Abstract: One of Malthus’s main arguments against free trade in his Essay on Population was the issue of international trade-induced structural change. We assess Malthus’s views both from a historical and an analytical perspective and compare them with Torrens (1815) and Ricardo (1822). We argue that the tender point of Malthus’s reasoning lies in his inability to perceive that a structural change process is at work both in agricultural and manufacturing countries. We develop a simple model to show that international trade dynamics may be such that a former manufacturing country may become a corn-exporting one, provided that the proportion of different qualities of land is different among trading countries.