As population growth exploded over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how well did England's food producers meet the challenge of feeding the people? From the mid eighteenth century, notes of concern sounded from numerous sources that food availability would not match the nutritional needs of a rapidly growing population. Thomas Malthus (1766--1834), mathematician, parson and political economist, lived through this critical period and was understandably concerned at a seeming mismatch between the (geometric) rate of population growth compared with that of agricultural output, which he considered to increase only arithmetically. Left unchecked, these diverging trends could end in only one outcome: famine. And yet the Malthusian ceiling was reached and breached. Earlier there seemed to be a limit of 5.5 million people who could be satisfactorily supported within England's boundaries, but this constraint was now exceeded in the eighteenth century and famine did not ensue.1 In the tragic case of mid nineteenth-century Ireland the nation succumbed to potato blight, starvation, death and mass emigration. Most of England, Wales and Scotland, however, did not enter famine after the mid eighteenth century, though regularly teetering on the brink.2 Just how close England came to this peril is up for debate. Between 1770 and 1850, according to Clark, Huberman and Lindert, a British food puzzle emerged: in spite of increasing effective demand in a growing economy that should have seen food consumption rise by 13 per cent, the supply of foodstuffs (both domestic and imported) appeared to stagnate or even decline.3 Nick Crafts observed that `it seems probable that per caput food consumption only regained its 1760 level at around 1840'.4 Anxieties around food, regarding availability, notions of a just price, quality, and market abuses, manifested in bread riots in the eighteenth century.5 John Komlos has argued that …
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Thomas Robert Malthus;
Robert Mayhew;
(2015)
An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings
(/isis/citation/CBB987385119/)
Article
Bederman, Gail;
(2008)
Sex, Scandal, Satire, and Population in 1798: Revisiting Malthus's First Essay
(/isis/citation/CBB001030987/)
Book
Dolan, Brian;
(2000)
Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: “Malthusianism” after 1798
(/isis/citation/CBB000110557/)
Article
John A. Stewart;
(2017)
Reform and Religious Heterodoxy in Thomas Robert Malthus’s “Crises” and the First Edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population
(/isis/citation/CBB929239750/)
Book
Mayhew, Robert;
(2014)
Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet
(/isis/citation/CBB001551304/)
Book
Hoyle, R W;
(2013)
The Farmer in England, 1650--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB001422268/)
Book
Nathalie Cooke;
Kathryn Harvey;
(2015)
The Johnson Family Treasury: A Collection of Household Recipes and Remedies, 1741-1848
(/isis/citation/CBB090740798/)
Book
Sara Pennell;
Beat Kümin;
Brian Cowan;
(2016)
The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850
(/isis/citation/CBB643647529/)
Article
McCormick, Ted;
(2013)
Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660--1750
(/isis/citation/CBB001214738/)
Book
Ron Broglio;
(2017)
Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism
(/isis/citation/CBB999620896/)
Book
Hale, Piers J.;
(2014)
Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England
(/isis/citation/CBB001213998/)
Book
Muldrew, Craig;
(2011)
Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550--1780
(/isis/citation/CBB001320097/)
Article
Klyve, Dominic;
(2014)
Darwin, Malthus, Süssmilch, and Euler: The Ultimate Origin of the Motivation for the Theory of Natural Selection
(/isis/citation/CBB001214551/)
Book
Javier Castro Arcos;
(2017)
Guerra en el vientre: control de natalidad, malthusianismo y guerra fría en Chile, 1960-1970
(/isis/citation/CBB450385078/)
Book
Quinlan, Sean M.;
(2007)
The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB000774598/)
Book
Alison Bashford;
Joyce E. Chaplin;
(2016)
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population
(/isis/citation/CBB325729338/)
Book
James Preston;
(2015)
Malting and Malthouses in Kent
(/isis/citation/CBB502571939/)
Article
Ian Gazeley;
Sara Horrell;
(2013)
Nutrition in the English agricultural labourer's household over the course of the long nineteenth century
(/isis/citation/CBB913099101/)
Chapter
Birgit Braasch;
(2015)
Eating Across the Ocean: The Role of Food in the Construction of the Tourists' North Atlantic, 1947-76
(/isis/citation/CBB750413862/)
Book
Bashford, Alison;
(2014)
Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth
(/isis/citation/CBB001551303/)
Be the first to comment!