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MALTHUS AND CHINA

Part of: Malthusian Moments Special Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2019

ALISON BASHFORD Open the ORCID record for ALISON BASHFORD [Opens in a new window]
ALISON BASHFORD*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
*
School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Morven Brown Building, 243, Sydney, NSW 2052[email protected]
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Abstract

T. R. Malthus was deeply interested in how his principle of population operated in societies distant to, and different from, his own. In this respect, China served as an intriguing case, already famous in his own time for its large and dense population and the central regulation of a closed economy. Malthus drew on both centuries-old Jesuit material and recent accounts from the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong emperor to assess its past and present food–land–population dynamics. This article explores Malthus's interest in China in the context of British public and private commercial interest in opening its trade, not least interest from his own East India Company. Historiographically, Malthus's China has been critiqued as an early rendition of orientalist demographic transition, posing a dichotomy of East/West fertility and mortality change. In disagreement with this interpretation, this article argues Malthus's key distinction was not East/West but Old World/New World.

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Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Special Issue 1: Malthusian Moments , February 2020 , pp. 63 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

My thanks to Helen Dunstan and Henrietta Harrison for advice and assistance with this article, and to the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge, for access to the Old Library Malthus Family Collection.

References

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52 Staunton, Account. Reprinted in Malthus.

53 Staunton, Account, iii, p. 389.

54 Malthus, Essay (1798), ch. 10.

55 Malthus, Essay (1803), p. 149.

56 Ibid., p. 148.

57 Ibid., p. 49.

58 Staunton, Account, iii, pp. 386–7. In drawing from accounts such as that of Staunton, Malthus was normally meticulous in his citations. But in this chapter, almost an entire page of Staunton was reprinted verbatim, and although containing a footnote, was unusually not in quotation marks.

59 Smith, Wealth of nations, ed. Cannan, book 1, ch. 11, ‘Of the rent of land’, p. 170. Staunton also referred to this passage from Smith in his Account, iii, p. 361.

60 Malthus, Essay (1803), pp. 151, 153.

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64 Malthus, Essay (1803), p. 150.

65 Ibid., p. 154.

66 Ibid., p. 151.

67 Smith, Wealth of nations, ed. Cannan, book 1, ch. 8, ‘On the wages of labour’, p. 82.

68 Lee and Feng, One quarter of humanity.

69 Malthus, Essay (1803).

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