by Paul Morland
Opening its market to the world after the repeal of the Corn Laws, Britain allowed for its people to be fed from wherever food could be brought in economically, and as transport technology progressed, that meant a wider and wider area. Britain’s purchases of American cotton alone would have required, to produce equivalent quantities of wool, the use of almost all of Britain’s pastureland, leaving nothing for the wool that actually was produced or for the production of meat. For the equivalent of a year’s coal production, Britain would have had to fell a forested area equivalent to more than seven times its total forested area–every year.14 Changes to public and private health and to diet greatly reduced death rates and so boosted the overall size of the population.
Although England was setting a pattern to be followed globally, as we have already seen, its population explosion differed from others in that it included not just a fall in the death rate but also at first a modest rise in the birth rate.15 Another characteristic of England’s demographic transformation was that, while the population boom was certainly fuelled by falling general mortality, it was not particularly marked by falling infant mortality. In most population booms which followed and which will be described later, as living standards improved and fewer died each year, it was usually highly vulnerable babies and small children whose mortality improved the fastest. In Yemen, for example, the death of children before the age of one has fallen from one in four to one in twenty since 1950, which is a major factor in explaining why, during this period, its population has grown from less than 5 million to more than 25 million (at least, this was the case until the recent outbreak of civil war).16 In England, infant mortality did not fall much from around 150 per thousand for most of the nineteenth century, and only began falling sharply after 1900.17 Once people had cleared the hazardous years of childhood they did live longer, reducing the mortality rate and boosting the population, but the early years remained, for now, just as dangerous.
In nineteenth-century England child survival was no higher in the town or city than it was in the countryside, a fact that would surprise someone presently working in the field of economic development. Today, a family in Jakarta, for example, is more likely to get better health care and have access to superior amenities than one in an outlying Indonesian island, and urban infant mortality rates are lower than rural ones. Back in the eighteenth century, at least in England, the reverse was true; London in particular was a much less healthy environment for a young child than was the countryside. In the nineteenth century, although towns and cities were improving, it was still the case that they were less healthy than the countryside. So as the population moved from country to town, it moved from areas of lower to higher infant mortality. This slowed the fall in England’s infant mortality whereas for countries urbanising today, it speeds it up.18
Generally, however, the pattern observed in England starting from the late eighteenth century would become a classic feature of societies in transformation, and has come to be called the ‘demographic transition’. As living conditions improve, people live longer. Yet for a time, people continue to have very large families of six or seven. Only later do family sizes decline.
Overseas Comparisons
What, meanwhile, was happening across the Channel in continental Europe?
France, traditionally seen as Britain’s main rival, was not only geographically larger but supported a larger population. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, England’s population had been a fifth of France’s.19 In 1800, with Napoleon Bonaparte in control and soon to be crowned Emperor, France had nearly four times as many people as England. British victories over France in the preceding centuries, victories which secured the global supremacy of Britain, had happened despite, not because of Britain’s population size. However, over the course of the nineteenth century France started to fall behind not only industrially and militarily but also in terms of population. By 1900, far from having four times as many people as England a century earlier, it had barely a quarter more (and fewer than the UK as a whole).20
This is even more extraordinary in view of the fact that while England had had mass emigration, few people had left France in the intervening century. It is true that France had lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, but this is a small part of the explanation. The strange fact is that French family sizes were simply much smaller than those in England. Its women had fewer children. Many explanations have been offered for this: French inheritance laws; the role of the Church in recruiting priests, nuns and monks who had no children; or, perhaps most intriguing of all, a knowledge among French peasants about how to practise birth control which simply did not travel across the Channel. Whatever the cause, France was, demographically speaking at least, stuck in a rut in the nineteenth century. Just as population expansion, urbanisation and industrialisation went hand in hand in Britain, so in France slow population growth was accompanied by limited industrialisation and a continuation of a predominantly rural lifestyle. By the middle of the nineteenth century England passed the point where half of its population lived in towns or cities; this did not happen in France until the middle of the twentieth century. With France’s stagnant population size and limited industrialisation came a loss of power. Indeed this was the start of a French fixation with demography and a fear that its inferior numbers would doom it forever to inferior status, if not subservience.
Two countries whose populations did rise as quickly as England’s, or almost so, were Denmark and Scotland. Denmark, however, hardly counted for much on the international stage by this point, while Scotland was bound to England in the United Kingdom, experiencing the same take-off of industry and urbanisation and also the same high levels of emigration.
For much of the nineteenth century it is not really possible to speak of ‘Germany’ as a single entity, since it did not unify until 1871, but taking it as the lands which were eventually to become Bismarck’s Reich, England and its fellow members of the United Kingdom made relative progress here too. In the first half of the century the population of Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland but excluding Ireland) rose from barely 40% of what was to become Germany to around 60%. Germany was still behind England in implementing those rudimentary reforms which cause the death rate to fall and the size of the population to rise. Other parts of Europe, such as Spain, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were further behind still and so experienced even slower population growth.
The fact that England’s population was growing so fast mattered. As the human tide always shows us, numbers count, whether because more people means the ability to field larger armies or because it leads to a bigger economy, sucking in and churning out more resources. The rise of England and more generally of Great Britain within Europe in population terms was a major part of Britain’s rise as the leading power during the course of the nineteenth century. When taking into account the simultaneous rise of people of British origin beyond Europe during the period, it was fundamental to Britain’s emergence as the leading global power. But before we examine the impact of England’s population revolution on the world, it is necessary to look at Ireland, where a very different and much darker demographic story was unfolding.
Ireland: An Exception within an Exception
While the population growth of England in the early nineteenth century was exceptional, Ireland’s loss of population was an exception within an exception.
Ireland was an agricultural country whose climate and soil were well suited for the potato. However, the potato did not arrive in Ireland until the reign of Elizabeth I, and when it did, it had major population implications. As Malthus pointed out, the soil can only support so many people. Once in a very occasional while, however, something extraordinary can happen which can dramatically enhance the land’s ability to support people, and in the case of Ireland, it was the arrival of the potato from the New World. When Walter Raleigh brought back the potato from America, he carried in his cargo the fate of Ireland. It took a while for
the crop to spread and for it to affect population, but whereas in 1600 Ireland’s population was perhaps 2 million (the data, as so much data from earlier periods, is contestable), it spiked to well over 8 million by around 1840.21 This was despite considerable emigration in the preceding decades to the United States of the mostly Protestant population from Ulster, which settled the Appalachian backwoods and became what the Americans call the ‘Scotch-Irish’.
The life of the Irish peasants who relied on the potato may have been materially miserable, but they were burgeoning in number nonetheless, and that was precisely Malthus’s point: unchecked, numbers would expand to the frontier of misery. In the absence of any kind of developed industry to provide exports to pay for the import of food, Ireland’s population could never have reached such dramatic heights without the potato and its ability in the damp Irish climate to support far more people than wheat, barley or any other crop could possibly have done.
Then in 1845, potato blight struck. What is most shocking about the Irish famine–which was hardly the greatest or the latest famine in human history but was nonetheless one of the most remembered in Europe–was that it happened when much of the British Isles was moving beyond the cruel Malthusian trap whereby populations that had grown too large to be supported were ground back down by the vicissitudes of nature and war. While England was heading into the modern age, Ireland was heading into a medieval nightmare. The hard-hearted attitude of British officialdom in the face of the Irish famine was informed by a Malthusian mindset undoubtedly supplemented by a degree of racism quite unfathomable from today’s perspective: a belief that, if the starving masses were fed, they would only breed in greater number and exhaust the land. It was the anti-philanthropy (or misanthropy) of the bottomless pit. Any attempts to alleviate the misery, to feed and tend to the poor and their sickly offspring, would just lead to more of them surviving and eating up the limited resources, pushing them again into misery. (This is the same approach that Victorians took to the poor in general and is familiar to us through the writings of Charles Dickens, parodying and condemning this outlook in, for example, Oliver Twist and Bleak House.) So as commercial exports of wheat and barley continued, the population remained unfed.
Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and the Queen’s private chaplain, spoke of the Irish as ‘white chimpanzees’. Some contemporary commentators were more sympathetic, as this report from County Cork in the Illustrated London News of February 1847 shows:
I saw the dying, the living and the dead lying indiscriminately on the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them… not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free of death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of three or four or even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last rest place.22
The effects of famine were shattering for Ireland. In the seven years between 1845 and 1852 around a million people died of starvation and another million emigrated under dire and often fatal conditions. Hundreds of thousands more left in the ensuing decades, transforming the great cities of the American north-east as the earlier Protestant emigrants from Ulster had transformed the Appalachians. Today there are seven times as many people claiming Irish descent in the USA as there are in Ireland, north and south combined. Hundreds of thousands more came to England and Scotland, often to the great and growing conurbations of Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham.
Famine and mass emigration consolidated British rule during the course of Queen Victoria’s reign. From 1837 to 1901 Ireland’s population fell from 8 to 4 million, and its share of the UK’s population fell from nearly a third to less than a tenth of the whole population of the British Isles, not only because of this calamitous drop but also because of the rise of population in the rest of the country.23 This had significant long-term impact, not least on British politics. During the course of the nineteenth century Britain extended the franchise to Catholics and, in due course, to working-class men and agricultural labourers. By the end of the century the male Catholic peasantry of Ireland (aided by the general over-representation of Ireland given its newly diminished demographic condition) could return enough MPs to swing many parliaments. Had Ireland still represented a third of the population rather than a tenth in this newly democratic era, the issue of Home Rule, which so preoccupied late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, would have loomed even larger. The demands of Irish nationalism would have been harder to resist; Home Rule, if not complete independence, would probably have come sooner, and partition may not have been a viable option.
Yet if Ireland was an exception within the UK, then Ulster was an exception within Ireland. It was in the north that industrialisation and urbanisation stirred while the rest of the island remained an agrarian society. Shipbuilding in Belfast and shirt-making in Londonderry meant Ulster was booming, integrating itself not only into the British but also into the imperial economy. As the Protestants of Ulster became the majority, both within the six counties which were later to form the Northern Irish State and even–more tenuously–within the wider nine counties which traditionally constituted the region, some of the more outlying and predominantly Catholic areas of Ulster suffered a fate closer to that of the rest of Ireland. Booming Belfast, meanwhile, the symbol of industrial, Protestant Northern Ireland with close links to Britain and its empire, went from having 20,000 people to having 350,000.24
Workshop of the World: How Population Made Britain the World’s Leading Economy
Britain’s imperial expansion in the nineteenth century was intimately tied to its becoming the workshop of the world. It was the first and the pre-eminent industrial power, leading the way in the production of clothing, the manufacture of iron and steel and the laying out of railways. This was the age when scientists such as Humphry Davy led advances in chemistry, and applied them to making mining safer, and when inventors such as Henry Bessemer changed the way steel was made, turning it into a material that could be used far more widely than ever before. There is no denying the importance of these individuals, their inventions and the changes to production they enabled. Yet it was only against the background of a rapidly growing population that these innovations could transform Britain into the world’s first great industrial power. Industrialisation supported Britain’s expanding population by providing work and, through trade, sustenance for its burgeoning numbers, but population expansion also drove industrialisation, providing the navvies to build the transport infrastructure and the factory hands to work on the shop floors.
It is true that a country with a small population can be rich and a country with a big population can be poor. So to say that Britain became the workshop of the world and, for a time, its leading economy, because its population ballooned is simplistic. Plenty of countries have had rapidly rising populations but remained poor while others have become rich as their population growth slowed. On the other hand, the link between these two events–the rise of Britain’s population and the rise of its industry–cannot be ignored. There are two basic ways in which a country’s population size contributes to its economic clout. First, there is the simple weight of numbers. Luxembourg is rich, its people on some scores twice as well off as Americans, but it is not a major player on the economic stage, unlike, say, India or China. Luxembourgers have prospered individually, and they have built a rich and successful country, but it has hardly any economic clout because it is so small. It has been possible for India and China to be very populous and to be so very poor that they too had no weight on the international economic stage–that was true of both countries for much of the twentieth century. But as soon as a country of many hundreds of millions starts to get going, even moving from abject to moderate poverty for its average citizen, the weight of numbers starts to count. The United States, meanwhile, is not the largest economy in the world because its people are very much richer than people in the individual European countries or
Japan, but because there are so many more of them.
Second, a country the size of Luxembourg can only thrive today because it lives within a zone of free trade–deeply embedded within the European Union and to a considerable extent, through the World Trade Organisation, with the wider world. Luxembourgers have been able to specialise in high-value services which enable them to buy necessities and luxuries from the rest of the world. Forced back entirely on their own resources, they would be living at subsistence level, as would any group of a few hundred thousand people cut off from global trade. Today, small countries can make their way in the world thanks to the rules and regulations of free trade. The world’s economy was not so open when Britain began its demographic take-off at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under less liberal trading circumstances, a larger population provides not only more hands for factories but more consumers and a larger market. It builds the economy both from the supply side and from the demand side. The ability to reach real scale in production and manufacturing requires either access to a wide global market or at least access to a sizeable one at home.