The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity of limited resources to feed growing numbers, and they sought ways to manage this relationship by “improvements” that combined technological and political innovations in both metropolitan and colonial settings. This article examines how these efforts engaged with population, focusing on several projects relating to food connected with Samuel Hartlib (1660–62) and the Hartlib Circle: Gabriel Plattes’s manifold agricultural improvements for domestic use, Hugh L’Amy and Pierre Le Pruvost’s promotion of colonial trade and fisheries, Cressy Dymock’s corn-setting and “perpetual motion” machines for use in England and Barbados, and John Beale’s promotion of fruit trees and cider. While the Hartlibians developed no theory or doctrine of population and made scant use of demographic quantification, their projects framed the problem of feeding populations central to the management of human multiplication, both as a global, historical concern and as a key problem of colonial empire. They thus shed light not only on the emergence after 1660 of new discourses of demographic quantification, and the background to sustained demographic growth after 1750, but on the origins of population as an object of scientific-cum-political intervention through the medium of food.

中文翻译：

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Hartlib 圈中的食物、人口和帝国，1639-1660

人口控制的想法通常与马尔萨斯的稀缺性观点及其 20 世纪的政治和技术遗产相关联。尽管 16 世纪和 17 世纪的政治思想家和科学计划者经常用宗教——尤其是圣经和天命论的术语来描述人类的繁衍，但他们同样理解人口受到有限资源能力的限制，无法养活越来越多的人，他们寻求方法来管理这种关系通过“改进”结合了大都市和殖民地环境中的技术和政治创新。本文探讨了这些努力如何与人口相关，重点关注与塞缪尔·哈特利卜 (Samuel Hartlib)（1660-62 年）和哈特利布圈子相关的几个与食品相关的项目：Gabriel Plattes 为家庭使用的多种农业改良，Hugh L'Amy 和 Pierre Le Pruvost 促进殖民贸易和渔业，Cressy Dymock 用于英格兰和巴巴多斯的玉米设置和“永动机”机器，以及 John Beale 促进果树和苹果酒。虽然 Hartlibians 没有发展出关于人口的理论或学说，也很少使用人口量化，但他们的项目将喂养人口的问题作为人类繁殖管理的核心问题，既是全球性的历史问题，也是殖民帝国的关键问题。因此，它们不仅阐明了 1660 年后出现的人口量化新论述，以及 1750 年后人口持续增长的背景，