the first point of criticism that he addressed in the appendix of 1806. ‘I believe that it is the intention of the Creator that the earth should be replenished’, Malthus insisted, ‘but certainly with a healthy, virtuous, and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious, and miserable one’.⁴²

What is worse, however, is that Valenze not only ignores everything added to the Essay after 1803; she actively disregards everything that Malthus wrote after that year. The Principles of Political Economy (1820) is dismissed (pace Keynes) as an insignificant and inaccessible response to David Ricardo, with Valenze informing the reader that ‘he never actually published another definitive treatise [in political economy] in the following thirty years’.⁴³ And despite ascribing the chief source of the Irish famine to ‘Malthusian thinking’, Valenze affords no space to Malthus’s own thinking about Ireland, such as this appeared in the Edinburgh Review of 1808–9 and later in the Principles.⁴⁴ And although the book has a few allusions to the law of diminishing returns, Malthus’s famous 1815 essay on the ‘nature and progress of rent’ goes entirely unexamined – a surprising omission in a book about civilisational margins and the ‘invention’ of scarcity. Seemingly, this lack of interest is justified by the idea that Malthus’s theory of rent was disproved pre-emptively by the Scottish agriculturalist James Anderson (and subsequently by Marx), a view that Valenze finds (rather than argues) in the work of the sociologist John Bellamy Foster.⁴⁵

Needless to say, these many oversights detract significantly from the persuasiveness of the book, which would have been much better if Malthus’s own words and intentions had been properly attended to, something which could also have enabled more complex historical ironies to unfold. There are a few intimations of such unexplored ironies, such as when Valenze describes the growing support for the abolition of the Old Poor Law as being ‘not precisely along the lines of Malthus’s vision of a favored rural sector’.⁴⁶ Another example occurs when Valenze correctly notes that Malthus was opposed to converting more arable land into pastures, but then fails to notice how this sets Malthus somewhat apart from the contemporary enclosure movement, to which he is instead said to have provided ‘closure’.⁴⁷ In general, the book tends to avoid such complexities and reads instead as an attempt to re-litigate the moral case against Malthus in the court of the twenty-first century – with the defendant being called to the stand only when he can be guaranteed to say something that sounds reprehensible.

Evidently, Valenze has not written this book as a contribution to the history of political economy. As she herself predicts, historians of political economy ‘may object to the dark version of Malthusian thinking’.⁴⁸ Yet if they do object, they will only be responding in kind, because although Valenze is aware that Malthus is still widely misunderstood, she considers the attempt to correct these misunderstandings as an effort that ‘only deflects attention away from more important prior questions about who governs available resources, their use, and their distribution’.⁴⁹ There is a distinct echo of E. P. Thompson here; perhaps a softer version of his criticism of the Cambridge School contextualists and their failure to condemn the enemies of the moral economy, the political economists.⁵⁰ Unlike Thomson, however, Valenze reserves her condemnation for Malthus and spares Adam Smith, whom she instead portrays as a benign predecessor in political economy, more nuanced than Malthus in his description of human difference, and someone who imagined a ‘coherent moral polity constituted by an alliance of social ranks’.⁵¹ In this regard, there is a significant overlap with Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose The Idea of Poverty (1984) opened up a vast chasm between Malthus and Smith, a chasm that many historians have since sought to narrow and bridge.⁵² But whereas Himmelfarb sought to expunge Malthus from a tradition of compassionate conservatism, the overarching purpose of The Invention of Scarcity seems to be to disassociate modern environmentalism from its historical connection with Malthus, replacing him with a motley crew of more palatable figures such as Joan Thirsk, Ester Boserup and, secondarily, J. S. Mill and Karl Marx. Malthusian ideas, we are told, are at the root of many of our social and environmental problems and act as a constraint on our political imagination. In short, Malthus is held responsible for imposing on the world a set of rigid assumptions about food production and consumption, assumptions which include a strong preference for intensive farming, especially of wheat, and which express a disrespect for non-British modes of procuring food as well as Indigenous forms of knowledge. On top of this, Malthus is castigated as one of the ‘founding theorists of neoliberal economics’ because he made scarcity of food appear as a natural phenomenon rather than as a product of certain social and political arrangements.⁵³ ‘The ideas of Malthus’, Valenze succinctly states, ‘have left us less able to deal with food insecurity and precarity in our own times, so we must forge new ways of thinking about land use and resources’.⁵⁴ Borrowing a term from Alex de Waal, Valenze describes this as a ‘Malthus Zombie’, which she claims hampers our ability to think about food and justice in an era of climate change.⁵⁵

Valenze’s starting point is an episode from the Travel Diaries in which Malthus described an encounter with a group of Sámi reindeer herders in Lapland in northern Norway.⁵⁶ ‘With characteristic precision’, Valenze writes, ‘he inadvertently generated one of the most detailed historical accounts of reindeer management extant’.⁵⁷ However, no trace of this episode found its way into the revised Essay of 1803, and Valenze finds this omission revealing of certain preconceived notions in Malthus, notions that limited his ability to observe and understand alternative forms of human existence at the margin of civilisation.

While a detailed analysis of this encounter is reserved for the book’s penultimate chapter, the first four chapters seek to familiarise the reader with certain aspects of Malthus’s biography and central components of his ‘narrow-minded’ philosophy. We learn that the Essay of 1798 was less the result of an argument he had had with his father, such as Malthus would have us believe, but arose as an attack on the optimism of the Enlightenment, fuelled by the sexual frustration of a physically disfigured and verbally challenged young man in search of a higher position in life. William Godwin was merely a ‘perfect strawman’ for Malthus’s resentful ambition, being a prominent radical without university credentials who was also enmeshed in a scandal about his and Mary Wollstonecraft’s sexual freedom. And while Godwin is said to have pursued a ‘productive dialogue’ with the author of the Essay, Malthus is seen as opportunistic and disingenuous in his subsequent dealings with him.⁵⁸ ‘He dismissed Godwin’s reply to the first Essay as a misguided response to his own argumentation’, Valenze writes disapprovingly, without stopping to consider whether this dismissiveness perhaps had something to do with the fact that Godwin had accepted Malthus’s argument to such a degree that he was willing to consider infanticide a remedy to the problem of scarcity.⁵⁹ In contrast, Malthus dismissed infanticide as an abhorrent solution.⁶⁰ Some acknowledgment of these nuances would have been appropriate, but it would of course have undermined the image of Malthus as the villain – a villain whose first Essay is said to be full of ‘viciousness’ and to display a ‘deliberate punitive attitude towards the poor’.⁶¹ In sharp contrast to Patricia James, Valenze finds neither compassion nor personal experience in Malthus’s comments about the unhealthy, stunted children of the poor. Instead, like Marx before her, she sees only malice mixed with the ‘bad-mannered prejudices of the propertied classes’.⁶²

Unsurprisingly, the coup de grâce of Valenze’s case against Malthus is the infamous passage in which he deployed the image of ‘nature’s mighty feast’ in order to deny that the poor had a ‘claim of right to the smallest portion of food’.⁶³ This passage, with its invocation of nature as a cruel and exclusive host, is quoted twice (p. 51 & 73) and presented as Malthus’s recommendation for how society should be reordered according to the ‘laws of nature’.⁶⁴ Again, it would have been good if Valenze had merely glanced at what Malthus wrote in 1806, where he clarified what he had meant. He was not opposed to any ‘voluntary or temporary assistance’, nor was he denying that children had a legal right to support from their parents, but the idea that everyone had a natural right to food was an impossibility if one accepted the premise of the different ratios. ‘[I]f the claim were allowed’, Malthus argued, ‘it would soon increase beyond the possibility of satisfying it’.⁶⁵ But Valenze is less interested in the premises of Malthus’s argument than in the prejudices it reveals, so it is to these that we must turn.

Among these prejudices – or tacit assumptions – she finds the Aristotelian notion of human mastery over nature, a problematic inheritance from Antiquity that was fused into the stadial theory of history formulated by the Enlightenment and applied by historians such as William Robertson and Edward Gibbon. Within this theory of history, she finds a stark dichotomy between civilisation and ‘otherness’, the former being identified with sedentary grain cultivation and the latter with more nomadic or ‘barbarian’ modes of existence such as dairying, fishing and trapping. Although Malthus was not alone in championing English-style high agriculture, he may have been, Valenze argues, ‘unique in effectively erasing all its competitors’.⁶⁶ And although Malthus was not the first to employ a stadial theory, he specifically repurposed it ‘as a warning of the peril associated with primitive existence’.⁶⁷

At the core of these assumptions there is a particular view of nature, one that sees it as threatening and scarce, with mankind standing somehow apart from it, or at least progressively transcending it as society moves through the stages of development. In what is perhaps the best and most wide-ranging part of the book (interlude + chapter 5), Valenze explores Malthus’s understanding of scarcity and hunger as the driving forces of a process of civilisation, where hunger acts as the spur to ingenuity, culminating in the kind of agriculture and diet that he saw around him every day at home. For Malthus, the ultimate symbol of civilisation thus became the fine wheaten bread, as enjoyed by the (domesticated) agricultural labourers in South England, while the agricultural practices of non-English peoples were relegated to the lower stages of civilisation.⁶⁸ For Valenze, this hierarchy of food and its procurement seems arbitrary and excluding, obscuring the true story of human interaction with the natural environment, which neither had to be nor was everywhere a matter of human mastery over nature – as Valenze finds substantiated by modern archaeology, anthropology and agrarian history. ‘Humans in several different settings’, she writes, ‘were taking their cue from nature, adapting in ways that enabled them to respond to ecological conditions, seasonal fluctuations, and native populations of plants and animals’.⁶⁹ More than anything, it is this legacy of Malthus that Valenze wishes to counteract, the legacy of dismissing all modes of procuring food that aren’t based on human dominance; that aren’t based on the idea of nature as a cruel and measly host. In this regard, there is perhaps another parallel with E. P. Thompson. Just as Thompson defended the ‘moral economy’ and sought to rescue the Luddite cropper and the hand-loom weaver from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, Valenze defends a lost ‘moral ecology’ and seeks to rescue the dairying herder and the trapping hunter from the enormous condescension of Malthus – for the benefit of a more variegated and sustainable human relationship with nature in the present.⁷⁰ But Valenze takes the argument too far when she claims that Malthus imposed a limited diet on his contemporaries, let alone on humanity, and she completely neglects the reasons why Malthus was so averse to the potato as a staple food. At no point, in fact, does Valenze consider the explicit reasons Malthus gave for the superiority of wheat as a staple food, stating only that they are ‘mostly implicit throughout the Essay’, nor does she appreciate the importance that Malthus attributed to habits of consumption in reducing poverty.⁷¹ By preferring the fine wheaten loaf to the potato, even to the point of half-starvation, the labourers of South England were not acting in a ‘self-defeating’ way, such as Valenze suggests, but exhibited a behaviour that was no less adaptive than the indigenous herders, ensuring a higher general level of subsistence and reducing the likelihood of famine. In contrast, the problem with the potato crop, although it was cheaper and could feed more people, was precisely that it led to an extremely limited diet, one that was precarious because it (quite literally) crowded out all alternatives.

When the common people of a country live principally upon the dearest grain, as they do in England, they have great resources in a scarcity; and barley, oats, rice, cheap soups, and potatoes, all present themselves as less expensive yet at the same time wholesome means of nourishment; but when their habitual food is the lowest in this scale, they appear to be absolutely without resource, except in the bark of trees, like the poor Swedes; and a great portion of them must necessarily be starved. (…) a large population, which had been habitually supported by milk and potatoes, would find it difficult to obtain these substitutes in sufficient quantities, even if the whole benevolence of the kingdom were called into action for the purpose.⁷²

Having a staple food that was relatively luxurious was thus a means to ensure a spectrum of dietary alternatives for a population that was also to some degree checked by its expensive tastes. In other words, insofar as the English labourer had a cultural distaste for (Scottish) oats and (Irish) potatoes, it was a prejudice that Malthus found economic reasons to endorse, reasons that are never discussed by Valenze.

But the best litmus test of Malthus’s prejudices is of course when Malthus travels outside of England and is confronted with a contemporary example of primitive life, the Sámi people of Lapland, which were known at the time simply as Lapps. Along with his travelling companion, William Otter, Malthus purposely sought out the Lapps on his journey through Norway and they arranged to spend a day in their company, witnessing the way they milked a herd of wild reindeer and afterwards sharing a dinner with them. However, while the settled and cultivated parts of Norway provided ample evidence of prudential restraint in action, the experience of meeting the Lapps and seeing their skilful interaction with nature generated no valuable insights to be included in the second Essay. ‘[H]e looked upon the unfamiliar environment as merely barren, with nothing to teach him’, Valenze writes, explaining that Malthus’s ‘remoteness from Indigenous knowledge and local strategies of combining various forms of subsistence activities meant that he could only categorize them as desperate measures’.⁷³ Valenze provides an extended analysis of the language Malthus used in describing this experience, and she finds him wanting as an anthropologist; his English outlook remained intact from this encounter with ‘barbarism’. But one can’t help wondering if Malthus didn’t in fact learn a few things about the Sámi that might explain why he dismissed reindeer herding as a viable food source for modern Europeans. For instance, he learned that the patriarch had lost 7 out of 13 children; that he was ‘rather infirm’ and looked older than he was. The matriarch too looked ‘much older’ than she was, with a face that revealed a life of hardship.⁷⁴ Valenze mentions these facts but oddly attaches no significance to them, as if it had no relevance to Malthus’s thinking – as if these observations would not have confirmed Malthus in his view of nature as scarce and unforgiving. Perhaps the explanation is that acknowledging this high mortality rate (and birth rate) somewhat answers the question of why the Sámi day trip was ‘omitted’ from the chapter on Norway, which after all was about the operation of preventive checks in modern Europe. By focussing on all the things that Malthus should have seen, Valenze seems to dismiss what he in fact saw. In general, Valenze’s interpretation of these ten pages in Malthus’s diary seems somewhat uncharitable and anachronistic in its expectations, at times verging on the absurd, such as when Malthus is faulted for not recording a Norwegian patronym properly or for being quietly concerned about the food hygiene of his nomadic hosts.⁷⁵

Valenze insists that she is not making a ‘sentimental case’ for a world that has been lost, yet it is hard to understand her book as anything other than a defence of various nomadic food practices that have historically lost out to large-scale grain cultivation and intensive farming. In general, the book adopts a highly critical attitude towards private property in land, reminiscent of Godwin’s anarchism but perhaps more indebted to that of James C. Scott, especially the nomadic nostalgia of Against the Grain (YUP, 2017).⁷⁶ Evidently, Malthus is merely the inflated human target of a critique directed at a much larger historical development, stretching all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution and culminating, according to Valenze, in the Western mentality of ‘possessive individualism’, a term borrowed from C. B. Macpherson and unmoored from his old critique of seventeenth century political theory.⁷⁷ As an expression of the desire for mastery over nature, private property in land, at least insofar as it gives rise to this possessive mentality, is for Valenze yet another part of the bundle of bad ideas that collectively comprise the ‘Malthus Zombie’, a foe which by the end of her book has acquired world-consuming dimensions, complicit in the spread of industrial capitalism and colonialism throughout the globe.

Unfortunately, in the process of slaying this giant zombie, Valenze finds it necessary to resurrect and avail herself of another, the one that George McCleary and Patricia James struggled to drive a stake through in the twentieth century, at a time when Malthus once again became enmeshed in contemporary debate. Valenze’s book would have been much more interesting, and perhaps more effective, if it had attempted the more difficult task of slaying both.

Malthus was neither an evil genius nor a vicious enemy of the poor; his polemical intervention of 1798 was not directed against the optimism of the Enlightenment but against the utopianism of its most recent decade, which imagined a future society without private property, marriage or self-love. Against these ‘wild speculations’, he saw himself as restoring the ‘rational expectation’ that had been characteristic of the Enlightenment before the 1790s.⁷⁸ As he wrote to William Godwin in 1798:

Great improvements may take place in the state of society; but I do not see how the present form or system can be radically and essentially changed, without a danger of relapsing again into barbarism.⁷⁹

Valenze quotes this letter (from Population Malthus) as an instance of ‘pure Malthusian reason’. Yet it is a purity that she has distilled herself – by leaving out the first part.⁸⁰ Malthus, it seems, is not the only one capable of ideological omissions. In many ways, this sums up the book perfectly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 George Frederick McCleary, The Malthusian Population Theory (Faber & Faber, 1953).

2 McCleary, The Malthusian Population Theory, 95.

3 Ibid., 147.

4 Ronald Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on Malthus – Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engels Dealing with the Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus (Lawrence and Wishart, 1953), 47.

5 Meek, ‘Malthus – Yesterday and To-Day: An Introductory Essay’, in Marx and Engels on Malthus, ed. Meek, 11–50.

6 Meek, ‘Malthus – Yesterday and To-Day’, 16.

7 McCleary, The Malthusian Population Theory, 75.

8 T.R. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol 2, 108.

9 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 109.

10 McCleary, The Malthusian … , 96.

11 Ibid. Quoted from Robert E. Riegel, ed., An Introduction to Social Science, vol. 2 (1941), 642.

12 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Rinehart & Company, 1944), 125.

13 William Vogt, The Road to Survival (New York, 1948), 238.

14 For two recent instances of this, see Robert Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2014); Niall O’Flaherty, ‘Malthus and the “End of Poverty”’, in New Perspectives on Malthus, ed. Robert Mayhew (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 74–104.

15 Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 275.

16 McCleary, The Malthusian … , 99.

17 Ibid., 97. In 1806, Malthus published a separate version of the appendix so that it could be bound in with the second edition. This version was entitled Reply to the Chief Objections which have been urged against the Essay on the Principle of Population, published in an Appendix to the Third Edition.

18 A.M.C. Waterman, ‘Reappraisal of “Malthus the Economist”’, History of Political Economy 30, no. 2 (1998): 299.

19 J.M. Keynes, Essays in Biography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 100–1.

20 Piero Sraffa, ed., The Collected Works of David Ricardo, vol. 6 (Cambridge University Press, 1952), xi.

21 Patricia James, Population Malthus – His Life and Times (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 4; Some years later, Patricia James facilitated the restoration of these paintings and ensured their move to the National Portrait Gallery.

22 Robert Malthus to G.F. McCleary, 19 June 1961. ‘Correspondence, 1960–1964’, Intellectual History Archive, University of St Andrews. IHA/James/3, https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/.

23 Robert Malthus to Patricia James, 24 June 1961, ‘Correspondence, 1960–1964’, Intellectual History Archive, IHA/James/3.

24 Patricia James, ‘Speech on Malthus at Haileybury, 1965’, Intellectual History Archive, IHA/James/21.

25 ‘Correspondence, 1965–1970’, Intellectual History Archive, IHA/James/4, 74–91.

26 Patricia James, The Travel Diaries of T. R. Malthus (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 8.

27 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], ed. Anthony Flew (Pelican Books, 1970), 93.

28 Peter Laslett, ‘Malthusian Motives’, The Guardian, June 17, 1966.

29 T.R. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. 1, 150.

30 Niall O’Flaherty, ‘Malthus and the “End of Poverty”’, 85.

31 Robert Mayhew, Malthus – The Life and Legacy of an Untimely Prophet, 109.

32 Patricia James, Population Malthus, 93.

33 Patricia James, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. T.R. Malthus, vol. 1, xiii.

34 For a proximate beginning, see especially A. Fauve-Chamoux, ed., Malthus – Hier et aujourd’hui (Paris, 1984).

35 Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty – An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

36 Donald Winch, ‘Mr Gradgrind and Jerusalem’, in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. J. Burrow, S. Collini and R. Whatmore (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243–66. Republished in D. Winch, Wealth and Life – Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 367–98.

37 Winch presented this ideal of intellectual history in his Carlyle Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1995. The text of these lectures has been published as Secret Concatenations: Mandeville to Malthus (Rounded Globe) and made available at https://roundedglobe.com

38 Winch, Secret Concatenations … , 206.

39 Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 50.

40 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: the 1803 Edition, ed. Shannon C. Stimson (Yale University Press, 2018).

41 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 128–9.

42 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 2, 206.

43 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 53, 207.

44 Ibid., 184.

45 Ibid., 82.

46 Ibid., 181.

47 Ibid., 123, 12.

48 Ibid., 11.

49 Ibid., x.

50 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 274–85, 350–51.

51 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 87–88.

52 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (Faber & Faber, 1984). For the attempts to narrow the gap between Smith and Malthus, see especially Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and A.M.C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy 1798–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

53 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , x, 15.

54 Ibid., xv.

55 Ibid., 6.

56 James, The Travel Diaries … , 188–96.

57 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 161.

58 Ibid., 49.

59 Ibid., 50; For Godwin’s reply to Malthus, see William Godwin, Thoughts occasioned by the perusal of Dr. Parr’s spital sermon, preached … April 15, 1800: being a reply to the attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the author of an Essay on population, and others (London, 1801).

60 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 1, 330.

61 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 38.

62 Ibid., 47, 55.

63 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 2, 127.

64 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity, 51.

65 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 2, 212–13.

66 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 66.

67 Ibid., 144.

68 Ibid., 116.

69 Ibid., 141.

70 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Pelican, 1968), 13. For the concept of ‘moral ecology’, see Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 83.

71 Ibid., 123.

72 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 2, 171–72.

73 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 145.

74 James, The Travel Diaries … , 191.

75 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 159.

76 Ibid., 18, 188.

77 Ibid., 165–71.

78 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1989), vol. 2, 202.

79 James, Populations Malthus, 68.

80 Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity … , 49.