ABSTRACT
Not far from Gatwick airport, down a country lane in the British county of Surrey, the ancient Okewood Church nestles in a shady grove of oak, beech and hazel trees. Its main claim to fame is that the Reverend Robert Thomas Malthus served there as curate, his first church job, in the late eighteenth century. Most of Malthus’s parishioners were poor and illiterate labourers, living in cramped thatched huts and surviving on a diet of bread and little
else. Their children suffered from stunted growth. Yet despite these miserable conditions, Malthus gleaned from studying church records that the number of baptisms was much greater than the number of burials – in other words births outnumbered deaths. This disparity evidently sparked his concern about the evils of population growth, ultimately leading him to formulate his famous principle of population.1
