Author:
Bashford, Alison, 1963- author.
Imprint:Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2016]
Description353 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
Note:Introduction -- Part I. Population and the New World. Population, Empire, and America -- Writing the Essay -- Part II. New Worlds in the Essay, c. 1803. New Holland -- The Americas -- The South Sea -- Part III. Malthus and the New World, 1803-1834. Slavery and Abolition -- Colonization and Emigration -- The Essay in New Worlds -- Coda.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-344) and index.
Note:This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.
