Pre-Malthusian Population Theories: Mercantilist and Physiocratic Views

Long before Thomas Robert Malthus published his famous essay in 1798, European thinkers were already debating one of the most fundamental questions in social science: how many people should a nation have, and how does that number shape its prosperity? Between the 16th and 18th centuries, two influential schools of thought, the Mercantilists and the Physiocrats, offered sharply contrasting answers. These pre-Malthusian theories form the intellectual bedrock of modern demography and continue to influence how policymakers think about population today.

The historical backdrop of pre-Malthusian thought 🔗

The period from the 16th to the late 18th century was an era of state-building, mercantile expansion, and emerging scientific inquiry in Europe. Nations were competing for colonies, trade routes, and military supremacy. In this climate, population was not just a social statistic, it was a strategic asset. Writers, statesmen, and economists began to systematically explore the link between the number of people and the wealth or power of a state. Their work, though uneven in rigour, laid the groundwork for the more formal demographic theories that would follow.

It is worth remembering that these thinkers did not have access to reliable census data, modern statistics, or the concept of carrying capacity as we understand it. Yet they grappled with surprisingly modern questions: Does prosperity drive population growth, or does population growth drive prosperity? Are resources fixed or expandable? What role should the state play in shaping family life?

The mercantilist perspective on population growth 🔗

Mercantilism dominated European economic thought roughly from the 16th to the late 18th century. Its central premise was simple: a nation’s wealth and power depended on its supply of precious metals, its favourable balance of trade, and its productive workforce. Within this framework, a large and growing population was almost universally viewed as an unqualified good.

The reasoning was straightforward. More people meant more workers to till fields, staff workshops, and produce exportable goods. Mercantilists generally argued that the number of people effectively determined a nation’s resources, not the other way around. A larger population also meant larger armies and navies, which were essential in an age of frequent warfare and colonial expansion. In short, people were both the engine of wealth and the muscle of state power.

Pro-natalist policies of the mercantilists 🔗

To translate this philosophy into practice, mercantilist governments and thinkers advocated for a range of pro-natalist measures. These included:

Discouraging celibacy: Religious and civic celibacy was viewed as economically wasteful. Some writers proposed taxes or social penalties on those who remained unmarried beyond a certain age, while others suggested removing privileges from celibates in monastic orders.

Promoting marriage: Governments offered incentives such as tax relief, dowries for poor brides, and preferential treatment in public employment for married men with children. Early marriage was encouraged as it extended the reproductive window.

Reducing punishment for illegitimacy: In a striking departure from prevailing morality, several mercantilist thinkers urged that the social and legal stigma attached to children born out of wedlock be relaxed. The logic was utilitarian, every additional citizen, regardless of the circumstances of birth, added to national strength.

Encouraging immigration and restricting emigration: Skilled foreign workers were welcomed, while those who tried to leave, particularly artisans, were often forbidden from doing so. C. E. Strangeland’s classic study traced these methods across English, French, and German mercantilist writings, showing how widespread and systematic they had become by the 17th century.

Giovanni Botero and the limits of population 🔗

While most mercantilists embraced unlimited population growth, one Italian thinker offered a strikingly different view that anticipated Malthus by two full centuries. Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), a Jesuit priest, diplomat, and political theorist, is widely regarded as the originator of modern population theory. His 1588 treatise On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities and his 1589 work Della Ragion di Stato (The Reason of State) introduced ideas that would echo through demographic thought for centuries.

The tension between generation and sustenance 🔗

Botero observed a fundamental tension in human society. The human capacity to reproduce, what he called the virtus generativa, was nearly limitless. But the capacity of the land to feed people, the virtus nutritiva, was bounded. According to the Encyclopedia of Population, Botero produced a first doctrinal draft of a theory of population more than 200 years before Malthus, and even anticipated what would later be called positive and preventive checks on population growth.

Botero argued that population growth eventually slows or halts because of three main factors:

Sterility of soil and environmental limits: Not all land is equally fertile, and the productive capacity of any given territory has a ceiling. Once that ceiling is reached, additional mouths cannot be fed.

Diseases and epidemics: Densely populated cities and regions tended to suffer recurrent outbreaks that drastically reduced numbers, a pattern Botero had observed in the plague-ridden cities of his time.

Wars and conflicts: Pressure on resources frequently led to warfare, which in turn served as a brutal corrective on population size.

In addition, Botero identified migration as a release valve: when local resources were exhausted, people moved to colonies or less crowded regions. One commentator has noted that Botero laid out almost the entire thesis of the famous Malthusian essay two centuries before it appeared, arguing that population always tends to press on the means of subsistence.

Despite the prescience of his ideas, Botero’s views did not find a wide audience in his own time. Europe was on the cusp of economic expansion and demographic recovery after the plagues, and his pessimism seemed out of step with the prevailing mercantilist optimism.

The physiocratic opposition to mercantilism 🔗

By the mid-18th century, a new school of economic thought emerged in France that would challenge mercantilist assumptions on almost every front. The Physiocrats, led by François Quesnay and his disciples, argued that true wealth came not from gold, silver, or trade balances, but from the land. Physiocracy held that agricultural labour alone was productive and that the prosperity of a nation depended on the surplus generated by farming.

This shift had profound consequences for population thinking. If wealth came from the soil, then the sustainable size of a population depended on agricultural productivity, not on policy mandates to multiply. The Physiocrats essentially flipped the mercantilist equation: resources determined the number of people, not the other way around.

Richard Cantillon and the means of subsistence 🔗

The Irish-French banker and economist Richard Cantillon (1680s-1734) profoundly influenced physiocratic thought. In his posthumously published Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (1755), Cantillon made the now-classic observation that men multiply like mice in a barn so long as they have the means of subsistence, and that the means of subsistence are the measure of population.

This was a powerful insight. Cantillon argued that the size of a population was not a matter of moral exhortation or state decree, but of available food and resources. He also drew attention to how different social classes, landowners, farmers, and labourers, responded differently to economic incentives, a theme that Malthus would later expand upon.

Mercier de la Rivière and the idea of an optimal population 🔗

Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Rivière (1720-1793), one of the most articulate spokesmen of the physiocratic school, developed these ideas further in his 1767 work L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies). This treatise is recognised as the major work of political philosophy of the physiocratic school.

Mercier introduced what we might today call the concept of an optimal population, the idea that every nation has an ideal demographic size determined by its agricultural capacity and technological development. Push beyond that level and you invite poverty, disease, and instability. Stay well below it, and you waste productive potential. The policy implication was clear: rather than crudely encouraging births, the state should invest in agricultural productivity, secure property rights for cultivators, and remove restrictions on the grain trade. Population would then adjust itself.

Mercantilism versus physiocracy: a study in contrasts 🔗

The two schools differed on almost every fundamental question. For mercantilists, the population was the foundation of national power, and bigger was always better. For physiocrats, the population was a derived quantity, governed by the land’s productive capacity. Mercantilists wanted the state to actively engineer population growth through laws, taxes, and incentives. Physiocrats preferred a laissez-faire approach in which removing barriers to agricultural prosperity would allow population to find its natural level.

These contrasting visions were not merely academic. They shaped colonial policy, taxation, marriage law, and poor relief across Europe for generations.

The bridge to Malthus and modern demographic thought 🔗

When Thomas Robert Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, he did not write in a vacuum. He drew, often without explicit acknowledgement, on the rich vein of pre-Malthusian thinking. From Botero he inherited the idea that population presses against subsistence. From the Physiocrats he took the principle that resources, especially agricultural ones, set the upper limit on numbers. From Cantillon he borrowed observations about class differences in fertility, and from Mercier the notion of a balance to be maintained between people and means.

In a real sense, Malthus reversed the mercantilist argument that numbers determined resources and adopted the physiocratic position that the resource base determines the numbers of people. His genius lay not in originating these ideas, but in synthesising them into a single, coherent, and provocative theory that would dominate demographic thought for the next two centuries.

These older debates still echo in contemporary discussions. When governments today design family-planning programmes, child subsidies, or migration policies, they are wrestling with the same fundamental questions that Botero, Cantillon, and Mercier asked, just with better data and more refined tools.

What do you think? If you had to advise a modern government, would you lean closer to the mercantilist view that a larger population builds national strength, or the physiocratic view that population should be shaped by what the land and economy can sustainably support? And in an age of rapid technological change, does Mercier’s concept of an “optimal population” still hold any practical meaning?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/science/population-biology-and-anthropology/Malthus-and-his-successors
2. https://dokumen.pub/pre-malthusian-doctrines-of-population-a-study-in-the-history-of-economic-theory-9780231888493.html
3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/botero-giovanni
4. https://mises.org/mises-daily/giovanni-botero-first-malthusian
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/physiocrat
6. https://historyofeconomicthought.mcmaster.ca/higgs/physiocrat.pdf
7. https://mises.org/mises-daily/physiocracy-and-free-trade-18th-century-france