Malthus's "Essay on the Principle of Population" has informed debate on relationships between population and economy for the last two centuries. These essays go beyond the usual European and North American boundaries, bringing out new empirical findings and developing new arguments.

Introduction ; 1. What Determined the Onset of Modern Progress in the Standard of Living ; 2. Short-run and Secular Demographic Responses to Fluctuations in the Standard of Living in England, 1540-1834 ; 3. Malthusian Mythologies and Chinese Realities: The Population History of One-Quarter of Humanity, 1700-2000 ; 4. Population Growth and Population Regulation in Nineteenth Century Rural Scotland ; 5. Infant Mortality, Child Neglect, and Child Abandonment in European History: A Comparative Analysis ; 6. Malthus and North America: Was the United States Subject to Economic-Demographic Crises? ; 7. Malthus Revisited: Exploring Medium-range Interactions between Economic and Demographic Forces in Historic Europe ; 8. Malthus in Latin America: Demographic Responses during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ; 9. Structural Factors Affecting the Short-term Positive Check in Croatia, Slavonia, and Srem in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries ; 10. Determinants of Mortality Variability in Historical Populations and Its Behavioural and Aggregate Consequences ; 11. Inequality in Death: Effects of the Agrarian Revolution in Southern Sweden, 1765-1965 ; 12. Mortality and Economic Stress: Individual and Household Responses in a Nineteenth Century Belgian Village ; 13. Price Fluctuations, Family Structure, and Mortality in Two Rural Chinese Populations: Household Responses to Economic Stress in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Liaoning ; 14. Mortality Responses to Short-term Economic Stress and Household Context in Early Modern Japan: Evidence from Two Northeastern Villages ; 15. Infant Mortality in Nineteenth Century Italy: Interactions between Ecology and Society

Tommy Bengtsson is Associate Professor of Economic History at Lund University. He is currently also Guest Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Osamu Saito is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University.