Malthus and the pre-famine economy.

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There is a slightly implausible scene towards the end of Thomas Flanagan's Year of the French where one of the main characters, a Mayo clergyman, is spending Christmas 1798 with a brother in Derbyshire. One evening, the local vicar lends him the recently published Essay on the principle of population. Being a short work, it did not take him long to read, but 'clear and cold as ice water, it clarified and chilled the brain'. Many since have shared the Rev. Mr Broome's reaction to Malthus's 'unimpassioned calm', in doom ing the Irish 'to an endless sequence of spawning and starving, spawning and starving'.1 But Malthus has had vigorous and steady support too over the years, from economists, historians, and policy makers. By coincidence, Malthusian exegesis is in great vogue at present, and Ireland's prominent role in it is a good reason for this paper. In the course of his recent television serial on the history of economics, John Kenneth Galbraith termed the Great Irish Famine a 'triumphant validation' of the ideas of Malthus. 'No one could doubt', claimed Galbraith, 'the tendency of the Irish population (to) increas(e) geometrically. Within a mere sixty years ... it first doubled and then very nearly doubled again . . .' The agricultural revolution based on potato cultivation could not keep food supply in line, and the blight of 1845-7, 'a Malthusian climax', merely confirmed food supply's loss in its race against population. William