In 1798, the Rev. T. R. Malthus published his explosive thesis
arguing that population had a natural tendency to expand with the
capacity of any society to feed itself. The most strident component
of the Malthusian cased turned on the 'positive check' to
demographic growth, a subsistence crisis generating
malnutrition-induced disease and starvation, and thereby inflicting
a marked drop in population. Malthus's argument was based on
historical experience, but his vision was conditioned by, and
conceived in, a late eighteenth-century context. Historians, while
acknowledging that Tudor and Stuart precedents, and contemporary
experience in continental Europe, and even in colonial Ireland,
could be marshalled in support of Malthus's position at that time,
have ignored any consideration of why an English country clergyman,
should have developed such a pessimistic theory. English historians
unthinkably, and automatically, take an implied refuge in the
optimistic view that English capitalism had, through
industrialisation and an agricultural revolution, achieved a
'maturity' enabling the country to escape incarceration in a
'pre-industrial' vicious circle, turning on a fragile
agrarian-based economic environment. This book reverts Malthus in a
thoroughly English context. It proves that famine could, and did,
occur in England during the classic period of the Industrial
Revolution. The key economic determinant proved to be the
ideologically-inspired war, orchestrated by the Prime Minister, the
younger Pitt, against the French and their attempted export of
revolutionary principles at bayonet point, to the rest of Europe.
This international context, in part, conditioned the recurrent
development of famine conditions in England in 1794-6 and again in
1799-1801. Here the multiple ramifications of famine in this
country, as it lurched from crisis to crisis in wartime, are
explored in considerable depth. These were repeated crises of
capitalism, juxtaposed with the autocratic and aristocratic state's
total commitment to war, which contrived to challenge not just the
commitment to war, but both the equilibrium and the survival of the
state itself. 'WANT' stalked the land; intense rioting periodically
erupted; radical politicisation, notably of unenfranchised working
people, proceeded apace, in part stimulated by the catastrophic
events projected on the world stage by the process of the French
Revolution. The book finally explains how such an oligarchic,
unrepresentative government managed through determined economic
interventionism, manipulation of the unique English social security
system, and final resort to army rule, to preserve itself and the
political structure during a key epoch within the Age of
Revolutions.
General
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