On the Prosperity of Future: Malthusian Theological-Political Economy and Colonial South India

This paper explores the idea of preventive restraint, which lies at the heart of Thomas Robert Malthus’s classical political economy. Preventive restraint entails a conception of futurity that promises economic equilibrium, which must emerge from the present condition of imposed austerity and discipline. In this idea of preventive restraint lies notions of providence and redemption that shape much of Malthusian political economy. Following this, scholars offered important insights about the theological ground of Malthusian political economy. Under discussion in the paper is how Malthusian theological political economy helped shape, while being contested, the famine governance in Colonial South India. To investigate this question, I consider a debate between Sir Richard Temple, who was the British colonial administrator in India during the great famine of 1876-1878, and William Digby, who was a prominent journalist based in Madras. The debate was whether or not famine relief schemes would constitute excessive government intervention, thus risking the economic equilibrium that was supposed to be achieved by productive activity. This debate, I suggest, provides a generative resource to think about the idea of futurity that underlies the relationship between restraints and redemption, labor and time, and market and governance in colonial South Asia.