An Essay – How Malthus and the
East India Company invented
overpopulation to justify empire
UNBEKOMING
YESTERDAY AT 4:00AM
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.