Nature's Evil

Refuting these Franco-American ideas, Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the American Treasury, in 1791 sent Congress his Report on the Subject of Manufactures . He discussed in detail whether agriculture or industry was more productive and profitable. Productivity depends on the division of labour, the use of machines and efficient time management. All these aspects were more pertinent to manufacture. Agricultural labour is seasonal, while factories can work continuously. Finally, industry widens the demand for the products of agricultural labour. A country without mines and factories will become dependent on other countries which do have them. This report was the first systematic examination of natural resources in intellectual history. Hamilton discussed in detail many resources, from leather to gunpowder, from iron to paper, from hemp to silk, and from cotton to coal. Writing about the new branches of industry that needed government support, he used such expressions as ‘infant industry’ or even ‘embryonic industry’. Later, this approach inspired Friedrich List and other theoreticians of industrial policy. It was Hamilton who came up with the image of the state-as-educator or government-as-gardener, which would create the favourable conditions for the growth of immature, childlike branches of industry.

Malthus

If Adam Smith was delighted by the new era, arguing that the division of labour and free trade would change the sinful world for the better, Robert Malthus condemned it on behalf of his science. The laws of human nature cannot be changed. The first law is that man must eat. The second is that he has a passion for reproducing. Neither law was new – it was Malthus’s discovery of their incompatibility that was shocking. If there is enough food for everyone, the population will double in twenty-five years, as it did in the American colonies. For this, land must be infinitely available. When there is a limit on land, the growth of the population will always outpace the growth of the productivity of labour.

John Maynard Keynes called Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population ‘a work of youthful genius’: 6 most of this book was not about hunger but about love. God commanded Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ in order to populate the earth; for Malthus, this was also the mission of the empire which had colonised the New World. He disagreed with the philosopher William Godwin, who taught, with what was considered a sign of optimism, that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished and that this is the way for improving people and society (ironically, Godwin was the husband of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein ). Ever since original sin, wrote Malthus, ‘towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no observable progress whatever has hitherto been made.’ If it wasn’t for sexual passion and the parental cares arising from it, man would remain ‘inert, sluggish, and averse from labour’. People only till the soil when compelled by sex and concerned about the fruits of that passion. This is a general law – it ‘undoubtedly produces much partial evil, but … produces a great overbalance of good.’ 7

Malthus’s dispute with William Godwin and Adam Smith was based on their different understanding of economic value, but behind this lay a difference in the way they understood people. Smith wrote about the wealth of nations, by which he meant not peoples but states. In contrast, Malthus understood the population as a multitude – a certain number of individuals, rich or poor, carrying out trade and reproducing. In his interest in population statistics, Malthus was ahead of Smith and many nineteenth-century economists. Godwin was a Calvinist minister, Malthus an Anglican priest, and Smith a Presbyterian layman. All three critically observed the British Empire colonising overseas territories which, in some cases, left the empire. While Godwin later switched to book publishing, the other two had careers directly connected to imperial policies: Smith had a lucrative post on the Scottish Customs Committee, while Malthus became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College. Neither Smith nor Malthus visited the overseas colonies, but both men knew adjacent colonial possessions very well. For Smith this was his native Scotland, for Malthus Ireland, a subject of scholarly interest. And, for both of them, distant America was an intriguing example of the new imperial economy. Wars were fought over colonies, garrisons were quartered there, flotillas sailed for their sake. Why was all this done? What could justify the expense? From Smith to Bentham and his Manchester followers, liberalism was the critical theory of empire.