In 1798, the Rev. T. R. Malthus published his explosive thesis arguing that population had a natural tendency to expand with the capacity of any society to feed itself. The most strident component of the Malthusian cased turned on the 'positive check' to demographic growth, a subsistence crisis generating malnutrition-induced disease and starvation, and thereby inflicting a marked drop in population. Malthus's argument was based on historical experience, but his vision was conditioned by, and conceived in, a late eighteenth-century context. Historians, while acknowledging that Tudor and...