by Paul Morland
Yet these battles are so memorable because they went against the rule that numbers count. Far more common in the history of human warfare have been cases where numbers were decisive, and in almost all cases numbers counted for something. Indeed, quite small margins were often judged to be critical, especially where the quality of the troops was not vastly different and there was no great strategic advantage to be grasped. Prior to Waterloo, Wellington could not even consider taking the initiative against Napoleon because he had only 67,000 men against 74,000 on the other side.5 In the grindingly predictable trench warfare of the First World War, fought with little scope for strategic advantage and troops of broadly comparable equipment, education and motivation, numbers were critical. The prospect of the entry of a first wave of 2.8 million American draftees in 1917/1918, threatening decisively to tilt the balance between the exhausted armies on the Western Front, drove Germany to desperate and ultimately futile measures.6
Behind the numbers on the front line are the numbers that comprise a society as a whole. In 1800, France’s population comprised a little under a fifth of the European total, and France could attempt to dominate the whole continent; by 1900, with a population that was less than a tenth of Europe’s, France was on the way to becoming a second-rank power. Ever since competing bands and tribes locked horns in pre-history, birth rate and population size have in most cases determined who has won and who has lost wars. Numbers of men on the battlefield, meanwhile, depend on numbers of babies in the cradle two or three decades earlier, particularly in eras of mass mobilisation or the levée en masse and total war.
Some societies have been more successful at mobilising their forces than others, but even higher mobilisation rates cannot fully compensate for a lack of numbers. Men left behind are often required for activities necessary for the support of the war effort and larger numbers of women meant, in modern times, more potential recruits for the factories producing armaments for the front. A state or an alliance of states with a demographic advantage–put simply, with more people and particularly with more men of fighting age–normally has a distinct advantage in a conflict. Through the translation of demographic weight into military edge, demography has come to have a powerful effect on world history.
Although missing from many histories, demography’s salience in world affairs has often been noted, and there has been a correspondingly long pedigree of pro-fertility thought and writing from those of a patriotic disposition. Tacitus, the Roman historian and statesman, compared the small families of the Romans unfavourably to the fertile Germans, while Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Arab historian, associated depopulation with the desolation and reversal of civilisation.7 Vauban, Louis XIV’s great military architect, was under no illusion about what ultimately drove power; however innovative the defensive buildings might be, he declared that ‘the greatness of kings… is measured in the number of their subjects’. Clausewitz, a Prussian theorist of war living in the Napoleonic era, considered superiority of numbers to be ‘the most general principle of victory’, and it was Voltaire who insisted that God was on the side of the big battalions. Adam Smith declared that ‘the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase in the number of its habitants’.8 Asked which woman he loved most, Napoleon is reported to have replied: ‘she who has the largest number of children’.9
Of course, a big technological advantage can undoubtedly be decisive. But often such an advantage, whether it be the Maxim gun or the atom bomb, cannot be indefinitely sustained, since it is invariably adopted by the enemy, whereupon population again becomes key. Iraqi and Afghan militants in recent decades were able to deploy devastating weapons against their first world invaders. Russian efforts to dominate Afghanistan in the 1980s and American attempts to dominate both Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century were in large part frustrated by the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq had populations with a median age of under twenty, while those of the USSR and the USA were well over thirty. It could be argued that in the end what was lacking on the part of the Russians and Americans was not sheer numbers but will; but even here, demography has a role to play. A country with a fertility rate of two or less is much more likely to have a culture in which civilian or military losses are unacceptable than a country with a fertility rate of over seven or nearly five, as was the case in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively around the time of the US invasions in 2002 and 2003. Each mother in the former case simply has fewer sons to lose. It seems callous to imagine that mothers of large families are any more willing to lose their children in a conflict, but there is compelling evidence to suggest that societies with smaller families are generally less bellicose.10
Numbers and Economic Clout
Besides military power, the most decisive factor in determining a country’s power is the size of its economy. A large economy itself contributes to military power through the ability to sustain large forces and, in modern times, to equip them with weaponry on an industrial scale. As well as contributing indirectly to state power through the support it is able to give to the military effort, a large economy is an asset to state power in its own right, providing leverage on world markets both as a buyer of goods and services and as a market for the goods of others. Again, this has been long recognised; Frederick the Great declared that ‘the number of people makes the wealth of states’.11
In a world in which the majority of the population lives more or less at subsistence level, the size of an economy is very closely related to the size of the population. If almost everyone has broadly the same income, and the national economy is no more and no less than the aggregate of individual incomes, then the economy will vary in size between countries based purely on their populations. This changes once average incomes cease to be similar between countries. When incomes per head vary, countries with relatively small populations can have exceptionally large economies and those with large populations can be so poor that their economies are small.
This occurred most remarkably during the industrial revolution when first Britain and then other parts of Western Europe and North America began to transform their economies and to experience sustained per capita income growth. Around 1800 the average incomes in Western Europe and the eastern seaboard of the USA were roughly equivalent to those on the Chinese coast. A hundred years later they were probably ten times greater.12 Thus the British economy was many times the size of the Chinese despite the fact that Britain had a much smaller population. The approximate correspondence of size of population and size of economy slipped out of kilter when some economies developed rapidly and others were left behind.
However, industrialisation has a tendency to spread, and it has done so dramatically in recent decades, nowhere more so than in China. The technologies which fuel economic growth are diffused with ever greater speed, and so it is not surprising that the economies of developing countries have grown more rapidly in recent years than those of developed countries. That is not to say that this is occurring everywhere or at the same pace, but it does mean that, globally, there is a great catching up occurring in terms of income per head, with many in poorer countries getting rapidly richer and most in richer countries seeing their incomes stagnate. In the pre-industrial world individual incomes did not differ radically across countries, and therefore the size of an economy was largely determined by the size of the population; likewise in today’s world, with its overwhelmingly modern economy, the size of populations comes to matter more in determining the size of an economy.
The relationship between modernisation and demography is not straightforward, however.13 It is true that in countries where most women are educated, most people live in towns and cities, and where there is a relatively high standard of living–that is, in all countries which meet our definition of ‘modern’–fertility rates in almost all cases are no higher than three and life expectancy is well over seventy. Modernisation is a sufficient condition of moving through or having moved through the demograph
ic transition to low fertility and long life expectancy. It alone will ensure that the demographic transition occurs. Women with university degrees will not, in general, have seven children. Office workers living in homes with sewage systems and having access to cars will live longer than did their peasant ancestors who toiled in the fields and relied for transport on their feet and, if lucky, their shoes.
But full modernity is not a necessary condition for having made the demographic transition. As the twentieth century progressed it was possible for a still relatively rural country with low levels of income and education to achieve low fertility rates and to lengthen life expectancy. Government-funded family planning, often assisted by international aid, and the provision of basic public health and medical facilities, again often internationally supported, can move demography ahead of modernisation. This is how a country like Morocco–where as recently as 2009 more than half of all women were illiterate–could have a fertility rate as low as 2.5 children per woman. It is how a country like Vietnam–with a per capita income a fifth or a sixth of the USA’s–can achieve a life expectancy at birth of just a few years shorter than America’s.14 Cheap technology and private and public philanthropy allow the demography, as it were, to get ahead of the economics.
Once the mass of humanity has reached or is rapidly moving towards modernity, along with which goes higher income per head, it becomes impossible for countries with huge populations such as China, India and Indonesia to have relatively small economies, and it becomes less sustainable for countries with relatively small populations, like the UK or even Germany, to maintain their position at the top of league tables of absolute economic size. For example, on the basis that the population of Indonesia is three times that of Germany, the German economy will remain larger than the Indonesian as long as the average German is three times richer, but once the average German is less than three times richer than the average Indonesian–a still relatively distant prospect, but far less so than was previously thought–the Indonesian economy will be larger than the German even though the average German will still be much better off than the average Indonesian. Also, because industrial and commercial technology is now widely spread and large advantages are harder to establish and maintain, population size is once more beginning to influence what determines the relative size of economies.
This view may be criticised on the basis that it looks rather crudely at the overall size of an economy, ignoring the importance of per capita income. There are two responses to this. First, demographic growth can itself assist in per capita economic growth; young, growing populations can provide a labour force and a domestic market. A large population creates the possibility of a large domestic market, which is particularly important where national markets are closed, as they have often been throughout history. Second, when it comes to power and what drives history rather than to measures of personal welfare, it is the overall size of the economy which matters. The Dutch continued to be prosperous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but lacking a large population they simply ceased to matter as much on the world stage as they had in the seventeenth century. Britain started to lose its pre-eminence to the United States as its population was overtaken by America’s towards the end of the nineteenth century. One of the most prosperous countries in Europe today, Luxembourg, is also one of the least important; wealthy though its citizens may be, there are so few of them that its economy continues to be a minnow. By contrast, China could soon become the world’s largest economy (indeed by some measures it already is), even though its people are on average still relatively poor, simply by dint of their great number. This gives China meaningful power in the world economy as both a buyer and a seller; it also allows it to access the resources required to be a major military player.
The question of ‘soft power’ is more subtle and perhaps less susceptible to numbers. Nevertheless, sheer population weight makes it more likely that a country will be able to play a role on the world cultural stage. The size of the population of India makes Bollywood a global phenomenon whereas the cinema of, say, Albania is not. The difference may lie partly in the quality or at least the general appeal of the product, but it also lies in the respective population sizes. It is less likely that Japanese design would have had such an impact on the world if there had been fewer than 10 million Japanese rather than more than 100 million. For sure, the extent of soft power is not demographically determined any more than military or economic power, but in all cases the weight of numbers counts–always for something, often for much.
Demography Within States, Not Just Between Them
Population matters not just to what happens between states but also to what happens within them. Had the United States been as ‘white’ in 2008 as it had been fifty years earlier, Barack Obama would not have become president. Obama won only 43% of white votes to John McCain’s 55%, but he won an overwhelming majority of non-white votes at a time when the US was simply no longer ‘European’ enough for this smaller white vote to prevent his election. Conversely, with the projected ethnic shape of the US in 2040, a candidate like Donald Trump, who purports to champion white, blue-collar America, will find it almost impossible to win, despite America’s electoral college system giving disproportionate weight to smaller, rural and predominantly white states such as Wyoming and North Dakota, both of which are around 90% white.
In 2016 those defining themselves as non-Hispanic whites comprised more than three-fifths of the US population and 71% of voters. Donald Trump had a large lead among whites in the 2016 election: 58% of voters who identified as ‘white’ voted for him (whereas only 37% voted for Hillary Clinton). Given the still significant white majority, this delivered Trump the White House. But when, towards the middle of the current century, white Americans slip below 50% of the total population, their support is very unlikely to be sufficient for a candidate to offset the very poor showing among non-white Americans that Trump received. Americans whose number one issue was inequality were significantly less likely to vote for Trump than those whose number one issue was immigration, which is testimony to the fact that concern about rapid demographic change was at the heart of the 2016 US election.
In England and Wales, the share of the population that does not categorise itself as white British has risen from around 2% in the 1960s and perhaps 7% in the early 1990s to nearly 20% in 2011. In predicting how an individual voted in the British Remain–Leave EU referendum, the strongest correlate with a ‘leave’ vote–after concern about European integration and the loss of British sovereignty–was a person’s attitude to immigration. Analysis of the voting data shows that it was areas such as Boston in Lincolnshire and Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, which had experienced the greatest rise in their immigrant populations in 2005–2015 (but interestingly not those like London, with the highest level of foreign-born residents), that were most likely to vote for Brexit, supporting the view that issues of identity in the face of changing local ethnic demography were vitally important in determining the vote.15
In France, it is unlikely that the government would have been moved to legislate against the burkini if there were hundreds or thousands of Muslims in the country rather than around 5 million. Quebec would probably have voted to break away from Canada had its predominantly Catholic French-speaking population maintained beyond the 1960s its exceptionally high fertility rate, which for a time was among the highest of any industrialised society. A few more French speakers would have tipped the independence referendum that Quebec held in 1995, when the noes won by just over 54,000 votes–barely a percentage point.
Shifts in the ethnic composition of states do not just affect the developed world, nor do they just impact on electoral politics; they are also associated with civil strife.16 Demography has become more important in more recent times, particularly as a factor in intra-state conflict.17 The sheer scale of demographic change and its acceleration over time–the demographic whirlwind–is one of the reasons. As birth rates hit unpreced
ented highs for lengthy periods while death rates plummet, populations can grow fast, as did England’s in the nineteenth century. Indeed, those experiencing these changes later experienced population growth which far outstripped the UK’s nineteenth-century achievement. Often such growth affects one ethnic group but not another because of different social or religious practices or different levels of socio-economic development. It has become harshly apparent that demographic strength between different ethnic and social groups can change with historically unprecedented speed, and this can have a dislocating and disorienting impact.
Although sometimes an inter-state phenomenon, these shifts are often experienced at intra-state level since most states contain ethnic minorities and many of those minorities display markedly different demographic behaviour from the majority. Chechens in Russia, Albanians in Serbia (or what was Serbia) and Catholics in Northern Ireland spring to mind. These are all cases where minorities have a higher birth rate than majorities, with the result being a shift in or challenge to the prevailing power structure. Sometimes it is the minorities who have a lower birth rate, such as the whites in South Africa or the Chinese in Malaysia, again with domestic political consequences.
Demography also matters more now than in the past because politics has become increasingly ethnic in its nature in the modern era, particularly since the French Revolution. The era in which an ethnically distinct elite rules over a majority, whether Normans in England, whites in South Africa or Alawites in Syria, appears to be coming to an end. In an increasingly democratic environment, numbers count, and where politics has an ethnic nature, the numbers of different ethnic groups relative to each other become particularly important.