Charles Hall, 1745-1825.

British physician and among the earliest "Ricardian Socialists". 

Little is known of Charles Hall, save that he was a physician and studied at Leiden, the Netherlands, before returning to Britain, and setting up in Travistock (Devon).  His medical career was not, apparently, a success and an expensive lawsuit left him impoverished.  Hall would eventually be jailed for debt in 1816, where he would remain for nearly a decade, and died shortly after being released from Fleet Street prison in 1825.

Charles Hall wrote only one hard-to-find 1805 treatise, the Effects of Civilization.  He picks up Malthus's theory of population, but takes its implications in a different direction. Hall concludes that a stationary population implies a very high death rate, which he promptly identifies as infant mortality among the poor, due to the very conditions of poverty, and extrapolates this to observations on inequality in society generally. Although his thesis was reminiscent and compared by contemporaries to Rousseau, Hall was not fantasizing about impossible returns to states of nature, but addressing inequality as it was concretely.  Charles Hall took the Smith'slabor theory of value to its logical extreme - i.e. the concept of labor exploitation. However, while some of Hall's claims were often quoted by contemporary socialists, the estimates were often outlandish and invented for effect (notably, Hall's famous claim that only 1/8th of total product was kept by labor). 

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