Malthus and the New World
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES
Tuesday 17 January 2012
18.00, Lecture Theatre K-1.56, King’s Building, Strand Campus
A joint meeting with the Centre for the Humanities and Health
Lecture by Alison Bashford
Why is T.R. Malthus so rarely analysed in terms of British colonialism? It is not often recognised — by economic historians, population historians, or scholars of colonialism — that he wrote quite extensively on the birth, life, and death of Aboriginal and Native people in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, and in North and South America. This lecture examines just what he thought in Essay on the Principle of Population. 1803 — the date of his long second edition — was a year when new world people and their land was high on many colonial agendas. The lecture suggests the need to analyse Malthus’s Essay in the light of colonial historiography as well as economic history, since the value of land is core to both scholarly domains.
Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University Sydney. In 2009/10 she was Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. Her authored and edited books, including Purity and Pollution (1998), Contagion (2001), Imperial Hygiene (2006), and most recently The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010 with Philippa Levine) have explored modern science and medicine. Currently she is completing “Geopolitics and the World Population Problem” for Columbia University Press and co-editing three projects: with Stuart Macintyre, the New Cambridge History of Australia; with David Armitage, Pacific Histories; and with Sarah Tracy, a special issue of Bulletin of the History of Medicine.