Malthus, Thomas Robert 1766-1834
English economist and clergyman

Born near Dorking, Surrey, he was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1793, and in 1797 he was appointed curate at Albury, Surrey. In 1798 he published anonymously his Essay on the Principle of Population, with a greatly enlarged and altered edition in 1807. In it he maintained that the optimistic hopes of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin are rendered baseless by the natural tendency of population to increase faster than the means of subsistence. (Malthus gives no sanction to the theories and practices currently known as Malthusianism.) The problem had been handled by Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and many other writers, but Malthus crystallized the views of those writers, and presented them in systematic form with elaborate proofs derived from history, and he called for positive action to cut the birth-rate, by sexual abstinence or birth control. In 1805 he was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the East India College at Haileybury. His other works included An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815), largely anticipating David Ricardo, and Principles of Political Economy (1820). Charles Darwin read Malthus in 1838, and was greatly influenced by him, seeing in the struggle for existence a mechanism for producing new species - natural selection.

Bibliography: J Ronar, Malthus and His Work (1885)