Thomas Robert Malthus, Stratification, and Subjugation: Closing the Commons and Opening the Factory

With eminently unpropitious timing, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote of resource competition just as humans were bursting the bonds of organic economies. An Essay on the Principle of Population, in warning of the ills consequent to population density and resultant resource competition, may have, however, underappreciated its evolutionary effects. Although the significance of mortality regime has superseded its overall significance, population density, and the resource competition it brings, was the variable around which life history theory was originally constructed. With the coming of density and accompanying competition, life history theory explains how populations change and stratify as they vie to survive and reproduce. As herein argued, the slowing of life history is a consequence of population density that Malthus could not suspect, but might have appreciated.