Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.
Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.
Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet

Biographies & Memoirs

Mayhew, Robert J.

Historical

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

English Geographies presents a set of seven interlinked inquiries into the ways in which geographical variations in the material conditions of existence and their representation in maps, poetry, and prose need to be incorporated into our understanding of the patterns of English history. The essays range widely, treating subjects as diverse as criminality in Oxfordshire, the birth of the preservation movement in Epping Forest, and Shakespeares representation of forest cultures, but they are unified by two underlying beliefs: in the centrality of geographical variation to the understanding of history, and in the need to ground such inquiry in rigorous empirical work. These beliefs spring from a shared scholarly kinship amongst the contributors to the career and work of Jack Langton, to whom these essays are dedicated on the occasion of his retirement. Providing new angles on key topics in English history, these essays will be essential reading for a wide range of scholars of English social, economic, and cultural history, and will offer undergraduate and graduate students of geography a convincing alternative to some of the more esoteric and ephemeral works of cultural geography.Table of ContentsIntroduction; Geography as part of a problematic, not an integral discipline: a personal and intellectual biography of Jack Langton (Elizabeth Baigent and Robert J. Mayhew); Mapping the English forests: Needwood 1598-1834 (Sarah Bendall); These Trees shall be my Books: forests as a geographical imaginary in English literature, c.1600-1800 (Robert J. Mayhew); A settled little society: networks, friendship and trust in eighteenth-century provincial England (Jon Stobart); Labour policy and rental policy on the Ditchley estate, 170050: parallel paths of transition (Andrew Hann); Crime and custom in forest communities: Whichwood Forest, Oxfordshire, c.1760-1850 (Michael Freeman); A splendid pleasure ground (for) the elevation and refinement of the people of London: geographical aspects of the history of Epping Forest 1860-1895 (Elizabeth Baigent); Retailing and economic uncertainty in interwar Britain: co-operative (mis)fortunes in north-west England (Martin Purvis); List of subscribers; Index.

English Geographies 1600-1950: Historical Essays on English Customs, Cultures, and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton

History

Mayhew, Robert

Europe

St John's College Research Centre

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