The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development

This book represents a major critique of the way Malthusian thinking has influenced capitalist development policy in the modern period, as well as in the past. Taking an historical and comparative view, it highlights the strategic role of Malthusian ideas in the defence of capitalist political economy when confronted by struggles for equality and human progress.

The leading historical example the author takes offers a major reassessment of the origins of the Irish Famine. His contemporary case study focuses on the Green Revolution, which the author analyses in terms of a broad Western strategy of capitalist agricultural development in the face of peasant insurgency. He examines how Malthusian arguments portrayed agricultural modernization as a humanitarian attempt to forestall a food crisis in the developing world when, in reality, he argues the agenda was to defer land reform and bolster existing rural class structures. Finally, the book examines how the political economy of underdevelopment is currently being obscured by alarm over the environmental impact of over-population, and how such Malthusian concerns represent the poor, not as victims of capitalist development, but as perpetrators of environmental destruction.

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Ross (anthropology, Institute of Social Studies at The Hague) exposes the ways in which Malthusianism has been used by politicians and policymakers to disempower the poor and disguise the dysfunctions of the capitalist economy. He examines applications of Malthus' theories, including the handling of Irish potato famine, eugenics, and Third World development, and integrates these issues with an overarching analysis of current aid policies and the rhetoric that supports them. Distributed by St. Martin's. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Eric B. Ross lectures at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague.