From Unbekoming @ substack
via earthsbloodstains

“The British needed to explain why their industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery—so they invented overpopulation.“

How Malthus and the East India Company invented overpopulation to justify empire

How a plagiarized equation became the perfect crime: making the victims blame themselves for their poverty. From the Irish Famine’s million dead to today’s climate colonialism, Malthusian thinking has justified every modern genocide by converting political choices into natural law.

The British needed to explain why their industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery—so they invented overpopulation. The theory persists because it still serves the same masters: turning artificial scarcity into cosmic inevitability, transforming solidarity into foolishness, and convincing good people that letting others suffer serves some higher purpose. This is the story of how empire learned to call murder mathematics.

Preface

I’ve been working on this essay on and off for a couple of years, but it was a recent exchange about the planet’s “carrying capacity” and “limited resources” that got me to finish it off.

I don’t believe in the idea of a “carrying capacity” the same way that I don’t believe in “safe and effective,” the greater good or in Climate Change™. These aren’t contrarian positions for their own sake. They’re recognitions that certain “scientific facts” function as empire-grade “fast thoughts”—ideas that seem so obviously true they stop further thinking, trapping minds into predetermined conclusions about scarcity, fear, and the necessity of “elite” centralised control.

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