ABSTRACT
When Malthus first published his celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the stated object of the work was ‘to investigate the causes that have hitherto impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness and to examine the probability of the total or partial removal of these causes in future’. 1 When he found that it was ‘much beyond the power of an individual to enumerate all the causes’, Malthus restricted his work to the one which he considered to be the principal and most important—’the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it’. At about the same time that these words were originally written, at the end of the eighteenth century, the population of England numbered close to 10 million, of Europe 192 million, and of the world close to 919 million people. A century later, by the end of the nineteenth century, the population of England had increased to about 30, of Europe to 423, and of the world to perhaps 1,608 million people; while the share of Europeans had risen from 21·2 to 26·9 per cent, and the share of North Americans from 0·7 to over 5 per cent of world population. With this, living standards and food consumption had also risen almost everywhere during the century and most of all in Europe, North America and Oceania. How did this come about? Firstly, it was due to the occupation of hitherto thinly populated or unpopulated land in America, Africa and Oceania; and, secondly, to the great rise in the productivity of land and labour. The first solution to the Malthusian problem was closely connected with the progress made in the development of means of transport and communication, with migration, with the spreading of international trade and, later, in the sphere of politics, with colonialism. The second solution was connected with the progress in botany and chemistry and with the wider use of mechanical equipment in agriculture. The former increased the area of cultivation; the latter raised its productivity per acre and per man-hour employed on it. 2 Both these processes of widening and ‘deepening’ the area of production were closely related to, and conditioned by, the immense socio-economic or cultural structural changes which accompanied them, and in the course of which the more or less predominant subsistence farming civilisations in Europe and of European origin were transformed into highly industrialised economies.
