Overview

Approximately 60 years before the now historic publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) penned a commentary on what he perceived to be the destiny of the human population in eighteenth-century Britain. Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population profoundly impacted the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), and continues to resonate through social, political, and environmental issues that affect the lives of people today.

Background

Prior to 1750, agricultural practices were as they had been since the Middle Ages. Great Britain was an agricultural society in which farmers worked long hours using simple tools—wooden plows, hoes, and scythes—to produce scanty crops. Using these tools and techniques, farmers were scarcely able to eke out...