A compelling study of views about population and demographic mobility
in the British long eighteenth century
In John Milton's Paradise Lost of 1667, Adam and Eve are promised they
will produce a "race to fill the world," a thought that consoles them
even after the trauma of the fall. By 1798, the idea that the world
would one day be entirely filled by people had become, in Thomas
Malthus's hands, a nightmarish vision. In Peopling the World,
Charlotte Sussman asks how and why this shift took place. How did
Britain's understanding of the value of reproduction, the vacancy of the
planet, and the necessity of moving people around to fill its empty
spaces change? Sussman addresses these questions through readings of
texts by Malthus, Milton, Swift, Defoe, Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott,
Mary Shelley, and others, and by placing these authors in the context of
debates about scientific innovation, emigration, cultural memory, and
colonial settlement.
Sussman argues that a shift in thinking about population and mobility
occurred in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Before that
point, both political and literary texts were preoccupied with "useless"
populations that could be made useful by being dispersed over Britain's
domestic and colonial territories; after 1760, a concern with the
depopulation caused by emigration began to take hold. She explains this
change in terms of the interrelated developments of a labor theory of
value, a new idea of national identity after the collapse of Britain's
American empire, and a move from thinking of reproduction as a national
resource to thinking of it as an individual choice. She places Malthus
at the end of this history because he so decisively moved thinking about
population away from a worldview in which there was always more space to
be filled and toward the temporal inevitability of the whole world
filling up with people.
