Food, Population, and Empire in the Hartlib Circle, 1639–1660

Abstract

The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity of limited resources to feed growing numbers, and they sought ways to manage this relationship by “improvements” that combined technological and political innovations in both metropolitan and colonial settings. This article examines how these efforts engaged with population, focusing on several projects relating to food connected with Samuel Hartlib (1660–62) and the Hartlib Circle: Gabriel Plattes’s manifold agricultural improvements for domestic use, Hugh L’Amy and Pierre Le Pruvost’s promotion of colonial trade and fisheries, Cressy Dymock’s corn-setting and “perpetual motion” machines for use in England and Barbados, and John Beale’s promotion of fruit trees and cider. While the Hartlibians developed no theory or doctrine of population and made scant use of demographic quantification, their projects framed the problem of feeding populations central to the management of human multiplication, both as a global, historical concern and as a key problem of colonial empire. They thus shed light not only on the emergence after 1660 of new discourses of demographic quantification, and the background to sustained demographic growth after 1750, but on the origins of population as an object of scientific-cum-political intervention through the medium of food.