Population, Empire, and America

There was no one element within Thomas Robert Malthus's principle of population that was wholly new, and yet he managed to make everything about it seem new. He did not invent so much as select from received observations about population and innovate within existing modes of demographic analysis. In intellectual terms, he was a magpie, a thief and reweaver of whatever he stole. That should not diminish his achievement — far from it. His use of familiar features of population analysis, if anything, gave his conclusions added power. But the extent to which he drew upon established modes of inquiry about population, adopting some elements while rejecting others, must be understood in order to appreciate his own and singular contribution: placing new worlds at the heart of population analysis.

Most historians of population studies look too late in the history of the field to make sense of Malthus. In identifying demography as a modern science, they trace its origins to the early modern period, often as late as the eighteenth century, with perhaps a little background on earlier periods. But population had concerned political and religious commentators since ancient times, most notably in Judeo-Christian Scripture. Those traditions of analysis did not cease in the early modern period. Rather, they were overlaid by subsequent and eventually more secular forms of analysis. Because Malthus would draw upon the scriptural and secular, the ancient and the modern, beginning at the beginning of the history of demography (long before it bore that name) is essential to understand his ideas about population and to understand how his contemporaries read them.

Four intellectual strands would be crucial to European comprehension of empires, new worlds, and population, and to Malthus's own eventual work on these long-connected topics. First, there was a natural theology of human generation, an interpretation of material things and processes that explained them as parts of divine mandate; this natural theology of population stressed that humanity had a genealogy precisely because of Adam and Eve's fall from grace and expulsion from Eden, a paradise that the new world was sometimes believed to resemble. Second, reason-of-state arguments from the Renaissance presented population as a tool of statecraft, one that was particularly relevant for rulers who had or wanted imperial territories. Third, political arithmetic, the early modern ancestor of demography, used statistical analyses to define knowledge of what populations existed, their sizes, and whether they were rising or declining (and why). Fourth, political economy analyzed modern commercial society in terms of whatever had economic value, including land, commodities, and labor; as such, it depended on a stadial theory of society in which a commercial stage was thought to be the last in a series of ever more sophisticated social forms.

From the discovery of the Americas through the US War for Independence, each of these intellectual idioms would define the new world as particularly important for an emerging, modern science of population. A variety of experts would contribute to each tradition. But even more important, some commentators would synthesize what was familiar in order to generate a new kind of understanding. That was what Malthus would do in relation to the Americas (later the other new worlds of the Pacific), and in this regard he would draw upon the most important synthesizer and theorist before him, the American-born Benjamin Franklin.

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Assessments of the peoples within worlds that Europeans categorized as "new" had taken initial form in relation to the Americas, with a mounting sense that the modern empires located there were qualitatively different from ancient empires, notably Rome's, and that these new worlds therefore constituted sites of natural experiments in the differential capacity for various populations to utilize natural resources and to increase their numbers, or else fail to do so. Because of this perception of a new quality for the population dynamics of these new worlds, there had also been a serious question of their relation to the story of humanity's origins as given in Christian Scripture, an emphasis that made especially clear that analysis of population was always an interrogation of the linked qualities of nature and human nature — specifically, of whether there ever could be redemption in the material world.

Natural theology interpreted the material world, including human beings, according to God's will and divine plan. That plan introduced an important and long-lived trope, the breeding pair. European Christians were aware that the Book of Genesis had commanded a primordial dyad, Eve and Adam, to "increase and multiply," eventually to "fill the Earth" as part of their divine mandate to exert dominion over nature. Humanity's scriptural parents heard that admonition while still in Eden, though they would not actually fulfil their duties until they had sinned, were expelled from paradise, and apportioned painful and gender-specific obligations. "In sorrow," God warned the apple-eating Eve (and her daughters), "thou shalt bring forth children." Meanwhile, "cursed is the ground for thy sake," God told Adam: "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," torn from the ground through daily toil. God would repeat the command to "increase and multiply" to Noah and his family after they survived the Deluge. The sons of Noah were presumed to have repopulated the world after God had drowned Adam and Eve's other descendants. Exactly which of Noah's sons had settled in what parts of the world fueled debate, especially the critical question of where Ham (or Cham) had gone after being cursed for looking upon his father's nakedness. Ham and his descendents were doomed to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for anyone who could extract such labor from them.

Scripture had thus provided Christians with a global genealogy, though one that designated human nature as fallen, postlapsarian. The population imaginary that survives even into the twenty-first century, of the fateful impact one breeding pair might have for the entire globe, does not always bear a religious cast, but it definitely did for the Reverend Malthus and his contemporary readers. The original sin of a divinely created pair of humans had ordained that producing children and feeding them would be painful human obligations, equally unlikely (it seemed) to create a surplus either of people or of food. A subsequent set of sins and a punitive deluge had restarted the process of human generation...