Theme for 2026-2027: Scarcity and abundance

Scarcity and abundance are issues that have become central concerns in environmental, economic, religious and intellectual history, as well as in the history of science.  Our scholars this year are concerned with how different cultures have dealt with the problems posed to social wellbeing and order by constraints such as food supply and population.

Most moral, religious, and socio-economic systems from the ancient world onward have developed in response to material limits, whether food, labour, land, or energy. In antiquity, political theorists, philosophers, and states grappled with how to balance wealth, virtue, and the needs of the community. Medieval societies, shaped by both subsistence economies and religious worldviews, developed systems of redistribution, restraint, and moral regulation in response to scarcity. Early modern empires and trading economies introduced new practices of extraction and accumulation, while also prompting debates about the ethics of expansion and the management of natural and human resources. 

Construed in material terms, as poverty and wealth, this dialectic inflected longstanding traditions in ancient and medieval social, moral and religious thinking. Franciscan debates over the ‘use’ of material goods, for example, precipitated a language of natural rights whose influence reached well beyond the original controversy that produced it. Conceptions of paradisical or Edenic abundance conditioned attitudes to new worlds in the ‘age of discovery’, but also human interaction with the natural environment throughout the pre-modern period. Construed metaphorically, a lexicon of deficiency, moderation and excess inflected both theoretical and empirical approaches to medicine and to health, to pre-modern ideas of demography, but also critiques of luxury and conspicuous consumption and idealizations of asceticism that spanned geographically and culturally disparate societies.

The modern era has brought unprecedented transformations in knowledge production, energy use, and economic growth, often framed as signs of inevitable progress. Industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism intensified both abundance and inequality, while reframing previously suspect pursuits, such as profit and curiosity, as drivers of societal advancement. Yet these developments have also provoked critiques, from early reformers to contemporary environmentalists, who have questioned whether growth has limits, and who bears its costs.