Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Malthus’s dispute with William Godwin and Adam Smith was based on their different understanding of economic value, but behind this lay a difference in the way they understood people. Smith wrote about the wealth of nations, by which he meant not peoples but states. In contrast, Malthus understood the population as a multitude – a certain number of individuals, rich or poor, carrying out trade and reproducing. In his interest in population statistics, Malthus was ahead of Smith and many nineteenth-century economists. Godwin was a Calvinist minister, Malthus an Anglican priest, and Smith a Presbyterian layman. All three critically observed the British Empire colonising overseas territories which, in some cases, left the empire. While Godwin later switched to book publishing, the other two had careers directly connected to imperial policies: Smith had a lucrative post on the Scottish Customs Committee, while Malthus became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College. Neither Smith nor Malthus visited the overseas colonies, but both men knew adjacent colonial possessions very well. For Smith this was his native Scotland, for Malthus Ireland, a subject of scholarly interest. And, for both of them, distant America was an intriguing example of the new imperial economy. Wars were fought over colonies, garrisons were quartered there, flotillas sailed for their sake. Why was all this done? What could justify the expense? From Smith to Bentham and his Manchester followers, liberalism was the critical theory of empire.

News from America was the main source for Malthus’s Essay . He referred to Franklin, the Abbé Raynal, Captain Cook, Humboldt and other explorers and migrants. Most of these travel accounts were remarkable for their belief in progress, censure of slavery, distrust of the Spanish, and admiration for the American colonies. Malthus wrote that the American rate of growth could never be transferred to the British Isles, even in one’s wildest dreams. A proponent of food security, as we would call it now, he calculated that imported grain, brought from America, Russia and the Baltic lands, fed about 2 million Britons, more than 20 per cent of the population. Malthus applauded when in 1813 Parliament passed the first tranche of the Corn Laws, limiting the import of grain. Corn prices soared and grain production increased. Nobody has expressed resource panic better than Malthus. He was terrified by the prospect of a grain deficit just when the British economy was becoming less and less dependent on its grain. Always concerned about grain, Malthus failed to take account of the large supplies of other commodities that Great Britain received from her colonies in the Atlantic. The main imported resource, sugar, guaranteed the British a great quantity of cheap calories. But sugar is not mentioned in the Essay , nor does Malthus mention the slave plantations in the British Atlantic.

However, his connection to the tropical world of slavery and sugar was very strong. His paternal grandfather, Sydenham Malthus, was a director of the South Sea Company; appointed in 1741, well after the notorious bubble, he could have been a treasure house of colourful memories, though he died before Robert was born. But, during Robert’s lifetime, the Malthus family still owned a large plantation in Jamaica. Robert willingly kept in touch with his relatives, the owners of hundreds of slaves, and he inherited wealth derived from the plantation. 8 Jane Austen, who was also dependent on the slave trade of the West Indies, often – and sometimes critically – mentioned news from the sugar plantations in her novels. 9 It is difficult to find such a theme in Malthus.