Thomas Robert Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, demographer and Anglican clergyman. Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, he was ordained in the Church of England and served as a country curate before becoming, in 1805, professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College (which itself opened in 1806) at Haileybury, a post often described as the first professorship of political economy in Britain. In 1798 he published, anonymously, An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that population tends to grow faster than the food supply unless checked. Revised across several editions, the work shaped nineteenth-century debate on poverty, wages and demography and influenced later writers in economics and natural science.