by Paul Morland
Likewise, it would be a mistake to substitute a demographic for a pseudo-Marxian view of history, replacing ‘class’ with ‘population’ as the hidden factor that explains all world history. To leave demography out, however, is to miss what may be the most important explanatory factor in world history of the last two hundred years. For millennia, the same bleak story could be told of steady population progress reversed by plague, famine and war. Since around 1800, however, humankind has increasingly managed to take control of its own numbers, and to stunning effect. Demography has gone from the slowest- to the fastest-changing discipline. Population trends no longer move at a snail’s pace, with occasional shocking interruptions like the Black Death. Fertility and mortality fall with growing speed and transitions which once took generations now take place in decades.
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The Weight of Numbers
Imagine a car trundling slowly forward at more or less the same speed for mile after mile after mile. Imagine it then increasing its speed, gradually for the first few miles, then rapidly, until it achieves tremendous, even frightening, velocity. Then, after a relatively short distance hurtling along, the brakes are suddenly applied, resulting in rapid deceleration. This is what the world’s population growth pattern has been like since 1800.
The question then arises: why the last two hundred years? Why the year 1800 as a starting point? The answer is that the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth mark a discontinuity in demographic history, a great transformation. Before this time humanity had experienced without doubt dramatic demographic events, mostly on the mortality side of the equation, such as plagues and massacres, but these had been sporadic rather than part of long-term trends. What long-term trends there had been, such as population growth in Europe and in the world more generally, had been gentle and punctuated with unhappy setbacks.
By around 1800 the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (essentially Britons and Americans) were escaping the constraints on population growth identified and defined by Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman, writer and thinker whose life spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of whom much will be said later. Ironically, however, they were escaping these constraints precisely as they were being identified. This era marks a meaningful break in demographic history, a demographic corollary of the industrial revolution, a landmark pointing both geographically and historically to global and permanent change. Along with an industrially grounded population explosion went a boost to military and economic power and a great outpouring of settlers. These demographically driven events came to form a pattern which challenged, disrupted and in some cases overturned established orders.
The Great Transformation
To get a sense of how completely revolutionary have been the changes of the last two hundred years or so, it helps to have a long view of demography. When in 47 BC Julius Caesar was appointed perpetual dictator of the Roman Republic his domain stretched from what is now called Spain to modern Greece, as far north as Normandy in France and much of the rest of the Mediterranean, a region that today contains over thirty countries. The population of these vast lands comprised around 50 million people, which was about 20% of a world population of approximately 250 million.1 More than eighteen centuries later, when Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837, the number of people living on earth had grown to something like 1,000 million, a fourfold increase. Yet less than two hundred years after Victoria’s coronation, world population has increased a further seven times–nearly twice the growth in a tenth of the time. This latter multiplication is astonishingly rapid, and has had a transformative global impact.
Between 1840 and 1857 Queen Victoria gave birth to nine children, all of whom survived into adulthood. Britain’s previous female monarch, Queen Anne, had died in 1714, aged forty-nine. She had eighteen pregnancies but her tragedy was that not a single child survived her. By 1930, just twenty-nine years after the death of Queen Victoria, another great British matriarch, the Queen Mother, had produced only two children, Elizabeth (the present queen) and Margaret. These facts about three queens–Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth the Queen Mother–neatly represent the two trends that began in Britain between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and which have subsequently spread across the world.
The first was a precipitous drop in infant mortality, with the death of a child becoming mercifully irregular rather than a common agony for parents. The second, which followed, was a dramatic reduction in the average number of children born per woman. In Queen Anne’s time, losing child after child was common. In mid-Victorian Britain, having a large brood was still the norm. Its complete survival into adulthood was unusual (in this, Victoria had luck as well as wealth in her favour) but would shortly become usual. By the interwar years of the twentieth century, the Queen Mother’s expectation that both her daughters would survive into adulthood was quite normal, in Britain at least.
When Queen Victoria was born in 1819, only a small number of Europeans–around 30,000–were living in Australia. The number of indigenous Australians at that time is uncertain, but estimates range from between 300,000 to 1 million. When Victoria died at the start of the twentieth century, there were fewer than 100,000, while Australians of European origin numbered nearly 4 million, more than a hundred times as many as eighty years earlier. This transformation in the size and composition of a continental population occurred in the space of a single lifetime. It changed Australia completely and forever, and would have a significant impact beyond Australia’s shores, as the country came to play a major role in provisioning and manning British efforts in both world wars. A similar story can be told of Canada and New Zealand.
These startling facts–the rapid but selective acceleration of population growth; plummeting infant mortality rates; falls in fertility; the nineteenth-century outpouring of European populations to lands beyond Europe–are all connected. They are born of the same profound social changes that accompanied the industrial revolution and have proved to be a formidable influence on the course of history, empowering some countries and communities at the expense of others, determining the fate of economies and empires, and laying the foundations of today’s world. Yet when, after 1945, these trends became truly global, they caused an even greater tidal surge, one that contained similar eddies and currents to the nineteenth-century transformation but which occurred faster and more furiously than before.
The Great Population Trends, Past and Present
The acceleration that began in nineteenth-century Britain contains within it a complex story. It took hundreds of thousands of years from the dawn of humanity to the early nineteenth century for the world’s population to reach a billion but only a couple of hundred years more for it to reach today’s 7 billion. Now, however, there is a slowdown. In the late 1960s the number of people on the planet was doubling roughly every thirty years. Today it is doubling every sixty years. By the end of the current century there is a good chance global population will have stopped growing altogether. Some countries are already experiencing population decline.
Rapid population acceleration and deceleration send shockwaves around the world wherever they occur and have shaped history in ways that are rarely appreciated. For example, many people in the West would be surprised to learn that women in Thailand are having four children fewer than they were in the late 1960s, or that life expectancy for men in Glasgow is lower than for men in Gaza, or that the world’s population is growing at barely half the rate it was in the early 1970s. Once this immense speeding up and then quite sudden slowing down are apprehended, it is possible to get a sense of the great fairground ride of world population change and our own position, today, of living at a turning point. This, in essence, is the human tide.
Within this big global picture there are striking contrasts between countries and continents. In 1950, for example, there were two to three Europeans for every person in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2100 there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Afric
ans as Europeans. Over the same 150-year period, the ratio of Japanese to Nigerians will have gone from two to one in favour of Japan to nine to one in favour of Nigeria. Population change on this scale transforms everything, from geostrategy to macro-economics, from the demand for cradles to the need for graves. Neither the past nor the future can be considered properly without understanding this.
The great demographic transformation of humanity began in the British Isles and among those who originated there and who spilled out into North America and Australasia. Soon it spread to other European nations, and from them to the peoples of Asia and Latin America. Today, its powerful effects are to be seen at different stages across the world, in particular in Africa, where it is shaking and remaking a continent humanity first ventured from more than 100,000 years ago. Thus the great demographic transformation is returning to humanity’s homeland. The Human Tide tells this story, from its origins in north-western Europe, and will trace its ever more rapid and dramatic impact across the entire globe. It focuses initially on those areas where demographic change first occurred. Following the trajectory, it will then move beyond Europe to China and Japan, to the Middle East, Latin America and south Asia and ultimately to Africa, as the human tide broke out of its originally narrow confines and became a truly global phenomenon. In each region some background will be given, but the story will essentially start when the old demographic order passed away and was replaced by the new, a process that occurs earlier in some places than in others.
How the Demography Equation Works
There is no bigger driver of population growth than the fall in the number of children dying in their early years. Queen Victoria may have had the advantages of the best care the era could offer as well as good health and good fortune, but as her reign drew to a close around one British baby in six did not make it to his or her first birthday. Today, just over a century later, only one child in three hundred born in England does not reach the age of one. In some parts of the world, in countries such as Afghanistan and Angola, things are not much better for infant survival now than they were in England a hundred years ago, although even there they are improving. In other parts of the world, however, progress has been even more rapid than in Britain. As recently as the 1920s almost three in ten babies in South Korea died before the age of one, but today that figure is barely three in a thousand, a hundredfold improvement in less than a hundred years. When progress happens this quickly, most people cannot grasp the scale of the transformation that has taken place. Nevertheless, such vertiginous falls in infant mortality can cause a population to quadruple in a few decades, with profound consequences for a country’s economy and environment, its ability to raise an army or send migrants overseas.
In the absence of war, plague or some other natural calamity, the second biggest factor shaping population, after child mortality rates, is the number of children being born. This, too, has seen staggering shifts over the previous two hundred years. In the mid-Victorian period English women, on average, had around five children (a large number, though less than their sovereign); by the 1930s they were barely having two, in line with the Queen Mother. After the Second World War, to general surprise, the number went up for twenty years, as it did across the Western world, peaking at 3.7 in the US in the late 1950s and at just over three in the UK in the early 1960s, only to fall back again. In the twenty-first century, fertility has fallen all over the world. Today, women in Iran have fewer children than women in France, while women in Bangladesh have about the same number as French women.
The impact on society can be enormous. As the average age in a society rapidly rises, schools empty out and care homes for the elderly fill up. There is clearly a link between the peacefulness of Switzerland and the fact that its average citizen is well over forty years of age. It is equally likely that the violence in Yemen is connected to its average citizen being under twenty years old. Although other factors also play a part–Switzerland is very rich and Yemen is very poor–it is true that the countries with older populations tend to be much richer than those with younger populations. Among poor countries, it is often the youngest that are the most violent. South Africans are not much worse off economically than, say, Macedonians, but South Africa has a median age of around twenty-six and Macedonia of around thirty-eight. It is therefore not surprising that South Africa has a murder rate twenty times higher than Macedonia’s. On the other hand, El Salvador and Bangladesh have similar median ages to South Africa–around twenty-seven–but the former has a murder rate that is double South Africa’s while Bangladesh has one that is less than a tenth. Socio-economic and cultural factors are highly important too, and here, as elsewhere, demography cannot explain everything. Yet there is a strong correlation between age and violence; almost all the countries with high murder rates have young populations, even if a few countries with young populations have low murder rates.
The third factor remaking the world is migration. Contemporary Britain illustrates this very well. Once the destination of great waves of inflow–Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans–the British Isles closed to mass inward migration after 1066. Before 1945 millions of Britons went to live overseas, peopling new areas on a continental scale. But the movement was almost entirely one way: outward. Huguenot immigration to the British Isles at the end of the seventeenth century–at most 200,000 and probably many fewer–was the only sizeable inward migration from outside the British Isles for hundreds of years,2 while the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration of east European Jews probably never exceeded 12,000 per annum in its peak years.
Now this has been radically reversed. Britons still go to live overseas, though their destination is much more likely to be a retirement villa on the Costa del Sol than a hard-scrabble life on the Canadian prairies. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the globe arrive in Britain every year. Regardless of whether this is desirable or not, to fail to recognise its historically unprecedented nature makes it much harder to understand how far it is transforming society. Those who in the 2011 UK census characterised themselves as ‘white British’ or whose ancestors were native to the British Isles from at least 1066 are likely to become a minority within the UK sometime after the middle of the current century.
The Difference Demography Makes
Many historical events would not have been possible without the human tide. Without its population explosion in the nineteenth century, Britain could not have populated vast territories across the world, including Australia, thereby creating much of what is considered ‘global’ today, from the ubiquity of the English language to the norms of free trade. Had it not been for the sheer drop in child death rates in Russia in the early twentieth century, Hitler’s armies might well have taken Moscow in 1941, rather than encountering wave upon wave of Russian soldiers. An America that was unable to attract millions of migrants every year and which had not doubled its population since the 1950s might already have been eclipsed economically by China. A Japan that had not experienced more than half a century of falling birth rates would probably not have seen a quarter-century of economic stagnation. If Syria had an average age closer to Switzerland’s than to Yemen’s, it might never have collapsed into civil war, while Lebanon might have plunged back into civil war had its population not aged rapidly in the past forty years.
There is no guarantee that humanity has escaped forever the great natural forces that set population back–above all war, plague and famine. Indeed, since the dawn of the nuclear age, the potential for a war that eviscerates the global population has never been greater. Nor has disease had a greater opportunity to spread rapidly than since the invention of the jet engine and the arrival of mass rapid intercontinental travel. Environmental calamity may yet doom us all. To argue as a matter of fact that humanity has, over the past two hundred or so years, progressively liberated itself from the forces of nature that have previously always inhibited its demographic expansion, is not the same as saying that this will
necessarily be the case in the future.
Numbers and Military Power
The first and most obvious way in which numbers of people have mattered in human history is through military force. The triumphs of small nations or armies over large ones are remembered precisely because they are the exception to the rule that the advantage belongs to the larger and heavier combatant, whether at the individual or collective level. In contrast, the many contests that have proven the rule rather than the exception are no more interesting than the headline ‘Dog Bites Man’. Many cases where large nations or armies crushed small ones are long forgotten or are merely historical footnotes.
In antiquity, command of numbers mattered more than anything else in military conflict. The ancient annals are notoriously unreliable when it comes to numbers, and 17,000 Macedonian troops may not really have met 600,000 Persians at the Battle of Granicus, yet undoubtedly when Alexander the Great scored his first victory in Asia, it was against dramatic numeric odds.3 Although contemporary medieval accounts, like ancient ones, often involve exaggeration and need to be viewed with a degree of scepticism, it is nevertheless thought that at Agincourt the conquering English were outnumbered by the French by a ratio of six to one.4