Abstract
The course and consequences of capital accumulation are key elements in the analysis of population growth and industrialisation of the kind that occurred in Britain over the lifetime of T. R. Malthus. He explicitly recognised that long-run trends in capital formation represented the outcome of many of the principal determinants of changes in output and population, when he wrote that ‘The laws which regulate the rate of profits and the progress of capital, bear a very striking and singular resemblance to the laws which regulate the rate of wages and the progress of population’.1 Indeed, one of the most arresting features of Malthus’s work is his continuing preoccupation with the development of the British economy, especially in the period of trauma from the 1790s to the 1820s, which stimulated his overriding concern with the interconnections between supply and demand conditions over time and their effects in terms of price variations. These themes have been reiterated with considerable elaboration by economists and historians ever since, drawn to the central period of the Malthusian era because, on the one hand, it was marked by many of the features most recently summarised in the expression ‘stagflation’ and, on the other, because it witnessed the effective transition to an industrial economy in Britain.
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Notes and References
T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London, 1836) p. 327.
C. Renwick (ed.), Five Papers on Political Economy by T. R. Malthus (Sydney, 1953) p. 94.
‘I differ as much as I ever had done with you, in your chapter on the effects of the accumulation of capital’, P. Sraffa (ed.), Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. VIII (Cambridge, 1951–73) p. 185.
T. R. Malthus, Definitions in Political Economy (London, 1827) p. 25.
For further discussion see J.J. Spengler, ‘Malthus’s Total Population Theory: A Restatement and Reappraisal’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, II (1945) in two parts, 83–110 and 234–64;
and D. P. O’Brien, The Classical Economists (Oxford, 1975) chapter 8 and references cited there.
S. Hollander, ‘Ricardo’s Analysis of the Profit Rate, 1813–15’, Economica, 40 (1973) 260–82.
See K. Kurihara (ed.), Post-Keynesian Economics (London, 1955) chapter 7;
and B. A. Corry, Money, Saving and Investment in English Economics, 1800–1850 (London, 1962).
W. A. Lewis, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’, The Manchester School, XXII (1954) 139–90, and The Theory of Economic Growth (London, 1955) pp. 225–6;
W. W. Rostow, ‘The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth’, Economic Journal, LXVI (1956) 25–48, and The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1960) pp. 41–5.
On the criticism of the thesis see P. Deane and H. J. Habakkuk, ‘The Take-Off in Britain’, in W. W. W. Rostow (ed.), The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth (London, 1963) pp. 63–82.
J. R. T. Hughes, ‘Measuring British Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic History, XXIV (1964) 60–82.
M. W. Flinn, Origins of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1966) pp. 38–44;
P. Mathias, ‘Capital, Credit and Enterprise in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History, II (1973) 121–43.
S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1972) chapter 3.
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England. A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967) p. 245; and Flinn, op. cit., p. 42.
J. Mokyr and N. E. Savin, ‘Stagflation in Historical Perspective: The Napoleonic Wars Revisited’, in P. Uselding (ed.), Research in Economic History, I (1976) 198–259;
J. Mokyr, ‘Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, XXXVII (1977) 981–1008.
N. F. R. Crafts, ‘British Economic Growth, 1700–1831: A Review of the Evidence’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXXVI (1983) 177–99.
Cited in F. A. Hayek, Prices and Production (London, 1935) p. 1.
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© 1986 Michael Turner
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Anderson, B.L. (1986). Trends in Capital Accumulation in the Age of Malthus. In: Turner, M. (eds) Malthus and His Time. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18218-3_14
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