The Unglobal Origins of Malthus’s Global Politics

This paper examines the relationship between material processes of globalisation and Robert Malthus’s conception of the world’s population. The focus is on the intellectual materials with which Malthus first projected the world’s population as an object of thought. The intellectual infrastructure of the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) is shown to be Adam Smith’s arguments regarding the capital-wealth nexus in Wealth of Nations (1776), repurposed by Malthus to investigate a food-population relation, with the results then interpreted using a heterodox version of Anglican theology. These intellectual ingredients bear no obvious debt to a globalised condition and are susceptible to historical description using the usual methods of contextual intellectual history. The implication drawn is that historians ought not presuppose that thought about the globe is either accompanied or shaped by a condition of globality.