Nature's Evil

Malthus sees the inability of Spanish America and British Ireland to cope with ‘indolence’ as a vicious circle. By the end of the nineteenth century, a similar conflict between ‘indolent smallholdings’ that survived on potatoes and grain trading enterprises arose again in eastern Prussia and western Poland. The German colonisers considered the Slav villages unproductive; disposing of state aid, the settlers exploited or ousted the Polish peasants just as the English had done to the Irish. The young sociologist Max Weber provided the scientific justification for this ‘internal colonisation’ (as this process was called by the Prussians). His early writings contained racist constructions along the lines of Slav indolence. 12

A less gifted writer than Hume or Smith, Malthus had broader historic experience. The further the reader delves into Principles of Political Economy , the more he sees Malthus’s sympathy for the ‘labouring classes’ and his distrust of the rich landowners. The wealth of a nation depends not only on the creation of capital but also on its distribution. ‘A very large proprietor, surrounded by very poor peasants, presents a distribution of property most unfavourable to effectual demand.’ 13 No matter how refined the owner of several estates, he is not going to renovate his castle every year. But if he gives out land to forty farmers, they could create demand by giving work to a great number of artisans and traders. The greatest secret of the wealth of nations stays with the ‘middle classes’; only they are capable of creating effectual demand, paying for goods and services with their own work. Thus Malthus, the prophet of crises and catastrophes, at the end of his life discovered the economic significance of the middle class.

In his appreciation of Malthus, Keynes compared him to Ricardo, whose formal laws of price formation defined the future of economics. With no hesitation, Keynes preferred the ‘vaguer intuitions of Malthus’ to Ricardo’s simplifying analytics: ‘by taking up the tale much nearer its conclusion, [Malthus] had a firmer hold on what may be expected in the real world.’ While Ricardo constrained economics ‘in an artificial groove’, wrote Keynes, Malthus had ‘disclosed a Devil’ of critical thought. Economic theories had practical consequences. ‘If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be to-day!’ 14

Jevons

Refuting Malthus’s predictions, the aggregate product of the fields, mines and colonies of the British Empire grew so rapidly that it far outstripped the population’s growth. The main source of this development was coal. When Malthus wrote his Essay , a thousand Newcomen engines were already at work in English mines and James Watt had patented his new engine. Malthus was not interested in coal and had nothing to say about steam; but, in his time, coal was about to play as significant a role in the English economy as grain.