Thomas Malthus and the Making of the Modern World
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THOMAS MALTHUS AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD Alan Macfarlane 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 References, Conventions and Measures 3 Preface 4 The Encounter with Malthus 5 Thomas Malthus and his Theory 12 Part 1: Malthus (1963-1978) Population Crisis: Anthropology’s Failure 15 Resources and Population 23 Modes of Reproduction 40 Part 2: Malthus and Marriage (1979-1990) Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus 44 The Importance of Malthusian Marriage 57 The Malthusian Marriage System and its Origins 68 The Malthusian Marriage System in Perspective 76 Part 3: Malthus and Death (1993-2007) The Malthusian Trap 95 Design and Chance 107 Epilogue: Malthus today 124 Bibliography 131 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My work on Malthus over the years has been inspired by many friends and teachers. It is impossible to name them all, but I would like to pay especial tribute to Jack Goody, John Hajnal, Keith Hopkins, Peter Laslett, Chris Langford, Roger Schofield Richard Smith and Tony Wrigley, who have all helped in numerous ways. Other acknowledgements are made in the footnotes. Gabriel Andrade helpfully commented on several of the chapters. As always, my greatest debts are to Gerry Martin, with whom I often discussed the Malthusian Trap, and to Sarah Harrison who has always encouraged my interest in population and witnessed its effects with me in the Himalayas. REFERENCES, CONVENTIONS AND MEASURES Spelling has not been modernized. American spelling (e.g. labor for labour) has usually been changed to the English variant. Italics in quotations are in the original, unless otherwise indicated. Variant spellings in quotations have not been corrected. Round brackets in quotations are those of the original author; my interpolations are in square brackets. The footnote references give an abbreviated title and page number. The usual form is author, short title, volume number if there is one (in upper case Roman numerals), page number(s). The full title of the work referred to is given in the bibliography at the end of the book, where there is also a list of common abbreviations used in the footnotes. Where several quotations within a single paragraph are taken from the same author, the references are given after the last of the quotations. Each page reference is given, even if it is a repeated page number. Measures A number of the quotations refer to English systems of measurement, some of which are now no longer in use. Value: four farthings to a penny, twelve pennies (d) to a shilling (s), twenty shillings to a pound (£). One pound in the seventeenth century was worth about 40 times its present value (in 1997). Weight: sixteen ounces to a pound, fourteen pounds to a stone, eight stone to hundred-weight (cwt) and twenty hundred-weight to a ton. (Approx one pound (lb) equals 0.454 kg.) Liquid volume: two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon. (Approx one and three quarter pints to one litre) Distance: twelve inches to a foot, three feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile. (Approx 39.4 inches to 1 metre). Area: an acre. (Approx 2.47 acres to a hectare). 3 PREFACE This is a different kind of book to the others in the series. The other works, on Montesqieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Maitland and Fukuzawa, are largely based on an intensive encounter over a few months of intensive reading and writing – although there may have been earlier shorter periods when the author’s work influenced me (as with Tocqueville or Maitland) and certainly the after-effects of the intense reading has continued over the years. In the case of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), however, his work has provided a foil and framework for three of my books and I keep returning to his ideas. Thus this book is arranged chronologically to reflect three periods of influence. There is some overlap between the treatments, but I have not altered the particular chapters; to do so would have meant writing a very different book. The first period lasted from my undergraduate days until I finished my second doctorate, that is to say my twenties and thirties, between 1963-1978. In this phase it was Malthus’ general theory of the relation between population and resources that interested me. His ideas formed the framework for my Ph.D. work in the Nepal Himalayas, later published as Resources and Population (1976). I was deeply concerned about the looming world crisis of over-population, a concern that was felt by many people in the 1970s, then faded somewhat, but has now returned in a new form. The second period covered my middle life, around my late thirties to late forties (1979-1990), when I was working on the history of English villages and in particular the nature of love and marriage in England. Here Malthus’ work on marriage and fertility again provided the framework for a book of a different kind – Marriage and Love in England (1986). The third was in my fifties, that is 1993 to about 2000, when I was trying to compare the demography of England to that of Japan. Here the focus switched from marriage to death – war, famine and disease. Malthus again provided the framework, this time for a third book The Savage Wars of Peace (1997). Whether my sixties will also erupt with another Malthusian work, it is difficult to say. But for one thinker to be the underpinning of three books in three different decades has been unique in my life. It seems appropriate to abstract these encounters into one volume and link them to Malthus, even if the format is rather different from the other major encounters. There is no sustained treatment of Malthus’ life or his methodology. And much of the detailed examination of the data that his questions threw up is in the three books themselves. Yet any account of my life’s work that did not indicate what a huge debt I owe to Malthus would give a very skewed impression. It is pretty evident to me now that I look back over my intellectual life that climbing Mount Malthus has had more influence on me than any other encounter. And while people are always wishing him away or believing he has been ‘disproved’, unlike many other prophets, he is still very much alive and his warnings are still relevant in the twenty-first century. 4 THE ENCOUNTER WITH MALTHUS1 My first memory of being really stirred by the question of the possible origins of industrial civilization, and in particular the relations between population and economic development, was as an undergraduate reading history at Oxford. I was writing an essay on the causes of the industrial revolution in England. I surveyed the state of the argument as to whether it was rising birth rates or falling death rates which had led to the surge of population from the middle of the eighteenth century, it appeared that scholars were almost equally divided on the degree to which population growth was a cause or a consequence of the industrial revolution and what caused that growth. I still remember my excitement at discovering a problem that was so clearly a puzzle to some of the best historians of the period. It seemed obvious that mortality was dropping, yet all the theories to explain why this happened were clearly inadequate. ‘Higher living standards’ seemed to be important, but what these were was left vague; of particular medical changes, the disappearance of plague was mentioned though it was not clear why this had happened; changes in the habits of lice, better nutrition, absence war, improvements in hygiene, medical improvements, even a change in the virulence of disease were canvassed. Scholars appeared to be circling round a large problem yet unable to resolve it - better at knocking down theories than building them up. It was possible for me as an undergraduate to show that the decline of plague had happened too early (it disappeared two generations before the rapid growth of population); that there was no evidence of viral changes; that the medical improvements were insignificant, with the possible exception of smallpox inoculation, that the nutritional improvements were very questionable, as were improvements in hygiene. Then there was a similar puzzle in relation to fertility. An almost equal number of authors believed that this was the crucial variable. But what caused the rise in fertility? The only reasons given were that it was due to the same rising living standards that affected mortality, perhaps by allowing people to marry younger. Yet again the arguments and evidence seemed weak and inconclusive. Part of the difficulty appeared to be caused by the fact that data on mortality, nuptiality and fertility was so poor, as it was based on aggregative analysis (totals of baptisms, marriage and burials from parish registers). I did not then know that French demographers were developing a new technique, ‘family reconstitution’, which would transform our understanding of the past by giving much more precise statistics on marital fertility, infant mortality and age at marriage. E.A.Wrigley first applied the method to English data in his work on Colyton in Devon. Along with the exploration of early listings of inhabitants by Peter Laslett, this made the period of the mid-to-late sixties an enormously exciting one in English historical demography. The academic work was given practical relevance by a growing awareness of ecological and demographic problems at a world level. 1 Modified from the introduction to Savage Wars of Peace. There is a more detailed account of my involvement with demography at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/savage/ROOTS1.pdf and ROOTS2.pdf 5 Some of the results of these new findings were summarized in my first publication, an article in New Society (10 Oct.