Unit information: The Malthus Wars: Debating Population, Resources and the Environment in 2017/18

Unit name	The Malthus Wars: Debating Population, Resources and the Environment
Unit code	GEOG30019
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Professor. Mayhew
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	School of Geographical Sciences
Faculty	Faculty of Science

Description including Unit Aims

Is population the “ultimate resource” allowing human societies to expand and flourish or a “bomb” whose detonation will destroy civilization and the environment in which it lives? This question, far from being the preserve of the 1960s or of present day anxieties about climate change, in fact has a pedigree stretching back a quarter of a millennium. The aim of this unit is to introduce students to debates about how population, resources and the environment interact over the long run. In particular students will learn:

1. To understand how the debate about population, resources and the environment was framed for modern, industrialising societies in the Enlightenment and why
2. To trace the patterns these debates have taken via literature, Darwinian evolution, concerns over eugenics and social engineering down to the peak of neo-Malthusian fears in the three decades after World War 2

To see the echoes between present demographic debates and those built over the past two centuries.

Intended Learning Outcomes

To understand debates about population, resources and the environment in historical context

To be able to write using primary source material about how European and North American scholars framed the population-resource question

To be able to situate contemporary debates about population’s environmental impact in a longer run trajectory

Teaching Information

Proposed Structure:

1. Introductory Lecture: “We Did this at School”: What you don’t know about Malthus, Boserup and the population-resource debate
2. Lecture: Before Malthus: Reasoning about Population and the Environment until 1798
3. Lecture: Enter Malthus: Enlightenment and Anxiety in the Population-Resource Debate
4. Lecture: Malthus’s Later Ideas
5. Student Led Presentations: Reading Malthus
6. Lecture: The Malthus Wars: Critics and Supporters of Malthus [Romantic writers, Ruskin, Jevons, Marx, etc]
7. Lecture: Evolution and its Discontents: Victorian Debates about Population and the Environment [Darwin, Wallace, Kropotkin, eugenics]
8. Student Led Presentations: Reading The Malthus Wars
9. Lecture: Global Malthus: Malthusianism, War and Planning
10. Lecture: The Ehrlich Wars: The Population Bomb and “peak fear”
11. Lecture: Malthus Today: New Population Bombs, Collapse and Climate Change
12. Student Led Presentation: Reading Malthus in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Weekly open hour slots to support the student led reading sessions and address other queries

Two study skills sessions: “Reading Texts: Hermeneutics” and “Reading Texts in Historical Context” ideally in weeks 2 and 3.

Assessment Information

1) A short “mid term” essay in week 6 of the course about Malthus’s argument in the 1798 Essay to build textual analysis skills – 1500 words (25%)

2) A longer end of course essay triangulating Malthus’s ideas with those of selected interlocutors addressed in the second half of the course. 4000 words (75%)

Reading and References

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population and Selected Other Writings (Penguin Classics: London, 2015)

Robert Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Ma., 2014)

Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2014)

Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia University Press: New York, 2014)

Robert Mayhew (ed) New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2016)

Tom Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 2012)