"This radical new reading of the eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population exposes his narrow understanding of food production by examining subsistence activities such as hunting, herding, and gardening. In broadening our conception of human...

"The defeat of the British government by American revolutionaries in 1776 and the role of the laboring classes in overthrowing the French monarchy in 1789 inspired confidence among working people and fear among the elites, posing the need for an ideological counterattack. The Essay on Population...