6: New colonies
The establishment of colonies is not an innovation of the author's time, but have been noted even in ancient Greece to have existed, and to have thrived. Now, as then, a colony would be established where colonists were granted a plentitude of fertile land for little or nothing, and made excellent use of it, producing a bounty of goods for not only themselves but for their mother countries.
And now, as then, the colonial territories grew rapidly and exceeded the prosperity of the mother countries who, jealous of their success, poisoned their children with the burden of arbitrary and exploitive trade restrictions and exorbitant taxation to extract their wealth.
While the recent revolution of the American colonies is an embarrassment to England, its errs pale in comparison to the gross incompetence with which the Spanish mismanaged some of the richest new world colonies in South and Central America, strangling the source of their own wealth. The Dutch and French did nearly as poorly with their own colonial holdings.
The former English colonies in North America, now the United States, mad far more progress than the colonies of other European states, and even that of English colonies elsewhere. The availability of resources is not a satisfactory explanation - those colonies that failed to flourish were just as well provided. But instead, the difference is largely a matter of politics.
In spite of the intrusion of English into economic matters that led the colonists to revolt (high taxes, trade restrictions, the forbiddance of manufacturing), the North American colonies were allowed a great deal of latitude in managing their internal affairs and established political institutions that were favorable to productive activity. Some examples:
- Lands that were not cultivated by their proprietor for a given amount of time were declared grantable to any other person who would make productive use of them
- There was no right of primogeniture (which held that the first-born male must inherit the entire estate), though in some states the first-born was entitled to a double share
- There were no internal tithes and scarcely any internal taxes
- External tithes and taxation was placed primarily on exportation and luxury goods, making the production of necessities (food) for domestic consumption the most profitable use of resources
The consequence of these circumstances was "a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history." The net effect was an explosion of population, from merely 21,200 inhabitants in 1643 to more than half a million in 1760.
In aggregate, this is the effect of the 25-year cycle of doubling Malthus previously mentioned, though there are accounts that the speed was more or less in different locations: an astounding rate of 15 years in "the back settlements", though 35 years in the coastal settlements that were earliest inhabited.
Malthus suggests that this disparity shows that population increases rapidly where the two checks against it, misery and vice, are least influential: "there is not a truer criterion of the happiness and innocence of a people than the rapidity of their increase." Where towns emerge and the population become settled, there arises corruption and vice that slows the growth of population, whereas the more removed areas where men are at liberty to labor for their own benefit to the extent of their ability and means, population grows rapidly.
(EN: While I'm inclined to agree, there's also the matter of the growth curve evident in most studies of population: for a hamlet of twelve residents to double in size is simple, but for a town of a hundred thousand to double requires quite some effort. Vice and corruption are an acceptable explanation of the reason for this, as is the availability of resources to people living in confined spaces. Even a colony of rats, among whom politics is unknown, will grow very rapidly until it reaches a point where resources are too thin in their location to support more - and it can only gain in size by expanding territory. If additional resources are unavailable, you can witness the increase of disease and starvation, greater infant mortality, smaller litters, and such. So my sense is that Malthus's suggestion that politics alone are the cause of colonial growth overlooks a second and more influential factor.)
Malthus considers the effects of various disasters on the populations of Europe: war, pestilence, and the accidents of nature. These tend to be very short-term events from which some nations have been seen to recover more quickly than others, resuming their previous levels of productiveness: the population of London recovered from the plague of 1666 within 15 or 20 years, and the populations of China and India show little traces of periods of severe famine.
In all, such disasters are seen to have little long-term effect on the population when compared to the tyranny and oppression of bad governments, and the way in which bad management discourages production, particularly in agriculture.