Thomas Malthus (1766–1834)
Thomas Malthus was born into a reasonably well-to-do English
family. He was educated at Cambridge, and from 1805 until his
death he held the first British professorship of political
economy in the East India Company’s college at Haileybury. In
1798 he published An Essay on the Principle of Population as It
Affects the Future Improvement of Society, which was revised
many times in subsequent years until finally he published A
Summary View of the Principle of Population in 1830.
It is these essays on population for which Malthus is best
known. His first proposition was that population, when
unchecked, would increase in a geometric progression such