Exploring the life and legacies of an untimely prophet

Press release issued: 24 April 2014 A major reassessment of the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus by Professor Robert Mayhew of the School of Geographical Sciences will be published in May. Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet is also an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment. Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery". After its publication in 1798, he found himself attacked on all sides: by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. In this book, Professor Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay , and the composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy . Professor Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use.