The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Third, the data is but an aggregation of millions of individual stories, of elderly parents living longer than anyone had expected, of a baby’s life hanging in the balance, of a choice to make a new life in a new land. The individual stories illustrate the data, but the data also illustrates the stories, placing the fate of families in the context of wider societies and the whole of the human race.

  A Point of View

  The human tide will continue to take its course regardless of what is written about it. The account I offer is essentially a historical rather than an evaluative one, an account of what has happened rather than what should have happened, or whether what happened is good or bad. Nevertheless, it is worth at this stage setting out my own values with regard to demography. There are only two that need be stated.

  First, human life is an inherently good thing, and the saving and extension of it is a worthy pursuit. If it is good to save the life of a single child then all the more is it good to save the lives of millions of children, which is what happens when infant mortality is brought down. Healthy, civilised and long lives are better than nasty, brutish and short ones. Violent and catastrophic mass deaths are an inherently bad thing; if we regret the loss of a single life then the regret at the loss of multiple lives should be proportionately greater. What we do not wish for our families and friends we should not wish for other human beings, whether this is in the name of equality or environmentalism or any other potentially worthy but abstract goal.

  Second, when women have control over their own fertility, they collectively make wise decisions, with or without input from their male partners. When women are educated and have access to contraception, they will not choose to have more children than they can support and, just as the hidden hand of the market works in economics, so the hidden hand of demography will work if allowed to do so. Enforced limitations on childbearing are not only wrong; they are unnecessary. In matters of demography as in so many others, the decisions of ordinary people, given the educational and technical tools to take them, will turn out to be best for their societies and for the planet as a whole.

  Demography is embedded in life and in a sense is life. The births, uprootings, couplings and deaths are life’s great milestones. Just because demography looks at these matters in the aggregate does not, should not and must not detract from the value and sanctity of the lives and experiences of the individuals over which it casts its eye. The demographer and the historian, however much he or she generalises, must never lose sight of this. Indeed, those who have the privilege of aggregating and generalising have a special responsibility to remember that the numbers they are handling are nothing more and nothing less than the sum of the hopes, loves and fears of every individual human being.

  PART TWO

  The Gathering Tide: Among the Europeans

  3

  The Triumph of the Anglo-Saxons

  Frank McCoppin was born in County Longford, in the middle of Ireland, in 1846. The same year, halfway across the globe, the Mexican region of Upper California was claimed for the United States, and the town that was to become San Francisco had barely 500 inhabitants; by the time McCoppin died, in 1897, it had around 300,000 inhabitants. It would have seemed astonishing at the time of McCoppin’s birth that he should have served as mayor of a town which barely existed in 1846, and that he should have represented a state in the US Senate which did not even come under US control until 1848. By the end of the nineteenth century the establishment on the western extremity of North America of a small but vibrant metropolis populated predominantly by people of British and Irish origins was thought of as quite normal, as it is today. Stories such as McCoppin’s abound, of people from small towns in the British Isles making their way to distant lands and there becoming rich or powerful representatives of new societies. Such stories could be told from Adelaide to Oregon, from Cape Town to Chicago, and they are all the product of a population explosion which created today’s world.

  England Leads the Way

  Experts debate what came first–the rapid growth of industrial production or the great surge in population–and which caused which. Whether it was the rise in population which stimulated the industrial take-off or the industrial take-off which enabled the growth of population, one thing is certain: these two events were contemporaneous. Whichever came first, the one could not have got very far without the other. Only mass factory hands could man the industrial take-off and world-scale manufacturing, but only with mass industrial production and exports could a growing population support itself. What started in Britain went on to storm the entire world and shake it to its foundations in country after country, on continent after continent. Population explosion first allowed the peoples of Britain and then more widely the people of Europe to dominate the globe, then played a major role in forcing their retreat. That is the story of the human tide. In this chapter, the first stirrings of what were to become global phenomena will be charted, stirrings which took place among the people of the British Isles and the sister peoples often referred to at the time as ‘Anglo-Saxons’.

  The British Isles is where the demographic revolution began. It is important to get a sense of why and how it was revolutionary and genuinely different from what had happened previously. It is not that populations had never expanded rapidly before. But the population expansion which began in England in the late eighteenth century and progressed throughout the nineteenth was the first to occur alongside industrialisation and urbanisation. What started at the beginning of the nineteenth century was therefore not just an incident in a long history of rising and falling numbers, but part of a sustained pattern of rapid transformation which was in time to go global. It was therefore revolutionary both in terms of time and space: time, because it was not only a rapid but a sustainable growth of population; space, because it set a pattern which was to be played out across the globe. (It should be noted that the data for England, or England and Wales, is distinct from the data for Great Britain, including Scotland as well, and from the United Kingdom, which included in this period all of Ireland too. The best available data is for England.)

  To get England’s population take-off into perspective it is necessary to go back a couple of hundred years, to the end of the sixteenth century and the closing years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the age of Shakespeare. When the Spanish Armada sailed–and failed–and when the Bard was at the height of his powers, there were about 4 million people in England, well up on the population of 3 million or so not that much earlier, at the end of the reign of Henry VIII. This rise by a third in half a century (which amounts to a little over a half of one per cent per annum) was rapid by historical standards. England under the Tudors was a largely peaceful and prosperous place, with a relatively stable political situation–despite the religious controversies of the age–and an expanding trade internally and with Europe. In addition, England was still making up for the losses of the Black Death, the bleak years of the Wars of the Roses and other calamities of the late medieval period. These had knocked the population back, so when the plague waned and a degree of stability returned, there was enough land to support more people. ‘Merry England’, then, was not entirely a myth of Victorian nostalgia merchants. A rising population normally suggests improving living conditions, and the Tudor and Elizabethan periods of the sixteenth century were indeed merry in England, at least compared to what had gone immediately before and to some extent what came after.

  The growth of the population slowed and then went into a modest reverse in the seventeenth century as civil war and plague returned, but growth resumed in the early eighteenth century.1 Average annual population growth was around a third of one per cent in the first half of the eighteenth century and nearly a half of one per cent in the second half. So far so good, but also historically fairly normal. But this is the point at which things change forever and the human tide begins to flow along a completely new course. Population growth in England accelerated in the nineteenth century, ex
ceeding an annual 1.33% on average despite large-scale emigration. Natural growth, excluding the effects of emigration, peaked at over 1.7% in the years 1811–25.2 This was much faster than in any other period, whether the high Middle Ages before the Black Death or in the Merry England of the Tudors, and it delivered a far larger population than England had ever seen before. When a population–or anything else–is growing at 1.33% per annum, it doubles in around fifty years, then doubles again in the next fifty years, and that is what the population of England did during the course of the nineteenth century.

  Just as this revolution was getting under way, the ‘old regime’ from which it was breaking was at last being identified, by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was a country parson from Surrey, a prosperous county in southern England, who identified what he believed was an iron law of history. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, written, published and progressively revised between 1798 and 1830, he argued that a growing population would always outstrip the ability of the land to support it, which would lead inexorably to misery and death. In such circumstances, Malthus maintained, war, famine and disease would reduce population back to levels that the land could sustain. At that point, with numbers down and fewer people to share the available resources, the surviving people, reduced in number, would each get a larger share of what was available, enabling them to live a little better, live longer and bear more surviving offspring. But the population would soon grow back towards its natural limit and, without the checks of ‘vice’ (birth control) or ‘restraints’ (late marriage and sexual abstinence), universal misery would return. As Malthus put it: ‘The power in population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’3

  Although Malthus had provided a landmark account of human development up to that point, the world was changing around him even as he wrote. With the arrival in his native Britain of the agricultural revolution followed by the industrial revolution, food production and trade were transformed, enabling the population to grow way beyond any previous bounds.4 Population size was no longer constrained by what could be produced locally. An industrialised country could sell its products on world markets and buy its food from around the globe. New agricultural techniques meant that more could be produced; for example, in the eighteenth century new sowing and crop rotation techniques boosted yields and in the nineteenth century agriculture was increasingly mechanised. Yields per acre rose around 50% in the early nineteenth century, and in the second half of the century huge new acreages in Canada, the United States and Australia fell under European farming techniques and their produce became available for purchase by people back in Europe.

  The settling of the new territories was often accompanied by the displacement and sometimes genocide of their inhabitants. Yet placing the land under modern agricultural techniques coupled with the advent of transport to sell the produce to people in Britain and elsewhere in Europe meant that millions of additional extra acres became available to feed a burgeoning number of mouths. Effectively, Britain was fuelling its population growth by opening up vast new acreages and farming them with the latest techniques. Only in Malthus’s day was this new, more efficient and productive world becoming imaginable. Had Malthus lived and preached in Manchester, at the heart of the industrial revolution, or emigrated to serve a community in the New World, he might have glimpsed humanity’s new future. But based in rural Surrey, he did not.

  The growth of the country’s population was not greeted by all as a national boon. Among intellectuals–and not only those who could be dismissed as conservatives or reactionaries–there was an upsurge of horror as the population spread and a mass civilisation and landscape came into view. In 1904 The Times lamented that the suburbs of south London were producing ‘a district of appalling monotony, ugliness and dullness’. H. G. Wells despaired that ‘England now for half of its area is no better than a scattered suburb’ and spoke of the ‘tumorous growth’ of endless streets and indistinguishable houses. D. H. Lawrence was positively genocidal in his response to the masses: ‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace… then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed.’

  A snobbish contempt for the lower orders was at least as old as ancient Greece, but the peculiarly nauseous (and nauseating) sentiments expressed here can be seen specifically as a response to population growth on a scale never seen before. No one expressed it more bluntly or alarmingly than the German philosopher Nietzsche: ‘The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.’5 This is a sentiment less likely to have been heard when the population was small and growing slowly at best, and when most of the poor were not far from the edge of starvation.

  Explaining Demographic Take-off

  Why was demographic growth happening and why in particular was it happening in England? To some extent, it had to do with good luck. The sceptred isle of which Shakespeare had written, with a civil war then still ahead of it, became once more a relatively safe place in the eighteenth century. In sharp contrast with much of the Continent, it suffered no marauding armies, at least after the Jacobite rising of 1745–6. Incidents of plague and other contagious diseases on a pandemic scale became less frequent, perhaps as standards of hygiene and nutrition started to rise. Some have even claimed the rising consumption of tea as a factor in explaining better health.6

  When population rises, one of two things–and perhaps both–must be happening. The first possibility is that births are outstripping deaths. The second is that there must be more immigration than emigration. In the case of England in the nineteenth century, the second of these explanations can be dismissed out of hand. It may often be said that England has always been a land of immigration, but this is simply untrue. The rise of England’s population between 1800 and 1900 most certainly did not have anything to do with immigration. On the contrary, during this period, Britain and Ireland were exporting huge numbers of people who were colonising the vast spaces of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and were for much of the period providing the largest immigrant group into the United States. It is true that there was much migration to England from Scotland and especially Ireland (both at that time within the United Kingdom) and, at the very end of the nineteenth century, of east European Jews, but this was dwarfed by the outward movement to the colonies and the USA. Estimates vary–the record keeping was not very good–and of course many people came back, complicating the picture, but one estimate is that in the 1850s alone, more than 1 million people left the country.7 By contrast, in the peak year for immigration in the century before the First World War, barely 12,000 from outside the UK came to stay.8

  Given that there was a mass migration out of England, and yet its population nearly quadrupled in the course of the century, the cause of the population growth must have been a vastly greater number of births than deaths, sufficient not only to generate this large domestic population growth but also to fuel the emigration. The poor, narrow streets of London’s East End, into which Jews were packed by the end of the century, representing the bulk of immigration into the country, counted as nothing when compared to the vast spaces into which emigrants poured out from Britain, in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Any excess of births over deaths had to compensate for the huge net emigration before it could contribute anything towards population growth. This is precisely what happened.

  One of the first things to change as Britain’s population revolution got under way was the average age at which people married. It got earlier, falling from twenty-six to twenty-three for women between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.9 That meant three more years of highest fertility when women would be having babies rather than waiting (mostly chastely) for a match.10 At the same time (still on the question of chastity), the number of births outside marriage
fell (along with the rising tide of Victorian morality). Overall, this was more than compensated for by the rise in births within marriage. Total fertility, whether inside marriage or out of it, rose from what had seemed quite low levels in the early eighteenth century, from four or five children, to about six children per woman in the early nineteenth century. This is one factor which makes England’s population take-off slightly different from many that followed: whereas in most cases a high birth rate stays high and the death rate falls, in England’s case the birth rate actually rose.11

  Meanwhile, on top of people marrying earlier and having larger families, people started to live longer, which meant fewer deaths each year. In the late seventeenth century, when plague was still fairly common and living conditions highly unsanitary, the average person could expect to live little beyond thirty. By the early nineteenth century, insalubrious though much of life continued to be, it was improving, and life expectancy was over forty.12 It was this steady fall of mortality which was the most important, consistent and sustainable contributor to the rise in population, even if the process was kicked off by a rise in the birth rate. And falling death rates were in turn made possible by changes in living standards–modest by our standards today but dramatic when compared with what had gone before–which were made possible by great technological changes ranging from cheaper and more hygienic clothing to more affordable food.

  To us, the Victorian city may seem like a squalid place, but compared with the poverty-stricken village life of an earlier age, not to mention the death trap which was London in the Georgian period and earlier, the great ‘improvements’ of the age were contributing to a population explosion. Plague died out in England sooner than elsewhere in Europe, and cholera, when it appeared, had less severe effects.13 Sewers were built, most famously in London by Joseph Bazalgette. Rudimentary medical care became more generally available. This was the age in which the railway made its first appearance. Pioneers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel laid out lines which connected all parts of Britain, and their successors ensured that with-in decades railways were spanning other nations and continents. Steamships came to plough the oceans and road surfaces improved. This meant quicker, cheaper transport, which, when coupled with innovations in agriculture, meant more, cheaper food. Local food shortages were less likely to result in famine when food could easily and cheaply be brought in from outside.