Pre-Malthusian Perspectives on Population: Mercantilist and Physiocratic Views

• Before Thomas Robert Malthus (1798), population was not studied as an independent variable. Ideas about it were embedded in philosophy, statecraft and economic doctrine.
• Population was valued mainly as a source of wealth, labour, taxes and military power. Its size was judged against the state’s needs and the land’s capacity.
• The ideas fall into four stages:
  • ancient (China, Greece, Rome, India);
  • medieval (Christian and Islamic thought);
  • early modern Europe (16th–18th centuries), when the mercantilist and physiocratic schools gave the most systematic views;
  • the late 18th-century debate that led directly to Malthus.

Ancient and Medieval Thought

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China

• Confucius (551–479 BCE) and his school sought an ideal proportion between land and population.
  • The government should move people from crowded to under-populated areas.
  • Population is held in check by food shortage, premature marriage (which raises infant deaths), costly marriage ceremonies (which delay marriage) and war.
  • Excessive growth lowers output per worker and the people’s standard of living, and breeds strife. This is an early form of the optimum idea.
• Han Fei-tzu (c. 280–233 BCE) observed that people multiply faster than goods, so that each person’s share falls and struggle grows. This anticipates Malthus by two thousand years.

Greece

• Plato, in the Laws, fixed the ideal city-state at 5,040 citizen households.
  • The number is divisible by every integer from 1 to 10, which suited the division of land and duties.
  • The size was to be held constant by regulating marriage and births, by founding colonies when numbers rose, and by admitting immigrants when they fell.
• Aristotle, in the Politics, held that a state should be neither too large nor too small.
  • Too many people cannot be governed well and breed poverty and sedition.
  • Too few cannot be self-sufficient.
  • Population and resources should grow in harmony. He was willing to limit births to keep that balance.
• Both thinkers judged the right size of population by the needs of the state. This is the root of optimum population theory.

Rome

• Rome needed soldiers and settlers for its empire and was pro-natalist.
• Augustus passed laws (the Lex Julia of 18 BCE and the Lex Papia Poppaea of 9 CE) that penalised celibacy and childlessness and rewarded parents of three or more children.

India: Kautilya

• Kautilya’s Arthashastra (traditionally dated to the 4th century BCE) counts janapada, the populated territory, among the seven elements of the state.
• A large, well-settled population was a source of revenue, cultivation and military strength.
• Settlement policy:
  • The king should found new villages of 100 to 500 families of cultivators.
  • Settlers come either by inducing foreigners to immigrate or by drawing off surplus people from crowded parts of the kingdom.
  • New settlements receive tax remission. This is an early population-distribution policy.

Medieval Thought

• Christian theology (St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas) treated procreation within marriage as a moral duty. It condemned abortion and infanticide and saw population as governed by divine law.
• Frequent famine and plague, above all the Black Death of 1347–51, kept mortality high and attitudes pro-natalist.
• Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), in the Muqaddimah (1377), gave the first cyclical theory linking population and economy:
  • A rising dynasty brings order and security, so population grows.
  • Dense population allows division of labour, higher productivity and prosperity.
  • Prosperity breeds luxury, heavy taxes and falling production.
  • Famine and plague follow, population declines, and the cycle restarts.

Mercantilist School: Population as Power and Wealth

Context

• Mercantilism dominated European economic policy from the 16th to the 18th century, alongside the Renaissance, the Commercial Revolution, overseas colonies and absolute monarchy.
• The wealth of a nation was measured in precious metals (gold and silver), earned through a favourable balance of trade.
• Population, economics and politics formed one triangle: people supplied labour, taxes and soldiers.

Core Ideas

• A large and growing population is essential for economic prosperity, military power and political dominance.
  • Trade and industry need an abundant labour supply.
  • A large workforce keeps wages and production costs low, making exports competitive.
  • Population adds to national income, armies and colonies.
• The emphasis was on numbers rather than quality (skills, education, welfare). Workers’ wages were assumed to stay near subsistence.
• Cities were seen to grow mainly by in-migration rather than natural increase.
  • John Graunt (1662), analysing London’s Bills of Mortality, found that burials exceeded christenings, so the city grew only through migration.

Mercantilist Policies

• France went furthest. Jean-Baptiste Colbert‘s edict of 1666 gave tax exemptions to men who married young and to fathers of large families.
• Prussia under Frederick II settled immigrants on its lands. German cameralists likewise treated population as the basis of state power.

Contributors

• Niccolò Machiavelli (Discourses, early 16th century) noted that when a country holds more people than it can feed, nature purges the excess through famine, flood and plague. This was a proto-Malthusian warning about resource limits.
• Jean Bodin (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576) put the populationist creed in one line: there is no wealth or strength but in men.
• Giovanni Botero (On the Causes of the Greatness of Cities, 1588) was the clearest precursor of Malthus:
  • The generative power of people is constant, but the nutritive power of the land is limited.
  • Population cannot grow indefinitely at the same rate. Growth is constrained by subsistence.
  • Checks come through food scarcity, and through disease, war, climate and infertile soil.
• Political arithmeticians:
  • William Petty (Political Arithmetick, 1690) estimated population and national income and favoured a larger, denser population for its productivity.
  • Johann Peter Süssmilch (The Divine Order, 1741) found statistical regularities in births and deaths, read them as God’s order, and urged policies to raise numbers.
• Summary: Population = Power + Wealth, with strong state-led encouragement of growth.

Physiocratic School: Population Linked to Resources

Context

• The physiocrats (18th-century France) arose as a reaction against mercantilism.
• Land is the only source of wealth. Only agriculture yields a net product (surplus); industry and trade merely transform or move wealth.
• They favoured laissez-faire: free trade in grain, low taxes on agriculture, an end to mercantilist controls.

Core Ideas

• Population should be aligned with agricultural productivity.
• Growth is desirable only when an agricultural surplus can support it.
• Growth that outruns resources lowers welfare and living standards. Unlike the mercantilists, they would not buy numbers at the cost of a falling standard of living.
• Population size is determined by subsistence, that is, by the carrying capacity of land and farm output. Raise wealth first, and population will follow.

Contributors

• Richard Cantillon (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, written c. 1730, published 1755) is a bridge between the two schools.
  • Population rises to the limit of subsistence.
  • Its actual size depends on how landowners choose to use the land (for food crops, for horses or for luxuries) and on customs of marriage.
• François Quesnay (1694–1774), leader of the school, author of the Tableau économique (1758):
  • A large population is good only if it is comfortably fed from the agricultural surplus.
  • Policy should increase wealth rather than numbers.
• Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, in L’Ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (1756):
  • First held that population is the source of wealth.
  • Under Quesnay’s influence he reversed this: subsistence governs population, so agriculture must be developed first.
• Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours argued that in a well-administered state population will not exceed the means of subsistence, an early equilibrium view.
• Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, as finance minister (1774–76), briefly put physiocratic free trade into practice.
• Summary: Population = f(resources), especially land and food supply.

The Road to Malthus

The Late 18th-Century Debate

• Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat; Persian Letters, 1721) claimed the world had become less populous than in ancient times and blamed bad government. David Hume (“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations”, 1752) disputed this, arguing that the numbers of the ancient world had been exaggerated.
• Robert Wallace (Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence, 1761) argued that even a perfect society would in time be overwhelmed by its own numbers.
• Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) held that the demand for labour regulates the production of people: wages above subsistence raise numbers, wages below it reduce them.
• William Godwin (Political Justice, 1793) and the Marquis de Condorcet (1795) were confident that society could be perfected. Reason, equality and science would solve any population problem.

Malthus’s Synthesis

• Thomas Robert Malthus answered Godwin and Condorcet in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
• He drew the earlier strands together:
  • the subsistence limit of Botero, Cantillon and the physiocrats;
  • the checks noted by Confucius, Machiavelli and Botero;
  • the wage–population link of Adam Smith.
• From these he built the first formal theory of population: population tends to outgrow food supply and is held back by positive and preventive checks. The Malthusian theory of population opened the modern debate, continued by Marx and the neo-Malthusians.

Evaluation

• Contributions:
  • The idea of an optimum size (Confucius, Plato, Aristotle).
  • The population–resource link and the notion of checks (Botero, Cantillon, the physiocrats).
  • The statistical study of population (Graunt, Petty, Süssmilch).
  • Population as an object of state policy: distribution (Kautilya), pro-natalism (Augustus, Colbert) and migration.
• Limitations:
  • Ideas were fragmentary and tied to political or economic doctrines, not to a theory of population as such.
  • They focused on numbers, not on fertility and mortality as processes, and had little reliable data.
  • Mercantilist pro-natalism ignored the welfare of the masses.
• Relevance today:
  • Mercantilist reasoning returns in the pro-natalist policies of ageing countries such as France, Hungary and South Korea, and in the competition for skilled migrants.
  • The physiocratic link between population and the land underlies carrying capacity and food-security debates.
  • Kautilya’s settlement policy prefigures population-distribution policies, such as planned colonisation of new land.
  • These themes run through the rationale of population policy.