ABSTRACT
Some see the beginnings with early “Political Arithmetics” in England, with men like John Graunt (1620-1674), William Petty (1623-1687), and Edmund Halley (1656-1742). Still, Malthus was the first to make a coherent theoretical system out of it. The argument of the younger Malthus, that the poor were the cause of their own poverty because they produced more children than they could properly feed, created a storm of criticism. Bodin’s contemporary, Giovanni Botero (1540-1617), was much more ambivalent about the growth of population. Still somewhat ambivalent, but already more outspoken concerning the possible negative consequences of population growth, was a younger, English contemporary of Bodin and Botero, Richard Hakluyt. In particular, it is unlikely that “Political Arithmetics” alone would in the end have also developed this second— and today so necessary—branch of demography. But it was John Derham, a contemporary of Edmund Halley, who made some kind of a science of theology-based demography.
