Trends in Capital Accumulation in the Age of Malthus

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.