by Paul Morland
Comparing the populations and economies of Britain and France is informative. The data for the size of the economy is more contentious than that for the size of the population, but taking what is probably the best data available, the economy of the UK grew steadily from less than a third of that of France in 1700 to more than a third larger by the outbreak of the First World War.25 Relative to France’s economy, therefore, Britain’s quadrupled. Over the same period, the UK’s population went from less than half of that of France to around 15% more. So a good part of Britain’s economic growth relative to that of France must be attributed to the relative growth of its population.
Without its great nineteenth-century population growth, Britain could not have developed either into the workshop of the world early in the century or into the world’s greatest financier in the second half. Even ignoring the impact of a growing population on increasing the market and enriching the population and simply looking at how sheer growth increased the economy, about half of the economic growth was the result of population increases alone. Just as a rising population contributed to economic growth, so economic development led to rising population. With greater wealth, Britain was able to invest in better public health, and its people were able to eat better, thanks to trade with their brothers and sisters settling the Canadian prairie and the Australian outback. Britain had the population scale to become the world’s factory and then, based on the wealth it accumulated, to become the world’s financier. And just as its leading economic role would not have been possible without its population boom, neither would its leading imperial role.
For Queen and Mother Country: Populating the Empire
The great cultural historian Fernand Braudel said of the Spaniards that they could conquer but not grasp Central and South America.26 The suggestion is that although the Spaniards had a vast empire on paper, in practice they had little impact or control over much of it, even before losing most of it early in the nineteenth century. In large part this was because there were simply not enough Spaniards to make a real population impact on the lands they conquered, even if they succeeded–intentionally or otherwise–in wiping out large swathes of the populations who had been there beforehand. When the US annexed the northern half of Mexico in 1848 (including what are today the states of California, Arizona and New Mexico) they were able to do so easily because there were hardly any Spaniards or Mexicans there. This is in sharp contrast to the British, who peopled their empire–for which, of course, people were required. And people is what Britain came to have in abundance. The difference between the Spanish and British in this respect depended critically on the fact that Britain was undergoing a population explosion at the time, producing enough people to grow the population dramatically at home while exporting millions to the colonies and beyond. Spain had never been able to do this.
Great waves of people from the British Isles settled in the imperial territories of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, bringing with them diseases that devastated the indigenous peoples–much as the Spaniards had done in Latin America two or three centuries earlier–while themselves rapidly growing in number. It might seem surprising that a few million migrants could dominate a continent the size of Australia within half a century, but it is less extraordinary when the relatively small size of the indigenous population is borne in mind as well as its decline in the face of European diseases and violence, and the robust health and reproductive powers of those Europeans who were able to double their numbers every generation even without migration. When a settler agriculturalist population replaces a largely hunter-gatherer one, that process is often aided demographically by the high birth rate and low death rate of the former (who are able to access new lands for cultivation and thus at least temporarily escape Malthusian constraints) and a high death rate of the latter (sometimes at least in part the result of genocide but often largely the result of diseases brought in by the newcomers).
The motives which drove the migrants–the pull and push factors–are complicated and vary in each case. Migration to the colonies itself pre-dated the population explosion by a couple of hundred years, it is true, but migration on the scale witnessed in the nineteenth century would not have been possible without depopulating Britain had a population explosion not been under way at home. To some extent, the surfeit of people generated its own outward pressures. The colonies were distant and travel to them was often difficult and dangerous, but they held out opportunity and possibility. Often migrants failed overseas and returned, and sometimes they might have regretted going, but there were many success stories. In colonies where men outnumbered women, women could be tempted to move out. Ellen Clancy, who emigrated to Australia in 1853, wrote back home years later:
If you can go under suitable protection, possess good health and are not too fastidious or ‘fine ladylike’, can milk cows, churn butter… the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet with in England.
She added that thanks to their fewer numbers relative to men, women ‘may be pretty sure of having our way’.27
It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this gave Britain a head start over its rivals. British emigrants settled in areas whose indigenous peoples, still following the population patterns described by Malthus, were easily outnumbered and pushed aside, sometimes brutally, by armies of newcomers who cornered resources such as land and water. Britain’s ability to escape Malthus’s constraints was the secret that allowed its people to wrest continental-sized territories away from their original inhabitants. It was the weight of numbers–combined with new industrial technologies–that enabled the British and their offspring to make their language, culture and political institutions the global norm.
Although England had led the way in population growth, Scotland was in close step. Wales was often included in the English data, but Ireland was different. Whilst aware of these differences and similarities, it is possible to talk of a population explosion which was not just English but which encompassed Britain as a whole. This was important in terms of the British Empire, because both Scotland and Ireland played a disproportionate role in providing immigrants for the lands beyond Europe. Britain’s rise to global pre-eminence was based not just on the population explosion at home but also on its people coming to dominate vast continental spaces abroad. If, as historian Timothy Snyder has argued, speaking of late 1940 and early 1941, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had remade Europe ‘but Great Britain had made the world’, they did so by exporting people.28
It is worth distinguishing between three different areas in which the British had an impact. First, there were colonies into which British people poured, where they overwhelmed the indigenous populations and forcibly shaped new societies in their place. In this category would be included Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Second, there was the United States, where Britain was no longer in control but which had been formed by people of British origin and which continued for much of the nineteenth century to be populated by waves of immigrants coming predominantly from the British Isles. Finally there was India and eventually vast areas of Africa where large numbers of colonists did not settle but where domination by the British was facilitated by its rising population (more boots to put on the ground) and by its industrialisation (particularly of its military), which meant that huge colonised populations could be dominated and controlled in their own homeland.
Let us start with Canada, the world’s second largest country by surface area. Much of it, it is true, is uninhabitable wasteland, but much is not, and is suitable for intensive agricultural settlement. The population of this vast area was less than 2.5 million in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it had nearly tripled by the outbreak of the First World War to well over 7 million. This was a growth rate fuelled by immigration, and that immigration came from England, Scotland and Ireland. By 1914 well over half the people of Canada hailed from the British Isles, either
directly or by origin. The French-Canadian share, concentrated in Quebec, slid from nearly a third to not much more than a quarter of the total. French Canadians had a famously high birth rate–interpreted by some as a ‘revenge of the cradle’, a getting their own back on the British for defeating France in Canada–and this went some way to counteracting the impact of immigration from the British Isles and ensuring that they remained a majority in what would become the province of Quebec. Many, however, emigrated to the United States during the course of the nineteenth century, while very few arrived from France to supplement their number.29
Immigrants from Britain and Ireland had been pouring in both before and after the creation of the Dominion (a formal union of the Provinces into a country called Canada) in 1867, and in due course the indigenous population of Canada was reduced to less than one in thirty. Some Irish immigrants kept up a tradition of antagonism towards Britain, but nevertheless the British imprint was placed firmly on this vast territory–in terms of its language, place names, constitution and politics. There was also a huge impact back home. Canada became one of the primary exporters of food to the United Kingdom, posing competitive challenges for British farmers in the high days of free trade but meaning more and cheaper food and a tangible improvement in the standards of living of the working classes in the two or three decades before the First World War. During that war, food from Canada became a lifeline for Britain, while men from Canada rushed to fill the trenches in the service of what was still very much thought of as the mother country.
The story of Australia is similar. In the hundred years to the outbreak of the First World War the European population of Australia went from fewer than 10,000 to more than 4 million, and again this number was made up overwhelmingly of emigrants from the British Isles. Nearly 200,000 came in the 1880s and nearly twice that number in the 1890s.30 This was a predominantly young population (immigrants usually are), encouraged to ‘open up’ the territory and incentivised by cheap land. Unsurprisingly, this meant a high birth rate and low death rate (typical of young populations), which in turn swelled numbers even more. Again as in Canada, the indigenous population, never very large to start with, was reduced to the status of statistical insignificance. By the early 1920s there were barely 3,000 indigenous Australians in the areas of most intense British settlement, namely Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. Throughout Australia as a whole, the people who little more than a hundred years earlier had had the continent to themselves represented barely 2% of the population. In contrast, over 80% of those born overseas had been born in Britain and the overwhelming majority of those born in Australia were born of British immigrant parents or grandparents.31
The population of New Zealand grew tenfold to a million in the half-century before the First World War, and although the Maoris were more successful at holding on than the indigenous populations of Canada or Australia had been (their population share rising significantly as the century progressed), they still represented barely 5% of the population early in the twentieth century.32 Again like Canada, Australia and New Zealand provided not only huge territories on to which British culture and norms could be imprinted through vast population movement, but also large quantities of food in peacetime and–even more crucially–in wartime, as well as more willing volunteers to man the trenches when the call from the Motherland came.
What is noteworthy in all these cases is that although Britain had nominally held colonies in North America since the early seventeenth century and in Australasia since the eighteenth century, it was only once a population boom at home could fuel mass emigration that these territories came under meaningful control of Britain through a process of settlement. Without the population boom there would have been no mass settlement, and without mass settlement Britain’s imperial claims to these territories might have remained as insubstantial as those of Spain to most of Latin America. Equally, without mass settlement these lands could not have become the great granaries and providers of meat and other essentials to a global trading system of which a newly industrialised Britain was the heart.
Just as Ireland was the exception within an exception in the British Isles, so South Africa was the exception that proved the rule within the British Empire. Whereas most of Africa was judged unsuitable for European settlement, its climate unhealthy, malaria rampant and transport to its interior untenable, South Africa was seen by the British as a land of emigration thanks to its more amenable climate. People were also drawn by the lure of diamonds and gold. As in Canada, people from the British Isles were not the first Europeans to come to this conclusion, and the history of Britain in South Africa is as much one of displacement of the Dutch settlers as it is of displacement of the Africans. The point, however, is not the ins and outs of British and Dutch relations and the Boer Wars, but rather this: that precisely where the Europeans were unable to dominate demographically, wherever their populations did not numerically overwhelm those of the indigenous people, their foothold was built on shaky and ultimately unsustainable grounds. It is true that today Canada, New Zealand and Australia have populations of decreasingly British, and indeed European, origins, as they have opened their doors to immigration from the wider world. However, when immigrants arrive they still conform to a society that is effectively British in its origins. English continues to be the predominant language (along with French in Canada). The political institutions continue to bear the mother country’s stamp, as do important symbols like the flag (in Australia and New Zealand) and the head of state (in all three)–in other words, they continue to be predominantly ‘white’ countries.
In contrast, the European presence in South Africa never became dominant against the presence of Africans–whether strictly ‘indigenous’ or more recent arrivals from neighbouring territories north of the Limpopo–and so the imprint of Europe has proved less permanent. In the year that Nelson Mandela was born, more than one in five South Africans was white. In the year he died, the figure was less than one in ten. Had the trend gone the other way, it seems unlikely that he would ever have become president of the republic and a numerically bolstered white population would probably have continued to hold on to a monopoly of power for longer. Long before Mandela became president, however, population weakness had been gnawing away at white control.
The British arrived in the Cape in 1814 and for a long time their primary goal was ensuring dominance over the pre-existing Dutch Afrikaner population rather than over the Africans. Eventually the Dutch moved into the hinterland, setting up territories which the British came to regard as blocks to further African expansion, and the result was the Boer Wars. Dutch and British migrants arrived, but on a dramatically smaller scale than in, say, North America. By 1870 around a quarter of a million Europeans had migrated to South Africa, far less than a hundredth the number in the (albeit much larger) territories of North America.33 The gold rush brought more at the turn of the century, but by 1904 whites, whether Dutch, British or other, represented barely one in five of the people in South Africa. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Australia, New Zealand and Canada at the same time.
The white share in South Africa was about the same in 1960: more had come and the population had undergone natural expansion, but by now the modernisation which causes population expansion was well under way among Africans. Africans had much larger families than Europeans and now they too were benefitting from falling infant mortality rates and experiencing rapid population growth while the white population had adopted the lower fertility patterns and lower population growth rates which by then had become common among peoples of European origin. Apartheid can be seen as whites trying to put off their inevitable demographic destiny, attempting to maintain dominance in the face of numerical weakness, but demography triumphed in the end. By the time Apartheid ended, whites comprised around 13% of the population of South Africa,34 and there simply were not enough of them to control the blacks or indefinitely disenfranchise them. Twenty years later, whites were w
ell below 10% of the population of the new South Africa.
Anglo-Saxons in America
The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sounds somewhat bizarre in the context of the USA. In the UK, at least, it has come to be thought of as the name for arrivals from Germany and Scandinavia, who came to England around a millennium or more before Christopher Columbus even thought of crossing the Atlantic and thirteen hundred years before the American Declaration of Independence. The US is thought of as a great melting pot whose people come from all over the world, including Native Americans, Europeans from across the continent, people of African origin and, increasingly, people from Latin America and Asia. It comes as something of a surprise therefore to learn that Americans took it for a commonplace in much of the nineteenth century that they were Anglo-Saxons. Thomas Jefferson had wanted the Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa to feature on the seal of the United States, seeing them as the true founding forefathers of liberty in distinction to the later imposition of the Norman yoke.
To an extent, the name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ provided a convenient label. On the one hand, following the War of Independence and the establishment of the Republic, Americans did not wish to describe themselves ethnically as ‘English’. Perhaps fancifully, some thought themselves not only the ethnic but also the spiritual heirs of a ‘free people’ who had had Norman rule cruelly imposed upon them seven hundred years earlier. (For these purposes, King George III was portrayed doubling as his distant ancestor William the Conqueror, the alien oppressor.) Also, not all white Americans were of English origin: not an insignificant number were of German extraction, even as early as the time of independence (many more Germans would come later) and there were other peoples of European origin. There were, of course, also the African Americans, but they were overwhelmingly slaves and not considered part of the nation at the time. Increasingly, the United States attracted immigrants from parts of the British Isles which were not English (that is, Scotland and Ireland), and while referring to such people as Anglo-Saxons was inaccurate, nevertheless it seemed less glaringly inaccurate than calling them English. So the term stuck and was often worn with pride by Americans of that era, while today it remains in the acronym ‘Wasp’–white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.