The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus by Alison Bashford

Author:Alison Bashford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Colonization and Emigration

AS A MORAL PHILOSOPHER, MALTHUS OFTEN relied on hypothetical scenarios. What if the island of Great Britain doubled on itself, he asked in a new chapter on emigration published in the 1803 edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population. “If a tract of rich land as large as this island were suddenly annexed to it, and sold in small lots, or let out in small farms … the amelioration of the state of the common people would be sudden and striking.” He was describing the fantastic transformation of ghost acres into contiguous acres. But Malthus’s point was that such a benefit could only be a passing one. This additional “Britain” would be tilled and filled, people would be fed, and the price of labor, momentarily rising, would mitigate some poverty and then make it worse. The population would grow and then be limited again, necessarily. Land constraint was Malthus’s bottom line, even if Britain were doubled. As with any island, there were always shoreline limits.1

Malthus well knew that North America was the “tract of rich land” that had been annexed, in effect doubling the size of Britain and much more, at least until the American War. And he knew that significant grain was still returning from America, as well as the Baltic, anticipating it shortly to be enough to support about two million Britons. Reliance on imported grain would increase the prosperity of the exporting country, and diminish Britain’s “riches, and her power.” He worried about North American acres, precisely because the most productive ones were no longer British. Rather, they produced grain that an independent United States could decide to export or withhold. The United States of America was not the straightforward “doubled” Britain at all. Surplus agricultural produce from Britain itself, he considered, was the source of its own future wealth, and at the very end of the Essay he argued for Corn Laws to protect just that.2

Still, there was land in North America beyond that claimed, or even desired by, the United States. Great swathes of forest and woodland seemed available for the taking in Upper Canada. Indeed, to settle this land would be to secure it for the British, in the light of the perceived threat from United States expansion into the Northwest Territories. The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain was in large part fought over this region. With the settlement of borders that year, and with the peace after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the need to secure Upper Canada through clearing land, creating gardens and fields, planting stock, and building new settlements was on the public agenda.

At the same time, British economists, statesmen, speculators, and colonial reformers began to look afresh at the antipodean penal colonies: New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Might wholly new settlement projects be established on the vast continent that was still known as New Holland? As events unfolded, the Swan River Colony in Western Australia was established in 1829, an enterprise beleaguered by difficulties of cultivation, hunger, and, if anything, too much land.

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