The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (ebook)

Argumento de The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (ebook)

Alison Bashford is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. Her books include Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Her books include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius.

"A richly contextualized and deeply researched portrait of Thomas Robert Malthus and his famously bleak analysis of the limits to population growth. This Malthus is steeped in the travel literature on the new worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, entangled in the West Indies sugar and slave trades, and in the thrall of theories of human development highly prejudicial to indigenous peoples under threat by European settlers. His Essay must now be read with new eyes."--Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

"This remarkable new book puts Malthus’s original arguments about population growth and scarce resources back in their historical contexts of global ecologies and worldwide experiences of colonial and economic change. An indispensable guide to the structure of the environmental crisis and its long-term genealogy."--Simon Schaffer, coeditor of The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820

"An entirely new way of reading the most famous book on population ever written. With remarkable force and erudition, Bashford and Chaplin show that no aspect of European history can be considered in isolation from the irrepressible European quest to understand--and master--the entire inhabited world. In their hands, Malthus emerges anew as a major intellectual presence."--Anthony Pagden, author of The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

"With this ambitious book, Bashford and Chaplin have succeeded in placing Malthus in the context of global history. A significant and original addition to the scholarly literature."--Donald Winch, author of Malthus: A Very Short Introduction

"This is the most important new reading of the life and work of Malthus in a generation. The book is beautifully written and powerfully conceived, and the scholarship is impeccable. Bashford and Chaplin offer a paradigm-changing interpretation of Malthus."--Robert J. Mayhew, author of Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet

"Penetrating reappraisal of the philosopher’s Essay on the Principle of Population."--Barb Kiser, Nature0Illustrations vii
Tables vii
Introduction 1
Part I: Population and the New World
1 Population, Empire, and America 17
2 Writing the Essay 54
Part II: New Worlds in the Essay, c. 1803
3 New Holland 91
4 The Americas 116
5 The South Sea 146
Part III: Malthus and the New World, 1803? 1834
6 Slavery and Abolition 171
7 Colonization and Emigration 201
8 The Essay in New Worlds 237
Coda 276
Acknowledgments 285
Abbreviations 287
Notes 289
Bibliography 317
Index 345