But if the trajectory of human history was shaped by those farming societies with the highest-yielding, most productive, energy-rich crops, why was life in these societies so much more laborious than it was for foragers? This was a question that preoccupied the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, one of the most influential of the Enlightenment’s cohort of pioneering economists who, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were trying to understand why in seventeenth-century England poverty had endured despite advances in food production.
