Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..
The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.
Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation.
“The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues.
Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a delightful essay—-clearly written, easy to read, a relatively short book. (Subsequent editions were more ponderous, I understand.)
Malthus is thoughtful and civil—deferential toward Adam Smith in spite of a disagreement and polite toward the two men whose arguments he demolished, William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. The essay is full of plain-spoken metaphors (using examples such as watches and telescopes)[3] and full of common sense.
The strange thing is this: Not only was his claim about population vs. food production wrong, as we now know from 120 years of experience, his argument for it was just armchair theorizing. Continue reading “The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus”
One of the enduring historical questions is why the Industrial Revolution started in England, rather than somewhere else. One theory—that of Robert Brenner—gives a lot of credit to England’s agricultural revolution.
Thanks to agriculture, England developed the ability to provide enough food for a growing population (famines ended completely by 1700). At the same time, the changing agriculture reduced the need for so many people on farms. The former manor tenants moved to the towns and cities and became the human engines of the industrial revolution.
For a class this fall, I read a 1976 article by Robert Brenner explaining how this agricultural revolution came about.[1] By the way, I may have earlier overstated the case when I said that historians don’t take Marxism all that seriously. Brenner was either a Marxist or a neo-Marxist, and his paper is laced with Marxist references to “class,” “class consciousness,” and “surplus-extraction.”
