The scarce first book by the Scottish civil servant and political economist James Bonar (1852-1941), a brief monograph on Thomas Robert Malthus, a subject that would preoccupy Bonar for the rest of his life. An earlier edition, of the utmost rarity, had been published in the previous year, ‘Printed for Private Circulation’ in Edinburgh, in an unfinished state without corrections to the text.
‘Bonar’s enthusiasm for Malthus (his ‘services to general theory are at least equal to Ricardo’s’, 1885, p. vii) was rivalled only by that of Keynes. Aside from two books (1881, 1885), his entry in Palgrave’s Dictionary, and an Economic Journal article (1929), Bonar was engaged for much of his life on a full-scale intellectual biography of Malthus. How far this might have advanced the understanding of Malthus’s contribution is impossible to say. However, since Bonar’s published writings on Malthus appeared before both the discovery of Malthus’s side of the Ricardo correspondence (in 1930) and Keynes’s celebrated essay on Malthus (in 1933), the availability of additional material could hardly have failed to lead Bonar into new fields of interpretation. He died on 18 January 1941 at the age of eighty-eight; his ‘definitive’ biography of Malthus (Keynes 1933, p. 81n), the manuscript of which Shirras claimed to ‘have with him’ in 1941 ready for post-war publication, remains unpublished’ (New Palgrave).
