Modern commentators upon Robert Malthus have frequently argued that he was a more effective interpreter of the relationship between population and resources for the period before his famous Essay was published in 1798 than for the decades that followed. The Industrial Revolution and the possibility that it gave for sustained economic and demographic growth has been viewed as the catalyst facilitating that transition. Robert Mayhew, a historical geographer with interests in the history of thought, is fully aware of this orthodoxy surrounding the interpretation of Malthus; however, he is well disposed toward his subject, both as a person and as a thinker, and he aims in this book to emphasize the enduring impact and relevance of Malthus's key propositions. In so doing, he has written an engaging book devoid of jargon but at the same time especially thorough in its coverage of a large body of scholarship. The book, as its subtitle suggests, is concerned with tackling the “legacies” constituting a long and resilient debate to which the Essay has given rise.
The book begins with an account of Malthus's early career, set within the outpourings of such contemporaries as Richard Price, Edmund Burke, the Marquis de Condorcet, and William Godwin, who were likewise much influenced (whether alarmed or encouraged) by happenings in revolutionary France. Mayhew proceeds to engage with an impressive range of nineteenth-century writings in political economy, situating Malthus within a sequence of debates about recurring cycles of population growth and decline as well as arguments concerning the distribution of wealth and power, many of which advocated various policy interventions. We encounter early hostile critics such as William Cobbett and Charles Dickens; economic thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, William Jevons, and Alfred Marshall; socialists and utopians; early evolutionary thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; degenerationists and eugenicists such as Francis Galton, Corrado Gini, and Enid Charles; as well as (ultimately) John Maynard Keynes, who wrote about Malthus's seminal thinking regarding the character of effective demand in the interwar years of the twentieth century. Comprehensive and accessible though these treatments are in chapters 3–7, they add little that is fundamentally novel to what has already been said by others on these matters. What does come through loud and clear in all of those chapters is the manner in which Malthus has provided a set of arguments that have been mobilized by a surprising number of social and intellectual viewpoints, many of which are sensational or threatening and in some cases so doom-laden as to be viewed as apocalyptic through their appeal to the “principle of population.”
Of particular value are discussions in chapters 8 and 9 in which Mayhew addresses the concerns of commentators, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, who were confronting world population increases of an unparalleled pace after World War II. He reviews the emerging ideas of “limits to growth” associated with writers such as Ehrlich as well as the resulting forceful rebuttals from economists such as Ester Boserup and Julian Simon. Subsequently, we are brought fully up to date with very recent discussions invoking Malthus, particularly the threat of new variants of the “positive check” via reflections on climatic warming and global security issues by such authors as Jack Goldstone and Thomas Homer-Dixon as well as the potentially destabilizing influence of a two-speed demographic world creating migration flows from the bulging youthful but poorer countries to richer economies with their top-heavy age structures.
While historians will be especially interested in the historical depth the later sections of this book give to many of the most pressing contemporary planetary concerns, they may desire more thinking about the historical context—whether it is used to praise the durability of some of Malthus's ideas or indeed to ponder those issues in which his claims may be less acceptable. For instance, the constraints imposed by the organic economy that Malthus and other classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed as taken for granted and their collective obliviousness to the contemporary changes that were occurring as a result of the exploitation of locked-up energy resources (not least among them the expansion of landed resources available for food production and increased agrarian yields from the fertilizers that would be manufactured from coal and oil) are noted largely through references to the seminal work of E. A. Wrigley on these issues. A more focused discussion of these issues within the context of contemporary environmental economic theorizing would have made the common denominator that Malthusian thinking is thought to offer to this matter an intellectually more satisfactory contribution from a book with a focus upon legacy. Likewise the Anglo-centric contextualization of Malthusian thinking dominant in the book and the use made of an historical demographic test bed within western Europe, particularly the focus on moral restraint exercised through marriage age and incidence as the key manifestation of the “preventive check”: these strategies ignore the variety of adaptive mechanisms found in other areas of the globe through which population growth could be constrained. These lacunae exist in Mayhew's approach notwithstanding the remarkable extent to which, as he notes, Malthus in his admirably level-headed empirical emphasis undertook pioneering comparative analysis, in the second and later editions of his Essay.
Readers engaging with the book from an Anglo-American vantage point will probably find the message that emanates appealing and reassuring. It is less clear that a similar reaction will be found among those living in rapidly growing economies such as new members of the finite resource-devouring club in Asia or those from stagnating, predominantly agrarian economies with still youthful populations in sub-Saharan Africa.
