How a plagiarized equation became the perfect crime: making the victims blame themselves for their poverty. From the Irish Famine’s million dead to today’s climate colonialism, Malthusian thinking has justified every modern genocide by converting political choices into natural law. The British needed to explain why their industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery—so they invented overpopulation. The theory persists because it still serves the same masters: turning artificial scarcity into cosmic inevitability, transforming solidarity into foolishness, and convincing good people that letting others suffer serves some higher purpose. This is the story of how empire learned to call murder mathematics.

Preface

I’ve been working on this essay on and off for a couple of years, but it was a recent exchange about the planet’s “carrying capacity” and “limited resources” that got me to finish it off.

I don’t believe in the idea of a “carrying capacity” the same way that I don’t believe in “safe and effective,” the greater good or in Climate Change™. These aren’t contrarian positions for their own sake. They’re recognitions that certain “scientific facts” function as empire-grade “fast thoughts”—ideas that seem so obviously true they stop further thinking, trapping minds into predetermined conclusions about scarcity, fear, and the necessity of “elite” centralised control.

The concept of carrying capacity, when applied to humans, assumes we’re like bacteria in a petri dish—consuming resources until we hit a wall and collapse. But humans create resources through technology and social organization. We turned sand into silicon chips, air into fertilizer, sunlight into electricity. The “limits” keep receding because the model is wrong. We’re not consumers but creators, not mouths but minds.

Yet this Malthusian logic persists with remarkable tenacity. Educated and compassionate people genuinely believe that helping the global poor have children threatens the planet. That fertility in Africa endangers civilization. That there are simply too many people. These beliefs feel scientific, natural, inevitable.

But here’s what should be a simple truth: the only people who should determine family size are husband and wife. That’s it. Full stop. No government planners, no UN agencies, no billionaire philanthropists, no climate activists, no economics professors—just the two people creating and raising the life. When couples are genuinely free to choose, with accurate information and without coercion or manipulation, everything else takes care of itself. Prosperity naturally moderates fertility. Education expands options. Security reduces the need for children as insurance. The demographic transitions that took centuries in Europe happen in decades elsewhere when people have real freedom and opportunity. But that’s precisely what Malthusians cannot allow, because free people making free choices don’t produce the crises that justify intervention. So instead we get synthetic hormones pushed on teenagers, financial pressures that make children unaffordable, propaganda that makes fertility shameful, and a culture that treats the creation of life as an environmental crime. The very people who should have no say in reproduction—distant bureaucrats and corporate interests—have made themselves the arbiters of who may have children and how many.

As this essay will show, the whole thing is cover for the abuses of oligarchy and their empires. Every famine in modern history has been policy. Every “overpopulated” nation has been deliberately underdeveloped. Every call for population control has protected wealth while punishing poverty. The theory that began as British imperial propaganda persists because it still serves the same function: making systemic exploitation appear as natural law.

The most insidious part is how Malthusianism makes cruelty feel like wisdom. It transforms solidarity into foolishness, compassion into danger, and human flourishing into existential threat. It convinces good people that letting others suffer serves some higher purpose.

This essay traces that deception from Malthus’s plagiarized equations through Ireland’s engineered famine, India’s colonial extraction, and today’s climate colonialism. The pattern never changes: create scarcity, blame population, propose “solutions” that entrench the very systems causing the problem.

We don’t face a population crisis. We face a power crisis—too few people controlling too many resources. Once we see that clearly, different futures become possible.

The Architecture of Deception: How “Carrying Capacity” Works

Before we trace the history of the overpopulation myth, it’s crucial to understand the rhetorical machinery that makes it so persistent. “Carrying capacity” isn’t just wrong—it’s wrong in precisely calibrated ways that make it impossible to refute. This isn’t accidental. It’s how ideology disguises itself as science.

A thought-terminating cliché - Once someone accepts “carrying capacity,” inquiry stops. Complex questions of political economy collapse into simple arithmetic. Why is there poverty? Too many people. Why environmental degradation? Too many people. Why do famines occur? Too many people. The phrase prevents analysis of actual causes—land concentration, financial speculation, deliberate underdevelopment. It’s an answer that prevents questions.

A motte-and-bailey argument - The “motte” (the defensible position) is the truism that Earth is finite. No one denies this. But the “bailey” (the real claim being advanced) is that current suffering is natural and certain populations must be controlled. When challenged on population control, proponents retreat to the motte: “Are you denying Earth has limits?” Once safe, they return to advancing the bailey: sterilization programs, conditional aid, preventing development. The reasonable premise shields the unreasonable conclusion.

A reification fallacy - “Carrying capacity” sounds scientific, like load-bearing capacity in engineering—something you could calculate. But for humans, it’s not a discoverable number but a political construct entirely dependent on assumptions about technology, distribution, and social organization. The carrying capacity of a society using stone tools differs from one using nuclear power. Yet the concept gets treated as if it were as measurable as gravity.

A naturalistic fallacy device - Political choices about resource distribution, technology use, and economic systems get laundered through “natural” carrying capacity. When millions starve while grain rots in warehouses, that’s not policy failure but natural correction. When technology is denied to developing nations, that’s not imperialism but respecting natural limits. Contingent social arrangements appear immutable.

A kafka trap - Disagreeing becomes evidence of its truth. Point out that humans have consistently transcended predicted limits? You’re told this proves we’re in “overshoot.” Note declining fertility? That’s evidence we’ve “hit capacity.” Cite technological solutions? They’re “temporary” and “unsustainable.” Show historical failed predictions? That just means catastrophe is even closer. Every observation confirms the theory.

An unfalsifiable premise - For animal populations, carrying capacity makes testable predictions. For humans, every failed prediction just pushes catastrophe forward. Malthus predicted imminent disaster in 1798. Paul Ehrlich promised hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s. The Club of Rome forecast resource depletion by 2000. When apocalypse doesn’t arrive, true believers don’t abandon the theory—they revise the timeline. It’s not science but eschatology.

Most fundamentally, it’s a depoliticization device - It removes human agency from the equation, converting political problems requiring justice into technical problems requiring management. Instead of asking “Who controls resources and why?” we ask “How many people can Earth support?” Instead of challenging systems of extraction and exploitation, we debate demographic projections. Power disappears behind the seemingly neutral language of ecology.

Understanding these devices is essential because they appear throughout the history that follows. From Malthus to modern climate discourse, the same rhetorical tricks make political choices appear as natural facts, transform victims into problems, and convert solidarity into foolishness. Once you see the machinery, you can’t unsee it.

1. The Big Lie

In 1798, an English clergyman employed by the British East India Company published an essay that would reshape how the world thinks about poverty. Thomas Malthus claimed to have discovered a “law of nature”: population grows geometrically while food production increases only arithmetically, therefore poverty and starvation are inevitable. This wasn’t science—it was propaganda dressed up as mathematics.

The theory served a precise political purpose. As Britain’s industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery, as common lands were enclosed and peasants driven into urban slums, the ruling class needed an explanation for poverty that didn’t implicate them. Malthus provided it. The poor weren’t poor because of exploitation or deliberate economic policies. They were poor because they had too many children.

William Engdahl, in A Century of War, exposes the strategic deception at work. Malthusianism functioned as what we’d now call a “psyop”—a psychological operation designed to rationalize the British Empire’s systematic underdevelopment of its colonies. Rather than admit they were deliberately preventing industrial development to maintain economic dominance, British elites could blame the poverty they created on the “natural laws” of population.

The most damning fact about Malthus’s theory is that he didn’t even create it. He plagiarized it from Giammaria Ortes, a Venetian writer who had attacked Benjamin Franklin’s optimistic views about population growth in 1774. Malthus took Ortes’s arguments, wrapped them in pseudo-mathematical language about geometric and arithmetic progressions, and presented them as scientific discovery. The British establishment immediately recognized the theory’s usefulness and made Malthus famous virtually overnight.

This wasn’t abstract academic theorizing. Malthusian logic justified real policies with catastrophic human consequences. It rationalized the abolition of poor laws—the closest thing to social welfare that existed. It explained why helping the starving was counterproductive: they would only breed more. It made cruelty seem like wisdom and neglect appear as natural law.

The theory’s core deception was its reversal of cause and effect. Capitalism and imperialism create surplus populations through specific policies—enclosure of commons, destruction of local industries, extraction of resources. But Malthusianism claimed population itself was the problem. This sleight of hand has persisted for over two centuries, morphing and adapting but always serving the same function: protecting power by blaming the powerless.

2. The Birth of a Useful Fiction

Malthus wrote his Essay on Population as a direct attack on revolutionary hope. The French Revolution had terrified Europe’s aristocracy, and radical thinkers in England were imagining societies based on equality and mutual aid. William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet envisioned futures where technological progress and fair distribution could eliminate poverty. Malthus’s essay was explicitly written to prove these dreams impossible.

The goal, as Eric Ross documents in “The Malthus Factor,” was to absolve the state and wealthier segments of society from responsibility for poverty. Malthus argued that no form of society could prevent misery—inequality was nature’s law, not man’s choice. He wrote with breathtaking callousness: “A man who is born into a world already possessed… has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone.”

But it wasn’t Nature saying “be gone”—it was Malthus, speaking for landlords and Parliament. The theory emerged precisely when British elites needed it most. The enclosure movement had driven millions from common lands they’d farmed for centuries. The new industrial cities were hellscapes of disease and exploitation. Rather than address these manufactured crises, Malthus provided intellectual cover for ignoring them.

The British establishment didn’t embrace Malthus because his theory was true—they embraced it because it was useful. It transformed poverty from a political problem requiring action into a natural phenomenon requiring acceptance. As Harvey notes in his critique, Malthus viewed population growth and poverty as “necessary stimulus to industry.” The poor had to be kept desperate to ensure they’d accept any work at any wage.

What Malthus deliberately ignored—and what his supporters continue to ignore—is the role of technology and social organization in expanding resources. His mathematical trick of comparing geometric population growth to arithmetic food growth assumed agricultural productivity was essentially fixed. Yet even as he wrote, the agricultural revolution was dramatically increasing yields. The industrial revolution would soon multiply human productive capacity beyond anything Malthus imagined.

The theory also concealed a crucial admission Malthus made in private correspondence. He acknowledged that “the laws of private property, which are the grand stimulus to production, do themselves so limit it, as always to make the actual produce of the earth fall very considerably short of the power of production.”

This is a stunning confession. Malthus was admitting that the earth could produce far more food and resources than it actually did—not because of natural limits, but because of property laws. The same private property system he championed as necessary for stimulating production was simultaneously preventing that production from reaching its potential. Landlords kept land idle for hunting estates. Speculators held fertile acres out of cultivation waiting for prices to rise. Enclosure converted productive common lands into less productive private holdings. The legal framework that concentrated ownership in few hands meant vast productive capacity went deliberately unused.

The scarcity wasn’t natural—it was systemic, built into the very property relations Malthus defended. He knew the shortage of food that supposedly proved his theory was actually created by the economic system he supported. Yet publicly, he continued to blame overpopulation rather than underproduc­tion, the breeding habits of the poor rather than the hoarding habits of the rich. The “natural law” of scarcity he proclaimed was actually the artificial outcome of very specific, very defend­able property arrangements.

This wasn’t failed science but successful ideology. It provided what British liberalism desperately needed: a “natural” justification for an ever more powerful imperial elite ruling on behalf of “vulgar ignorant masses” who supposedly couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves. The theory that began as an attack on the French Revolution became the intellectual foundation for a global system of exploitation.

3. Laboratory of Cruelty: Ireland

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852 wasn’t a natural disaster—it was Malthusian theory put into practice. When potato blight destroyed the crop that fed millions of Irish peasants, British officials saw not a humanitarian crisis but a vindication of Malthus. Charles Trevelyan, who administered relief efforts, explicitly used Malthusian logic: this was nature’s correction to Irish “overpopulation.”

The facts tell a different story. Throughout the famine, Ireland continued exporting food to Britain—300,000 tons of grain in the worst year alone. Irish ports shipped out butter, eggs, cattle, and vegetables while a million people starved to death and another million fled the country. This wasn’t scarcity. It was policy.

Trevelyan believed providing adequate relief would only encourage “dependency.” Better to let the famine run its course and reduce the surplus population. He wrote that the famine was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” that would ultimately benefit Ireland by reducing its numbers. The British Parliament, steeped in Malthusian thinking, agreed. They provided minimal relief, attached to conditions designed to break up traditional Irish landholding and force modernization along British lines.

The deeper purpose, as Engdahl suggests, was the “clearance of the Irish countryside.” Landlords had long wanted to consolidate small peasant holdings into larger, more profitable estates. The famine provided the opportunity. Starving tenants who couldn’t pay rent were evicted en masse. Whole villages were demolished. The Malthusian explanation—too many Irish, too little food—obscured what was actually happening: the deliberate transformation of Irish agriculture to serve British markets.

The Irish had seen this pattern before. In the early 1700s, thriving Irish wool and textile industries were destroyed by British laws prohibiting Irish exports. Irish Catholics were forbidden from buying land, attending school, or entering professions. By the time of the famine, Ireland had been systematically underdeveloped for over a century. The poverty that Malthusians blamed on Irish breeding habits was the direct result of British economic policy.

What makes the Irish case so revealing is how consciously British officials applied Malthusian logic. They didn’t stumble into catastrophe—they chose it. Nassau Senior, an economic advisor to the British government, actually complained that the famine would “not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.” This wasn’t callous indifference. It was deliberate policy based on theoretical conviction that reducing population was beneficial.

The Irish Famine exposed the murderous potential of Malthusian thinking. When theory declares poverty natural and helping the poor counterproductive, mass death becomes acceptable, even desirable. The million who died weren’t victims of potato blight or overpopulation. They were victims of an idea—an idea that justified turning abundance into starvation and calling it natural law.

4. The Perfection of the System: India

If Ireland was the laboratory, India was the factory—mass-producing Malthusian justifications for colonial extraction on an industrial scale. The British East India Company didn’t just apply Malthusian theory; they refined it into a comprehensive ideology that could explain away any atrocity, justify any exploitation, and transform systematic impoverishment into humanitarian necessity.

The Company’s masterstroke was presenting Indian famines as demographic inevitabilities rather than policy outcomes. When millions died—10 million in Bengal in 1770, another million in 1866, up to 10 million in 1876-78—colonial administrators blamed overpopulation. They argued these were “natural checks” that would have occurred anyway, perhaps even more severely, without British rule. The logic was breathtaking in its cynicism: British exploitation didn’t cause famines; British benevolence prevented worse ones.

This rhetoric enabled policies of calculated cruelty. During famines, relief was deliberately minimal and punitive. The destitute were required to perform hard labor—breaking rocks, digging ditches—to “earn” starvation rations. Open charity was forbidden as it might encourage dependency. The infamous “distance test” required starving people to walk miles to relief centers, ensuring only the desperate would apply. Those too weak to work or walk were classified as “undeserving poor” and left to die. All this was defended through Malthusian logic: excessive relief would only encourage breeding and create future famines.

The Company’s most audacious argument was that British improvements had created India’s population problem. They claimed that by establishing peace, building railways, improving hygiene, and providing “civilized government,” they had removed the traditional “checks” on population—war, disease, local famines. Population growth was thus presented as an unintended consequence of British benevolence. The famines that followed weren’t failures of colonial rule but proof of its success—so many Indians were alive only because of British governance.

This humanitarian revisionism obscured the actual causes of famine. The Company had forced Indian farmers to shift from food crops to cash crops for export—opium for China, cotton for Manchester, indigo for dye. They had destroyed India’s traditional insurance systems—village grain reserves, mutual aid networks, flexible land tenure. They had imposed rigid tax demands that had to be paid in cash, forcing farmers to sell their entire harvest immediately after collection when prices were lowest. When drought struck, farmers had no reserves, no credit, and no flexibility. But according to Malthusian logic, the resulting starvation was due to overpopulation, not economic restructuring.

The designation of India as a “labour surplus country” became central to colonial economic policy. This classification, derived from Malthusian theory, justified keeping wages at subsistence levels. If India had surplus population, then poverty wages were natural market outcomes, not exploitation. The same logic rationalized massive labor recruitment for plantations in Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, and the Caribbean. These weren’t desperate people driven by manufactured poverty to accept any work anywhere—they were “surplus population” being efficiently allocated by the market.

The Company used population arguments to deflect every criticism. Why was India poor despite its rich resources? Overpopulation. Why did development projects fail to improve living standards? Population growth absorbed all gains. Why did modernization seem to increase rather than decrease poverty? Because it enabled more population growth. The theory was unfalsifiable—every outcome could be explained by invoking demographic pressure.

Perhaps most perversely, Malthusian logic allowed the British to present continued extraction as necessary for India’s own good. Resources had to be exported to generate revenue for famine relief (though little relief materialized). Indian markets had to remain open to British goods to maximize efficiency (though this destroyed local industries). Land had to be commodified and concentrated to improve agricultural productivity (though this dispossessed millions). Each policy that enriched Britain and impoverished India was justified as a rational response to India’s demographic crisis.

The documents reveal the conscious nature of this deception. Internal correspondence shows British officials understood that their policies created famine vulnerability. They knew that land revenue demands were excessive, that cash crop cultivation reduced food security, that destroying traditional support systems left peasants defenseless against crop failure. But publicly, they invoked overpopulation. As one administrator privately admitted, population theory provided “ideological cover” for policies that would otherwise be indefensible.

By the time of the 1876-78 famine, the system had been perfected. Viceroy Lytton actually increased grain exports during the famine, insisting that interfering with market forces would only worsen the situation. His Famine Commission concluded that India’s problem was not British rule but “the numbers of the population.” The millions who died weren’t victims of policy but of demography. The Empire had successfully transformed a theory into a technology of rule—one that could convert mass death into natural law and colonial extraction into scientific necessity.

5. The Imperial Management System

Malthusianism became the operating system of the British Empire, providing intellectual justification for a global network of extraction and exploitation. The pattern perfected in Ireland—deliberate underdevelopment explained as natural poverty—was replicated across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

India offers the starkest example. Before British rule, India had thriving textile industries that produced fabrics coveted worldwide. The British systematically destroyed these industries, forbidding Indians from manufacturing cloth and forcing them to export raw cotton to British mills, then buy back finished textiles at inflated prices. By 1850, India’s share of world manufacturing had collapsed from 25% to 2%. The poverty that resulted wasn’t because Indians had too many children—it was because British policy had destroyed their economic base.

This systematic destruction of local production in favor of extraction perfectly exemplifies what Daniel Natal identifies as the mercantile model—merchants don’t make products, they merely transport finished goods from colonies to sell at a premium in the metropole. As Natal explained in our interview, mercantilism requires the suppression of factory production in colonies because local manufacturing threatens the entire extractive system. The British didn’t just happen to destroy Indian textile industries; they had to destroy them to maintain the mercantile relationship. Any colony that developed its own industrial capacity would cease to be a colony and become a competitor. Malthusian theory provided the perfect cover—claiming Indians were naturally poor due to overpopulation rather than deliberately impoverished to preserve mercantile profits.

But Malthusian theory said otherwise. When famines killed millions in British India—10 million in the Bengal famine of 1770, another million in 1866, up to 10 million in 1876-78—colonial administrators blamed overpopulation. They applied the same logic Trevelyan used in Ireland: relief would only encourage dependency. Markets must be allowed to work. Exports continued while millions starved.

The theory served multiple imperial functions. First, it justified extraction. If colonies were naturally poor due to overpopulation, then British resource extraction wasn’t exploitation—it was the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Second, it prevented industrial development. Colonies needed to remain agricultural to avoid the “demographic disaster” of urbanization. Third, it rationalized authoritarian control. People who couldn’t control their reproduction certainly couldn’t govern themselves.

This wasn’t just British policy. As Engdahl documents, by the late 19th century, “British liberalism” had become the dominant ideology of international trade. It combined free trade (which meant British manufactured goods could dominate any market), Malthusian population theory (which explained away the poverty this created), and eventually Social Darwinism (which made imperial dominance seem like natural selection). Together, these ideas formed what we might call the first modern system of global economic management.

The system required careful ideological maintenance. Universities taught Malthusian economics as scientific fact. Colonial administrators were trained to see famine as natural correction rather than policy failure. Missionary societies spread the gospel of moral restraint. The entire apparatus of empire was mobilized to make artificial scarcity appear natural and inevitable.

Marx saw through the deception. He argued that capitalism doesn’t face a population problem but deliberately creates “surplus populations”—a reserve army of labor kept desperate enough to accept any conditions. What Malthusians called overpopulation, Marx recognized as systemic unemployment necessary for capitalist labor discipline. The poverty wasn’t natural; it was functional.

The mercantile empire Engdahl describes needed exactly what Malthusianism provided: a theory that made its victims responsible for their victimization. Raw materials could be extracted, markets could be dominated, development could be prevented—all while maintaining that the resulting poverty stemmed from the moral failings and breeding habits of the colonized. It was a perfectly closed logical system: empire created poverty, Malthusianism explained it away, and the explanation justified further imperial control.

6. The Modern Mutations

Malthusianism didn’t die with the British Empire—it evolved. Each generation rediscovered the political utility of blaming poverty on the poor rather than on economic systems. The theory morphed to fit new power structures, but its essential function remained unchanged: protecting privilege by naturalizing inequality.

The Cold War gave Malthusianism new urgency. In 1974, Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200 made population control an explicit element of U.S. security policy. The classified document argued that population growth in developing countries with strategic resources posed “national security threats.” The real fear wasn’t overpopulation but political power. Countries with growing populations might demand better prices for their resources or pursue independent development paths.

NSSM 200 targeted thirteen countries for special intervention, including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria—all rich in resources the U.S. economy needed. The document warned that young populations might become revolutionary. Better to reduce their numbers than risk losing access to cheap raw materials. For the first time in American history, Malthusianism became official government policy, pursued through conditional aid, sterilization programs, and the promotion of population control as development policy.

Denis Rancourt’s analysis of predatory globalization reveals the deeper structural forces driving these Malthusian mutations. He identifies two critical transformations in the global financial system—1971’s cancellation of Bretton Woods and 1991’s Soviet dissolution—each requiring new ideological justifications for extraction. The shift from fixed exchange rates to financialization in 1971 coincided precisely with the Club of Rome’s computerized Malthusianism and the ramping up of population control as official U.S. policy. This wasn’t coincidence but coordination: as traditional colonialism became untenable, new narratives of scarcity and overpopulation justified continued resource extraction under the guise of environmental concern.

The most revealing moment came in 2005-2006, when Rancourt documents an explosive, simultaneous four-fold increase in climate change coverage across 27 countries—not triggered by any climatic event but coinciding exactly with Goldman Sachs establishing its Center for Environmental Markets and the emergence of “cap and trade” in both academic literature and Google Books. The same financial institutions that had profited from previous waves of extraction now positioned themselves to profit from the climate crisis, with Malthusian logic once again providing cover. As David F. Noble observed, climate change became “an opportunity for profit-making” with investment banks as “central participants.” The poor would be priced out of carbon consumption while financial markets created new derivatives from artificial scarcity—the same pattern Malthus had originally justified, now wrapped in environmental rhetoric.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s perfectly embodied neo-Malthusian logic. Sold as the solution to world hunger, it was actually designed to prevent land reform. As Engdahl documents, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations promoted industrial agriculture not to feed the hungry but to forestall political change. By making farming dependent on expensive inputs—hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides—the Green Revolution created new forms of dependency while concentrating land ownership. Countries that had been self-sufficient in food became importers. Peasants driven from the land swelled urban slums. The resulting poverty was then blamed on overpopulation, not on the systematic destruction of sustainable local agriculture.

The 1972 Club of Rome report “Limits to Growth” gave Malthusianism a modern, computerized face. Using fraudulent computer models that ignored technological progress, it predicted imminent catastrophe from resource depletion. Engdahl calls it “Malthus with computer graphics”—the same static view of resources, the same ignoring of human creativity and adaptation, the same conclusion that the poor must have fewer children rather than the rich consume less.

Today, Malthusian logic pervades discussions of climate change and environmental crisis. Rather than address the fact that the richest 1% produce twice the carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, some environmentalists focus on population growth in Africa and Asia. The people least responsible for climate change are blamed for it. As documented in the Hampton Institute critique, this “climate colonialism” uses environmental concern to justify the same old interventions: population control for the Global South while consumption patterns in the Global North remain untouched.

The contemporary version is subtler but no less pernicious. Structural adjustment programs impose austerity in the name of fiscal responsibility. Land grabs for biofuels or carbon offsets displace millions in the name of sustainability. Development aid comes tied to population programs. The language has shifted from moral restraint to reproductive rights, from racial superiority to cultural difference, but the underlying structure remains: the powerful create scarcity, then blame it on the powerless.

What makes modern neo-Malthusianism particularly insidious is how it co-opts progressive language. Population control becomes “family planning.” Resource extraction becomes “sustainable development.” Land grabs become “conservation.” The same policies that once flew under the flag of empire now march under the banner of human rights and environmental protection.

7. The War on Women’s Bodies

The ultimate expression of Malthusian control isn’t just managing populations—it’s controlling the very source of life itself. Women’s bodies became the primary battlefield in the population wars, with their fertility treated as a threat to be contained rather than a power to be respected. This isn’t just about numbers on demographic charts; it’s about the systematic transformation of women from creators of life into units of economic production.

The birth control pill, approved by the FDA in 1960, represents the perfect merger of Malthusian ideology with pharmaceutical profit. Margaret Sanger’s crusade for contraception was funded by the same Rockefeller Foundation that had poured millions into eugenics research since the 1920s. By 1974, Kissinger’s NSSM 200 explicitly promoted women’s education and workforce participation not as goods in themselves, but as the most effective means of preventing births. The alignment was perfect: population controllers wanted fewer births, corporations wanted cheap female labor, and certain feminist organizations wanted women in the workforce. The pill became the tool that satisfied all three agendas while being marketed solely as liberation.

But as my essay “The Birth Control Deception” reveals, the real cost has been staggering. Women on hormonal contraceptives face a 70% higher risk of depression, double the risk of suicide attempts, and triple the risk of completed suicide. The pill fundamentally alters brain chemistry, changing everything from stress responses to partner selection. Women who meet their partners while on the pill often experience shocking changes in attraction when they stop—discovering their entire relationship was built on a chemically altered state. One in four women taking hormonal contraceptives is now prescribed antidepressants, yet the connection is rarely acknowledged.

The coercive nature of population control reveals itself most starkly in the developing world. In India during the Emergency of 1975-77, Indira Gandhi’s government forcibly sterilized 8 million people, primarily targeting the poor. The World Bank made aid conditional on meeting sterilization quotas. In Peru under Fujimori, over 300,000 women, mostly indigenous, were sterilized without proper consent. In Puerto Rico, by 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age had been sterilized—the highest rate in the world. These weren’t rogue programs but the logical extension of Malthusian thinking that sees certain populations as surplus.

In developed nations, the assault takes subtler forms. Schools became sites of psychological manipulation where, as Thomas Sowell documented, pharmaceutical companies viewed their “captive audience of more than 40 million school children” as future customers. Teachers used shock tactics—forcing students to watch graphic childbirth videos, isolating those with traditional values through peer pressure. One documented case involved a teacher calling on a student 23 times per class to defend his belief that sex should wait for marriage while orchestrating classmates to argue against him. The message: traditional values about sexuality and reproduction were shameful, backward, abnormal.

The fertility trap this creates is particularly cruel. Women are told they can schedule reproduction like a business meeting, but female fertility begins declining at 27 and dramatically after 35. The result is what researchers call “unplanned childlessness”—women who always intended to have children but aged out of their fertility window while building careers they were told should come first. Studies show that 80% of childless women didn’t choose that path—they were victims of circumstances created by a system that convinced them fertility could wait indefinitely.

The chemical assault extends beyond contraception. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals—BPA in plastics, phthalates in cosmetics, pesticides in food—create what scientists call an “endocrine-disrupting soup.” These chemicals may be damaging not just fertility but the maternal instinct itself, disrupting the complex hormonal cascade that creates the drive to nurture. Combined with decades of synthetic hormones from the pill, we may be creating a generation of women whose bodies are less capable of bearing children and whose brains are less primed to want them.

Modern feminism’s complicity in this assault represents a profound betrayal. As Marxist feminist Nancy Fraser admits, the movement became “capitalism’s handmaiden,” enabling the destruction of the family wage by flooding the labor market with women. When you double the workforce, you halve its value. What was sold as the choice to work became the necessity to work, with families now requiring two incomes to achieve what one provided in the 1960s. Women were “delivered exactly what feminism claimed to oppose: women reduced to their economic function, valued only for productivity.”

Most perversely, women have been taught to view their own bodies as the enemy. Natural fertility is reframed as a disease to be treated, periods as a curse to be chemically suppressed, the ability to create life as an inconvenience incompatible with modern life. Young women learn to fear their own biology while embracing synthetic hormones that disconnect them from their natural cycles. As one researcher notes, “First we need to remember that for a woman, love is an instinctive act of self-sacrifice. She gives herself to her husband and children and is fulfilled by seeing them thrive.” But feminism has trained women to reject this model as oppressive, even though it may reflect natural instincts.

The contrast with genuine reproductive autonomy is stark. When women have real choice—education, economic opportunity, and access to healthcare—birth rates naturally decline without coercion. Kerala in India achieved demographic transition faster than China’s one-child policy through female literacy and healthcare access. These examples show that empowering women doesn’t require poisoning them with synthetic hormones or sterilizing them against their will.

But even more disturbing is how violence against the unborn has been normalized as women’s rights. In Australian states, women can now abort healthy babies the day before birth for “psychosocial reasons”—relationship breakdown, financial challenges, or simply not wanting the child. The method involves making a hole in the baby’s skull, sucking out its brain, and crushing the skull. Yet this violence is not only legal but celebrated as liberation. The same society that recognizes wanted unborn babies as victims deserving justice allows mothers to kill unwanted babies at the same gestational age.

True reproductive autonomy means the right to have children as well as not have them. It means accurate information about fertility’s finite window and the risks of hormonal contraception. It means addressing the economic structures that force women to choose between children and survival. It means recognizing that women’s capacity for creation is a power, not a pathology. Instead, we have a system that treats female fertility as a disease, markets synthetic hormones to teenagers, normalizes violence against the unborn, and then wonders why we face crises of depression, infertility, and demographic collapse.

The Malthusian war on women’s bodies continues, but awareness is growing. Women are sharing stories of pill-induced personality changes, of relationships destroyed by altered attraction, of years lost to iatrogenic depression. They’re questioning why they should accept cancer risks for clearer skin, why they should shut down their fertility to participate in an economy that denies female biology. The age of uninformed consent may finally be ending—but only if we have the courage to name what has been done to women in the name of liberation.

8. Beyond the Malthusian Trap

The real population problem isn’t too many people—it’s too few people with power over resources. As the anti-imperialist critics in the Hampton Institute argue, we need a different theory of population, one rooted in actual political economy rather than imaginary natural laws.

The evidence against Malthusianism is overwhelming. World population has grown from 1 billion in Malthus’s time to 8 billion today, yet calories per capita have increased. Famines in the modern era don’t result from absolute scarcity but from distribution failures—people starve because they can’t afford food, not because food doesn’t exist. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization confirms we already produce enough to feed 10 billion people. Hunger persists not from overpopulation but from poverty, conflict, and the use of food as a commodity rather than a right.

Technology that Malthus ignored has transformed human capacity. The Haber-Bosch process alone, which synthesizes ammonia for fertilizer, supports roughly half the world’s population. Norman Borlaug’s wheat varieties, despite the Green Revolution’s political agenda, genuinely increased yields. The limits Malthusians invoke keep receding because human ingenuity keeps advancing.

But the deeper refutation of Malthusianism is political, not technical. Scarcity is manufactured through specific policies: land concentration, resource extraction, financial speculation, intellectual property restrictions. When Haiti’s peasants were driven from their land to create export processing zones, when Mexico’s corn farmers were bankrupted by subsidized U.S. imports, when Detroit’s water was shut off while Nestlé pumped millions of gallons from Michigan aquifers—these weren’t natural processes but political choices.

Consider Cuba’s response to its food crisis after Soviet aid ended. Instead of accepting Malthusian logic about too many mouths to feed, Cuba reorganized its agriculture around urban farms, organic methods, and local distribution. Calories per capita returned to previous levels without population reduction or foreign dependency. The solution wasn’t fewer people but different systems.

The alternative to Malthusianism starts with recognizing that poverty is created, not natural. Every famine in the modern era has been policy-driven. Every slum represents a victory of property rights over human rights. Every malnourished child is a political choice disguised as economic necessity. Once we see poverty as manufactured, we can start dismantling the machinery that creates it.

This means challenging the entire architecture of global inequality that Malthusianism supports. Land reform that breaks up concentrated ownership. Technology transfer that enables local development. Debt cancellation that frees countries from structural adjustment. Trade rules that permit industrial development. Climate finance based on historical responsibility. These aren’t utopian demands but practical necessities for a sustainable future.

The ultimate irony is that Malthusian policies increase the very problems they claim to solve. Poverty and insecurity drive high birth rates—children become insurance in the absence of social support. The countries with the lowest birth rates aren’t those with the strictest population controls but those with the greatest equality, education, and economic security. Kerala in India, with its focus on education and health rather than population control, achieved demographic transition faster than China with its one-child policy.

Two centuries after Malthus, his theory persists not because it’s true but because it’s useful to those who benefit from the status quo. It transforms moral questions about justice into technical questions about resources. It makes social problems appear as natural facts. Most perniciously, it convinces us that helping the poor is counterproductive, that cruelty is wisdom, that solidarity is impossible.

Breaking free from Malthusian thinking is essential for human survival—not because we face overpopulation but because Malthusianism prevents us from addressing the actual crises we face: environmental destruction and the concentration of power that drives both. The choice isn’t between fewer people or ecological collapse. It’s between a system that creates artificial scarcity for the many to maintain abundance for the few, and one that recognizes Earth’s abundance is sufficient for all when justly shared.

The Malthusian trap isn’t that population will outstrip resources. It’s that we’ve let a false theory justify two centuries of preventable suffering. Breaking that trap doesn’t require fewer people. It requires different politics—politics that sees human beings not as mouths to feed but as minds to create, not as burdens on the system but as its greatest resource.

Bibliography

Primary Historical Sources

Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson, 1798.

Senior, Nassau William. Letters on the Irish Poor Law. London: B. Fellowes, 1831.

Trevelyan, Charles. The Irish Crisis. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848.

Critical Analyses of Malthusianism

Engdahl, F. William. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. Progressive Press, 2012.

Harvey, David. “The Political Implications of Population-Resources Theory.” Economic Geography, vol. 50, no. 3, 1974, pp. 256-277.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. 1867. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, 1990.

Noble, David F. “The Corporate Climate Coup.” Blog post, 2007. Archived at Global Research.

Rancourt, Denis G. “Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines.” Ontario Civil Liberties Association, OCLA Report 2019-1, April 2019.

Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. London: Zed Books, 1998.

Irish Famine Studies

Mokyr, Joel. Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850. London: Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton University Press, 1999.

Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962.

Colonial India and Famine

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001.

Digby, William. The Famine Campaign in Southern India 1876-1878. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878.

Patnaik, Utsa. “The Republic of Hunger.” Social Scientist, vol. 32, no. 9/10, 2004, pp. 9-35.

Population Control and Reproductive Politics

Connelly, Matthew. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.” New Left Review, vol. 56, 2009, pp. 97-117.

Kissinger, Henry. “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” National Security Council, Washington, D.C., December 10, 1974.

Sanger, Margaret. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentano’s, 1922.

Environmental and Climate Politics

“The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.” Meadows, Donella H., et al. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Contemporary Critiques

Hampton Institute. “Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Capitalism: The Racist History Behind Population Control.” Hampton Institute, 2020.

“The Birth Control Deception.” [Essay referenced in the text]. Details not provided in original.

Medical and Scientific Literature on Contraception

Skovlund, Charlotte Wessel, et al. “Association of Hormonal Contraception with Depression.” JAMA Psychiatry, vol. 73, no. 11, 2016, pp. 1154-1162.

Skovlund, Charlotte Wessel, et al. “Association of Hormonal Contraception with Suicide Attempts and Suicides.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 175, no. 4, 2018, pp. 336-342.

Additional Resources

Borlaug, Norman. “The Green Revolution Revisited and the Road Ahead.” Nobel Lecture, 1970.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Annual Report Series.

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-big-lie-about-too-many-people