ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Thomas Robert Malthus’s unrealized project and the related negotiations between him and the publishing houses. It explores the contact between Malthus and a publishing firm regarding the publication of a new edition of The Wealth of Nations. The chapter examines the process of negotiation between Malthus and the firm. It discusses the possibility that his edition would have had an impact on the leading economists of his time and could have contributed to the academic study of economics. In 1776, the first edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published by W. Strahan and T. Cadell. In 1805, Playfair’s three-volume edition of The Wealth of Nations duly came forth from and Byron Davies, and Malthus’s 1804 project did not advance further. It is interesting that the original publishers of the work, Cadell and Davies, approached Malthus, who had developed a criticism of Smith in his The Principle of Population, to ask him to edit it.
