Nature's Evil

News from America was the main source for Malthus’s Essay . He referred to Franklin, the Abbé Raynal, Captain Cook, Humboldt and other explorers and migrants. Most of these travel accounts were remarkable for their belief in progress, censure of slavery, distrust of the Spanish, and admiration for the American colonies. Malthus wrote that the American rate of growth could never be transferred to the British Isles, even in one’s wildest dreams. A proponent of food security, as we would call it now, he calculated that imported grain, brought from America, Russia and the Baltic lands, fed about 2 million Britons, more than 20 per cent of the population. Malthus applauded when in 1813 Parliament passed the first tranche of the Corn Laws, limiting the import of grain. Corn prices soared and grain production increased. Nobody has expressed resource panic better than Malthus. He was terrified by the prospect of a grain deficit just when the British economy was becoming less and less dependent on its grain. Always concerned about grain, Malthus failed to take account of the large supplies of other commodities that Great Britain received from her colonies in the Atlantic. The main imported resource, sugar, guaranteed the British a great quantity of cheap calories. But sugar is not mentioned in the Essay , nor does Malthus mention the slave plantations in the British Atlantic.

However, his connection to the tropical world of slavery and sugar was very strong. His paternal grandfather, Sydenham Malthus, was a director of the South Sea Company; appointed in 1741, well after the notorious bubble, he could have been a treasure house of colourful memories, though he died before Robert was born. But, during Robert’s lifetime, the Malthus family still owned a large plantation in Jamaica. Robert willingly kept in touch with his relatives, the owners of hundreds of slaves, and he inherited wealth derived from the plantation. 8 Jane Austen, who was also dependent on the slave trade of the West Indies, often – and sometimes critically – mentioned news from the sugar plantations in her novels. 9 It is difficult to find such a theme in Malthus.

Malthus’s Essay made him famous; but he continued to teach and write for several decades afterwards, setting out his conclusions in a later book, Principles of Political Economy (1820). Here he was able to build on the works of his friend David Ricardo and the concept of rent. For Malthus, rent represented the most valuable characteristic of land – its ability to feed more people than worked on it. Ricardo’s ‘classical theory’ purged economics of anthropology and demography; Malthus recombined them, as John Maynard Keynes did again a hundred years later. One of the key problems discussed in Political Economy was ‘indolence’. Malthus drew a sad parallel between Mexico and Ireland: where foodstuffs were easily available, ‘indolence and slackness’ flourished. Like Mexican maize, the Irish potato was more productive than cereal crops. As a result, Ireland could support ‘a much greater population than it [could] employ’. For Malthus, this discrepancy is the route to idleness. The flow of capital will hardly remedy the situation; the main problem, he says, lies not in external capital but in internal demand. ‘The tastes and habits … are extremely slow in changing.’ Until they change, the import of capital for the building of factories and similar projects is doomed to failure. 10

The natural resources of Ireland are greater than those of England, wrote Malthus, and with the necessary development Ireland could be ‘beyond comparison richer than England’. This economic growth required ‘such a change in the tastes and habits of the lower classes … as would give [them] a greater will and power to purchase domestic manufactures and foreign commodities.’ 11 A comparative analysis of New Spain and British Ireland leads to a final conclusion: the poverty of fertile countries, writes Malthus, is connected to the lack of culture and civilisation. Only a ‘change in the tastes and habits of the lower classes’ could create an effective demand for manufactured goods. Thus the Enlightenment finally formulated its economic role as the formation of habits and the education of tastes. Consumption follows culture, trade follows consumption, production follows trade. In contrast, a surplus of capital – the import of silver – inhibits growth. Malthus pre-empts the conclusions to which economists would come 150 years later. If the supply of capital (for example, as a result of the export of guano or oil) exceeds internal demand, it is destructive to the country. Out of all the conditions for development, ‘effectual demand’ plays the leading role, and this demand depends on the cultural inclinations of the lower classes. Keynes singled out this idea as the most important of Malthus’s contributions.