by Paul Morland
Despite the rather spurious use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in nineteenth-century America, it needs to be remembered that at the time of independence, the people of the United States, and particularly their governing elite, were overwhelmingly of English, or at least British, origin. During the decades that followed, the United States grew away from its east coast origins and spread deep into the North American continent, absorbing the Appalachians, purchasing vast areas of the mid-west from France (the Louisiana Purchase) and acquiring still larger areas as part of the Oregon Treaty with the UK and from the ex-Spanish colony of Mexico, thus reaching the Pacific coast. None of this would have been possible, or meaningful, without the people to back it up. When the United States made the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, it had a hundred times more people than there were French men and women in the area of the Purchase.35 Napoleon wisely saw that without a strong French presence there was no way he could hold on to the territory in the face of the swarming Anglo-Saxons. The human tide was pressing west, and at that point it was speaking English. By 1820 the USA had 10 million people and the numbers kept growing thanks both to new arrivals–still largely from the British Isles–and a high birth rate. American women in those days were giving birth to seven children. The population was mostly of British origin and its demography was an essential part of its dynamism and ability to brush aside rival French and Spanish colonists as well as Native Americans. Malthus had been well aware of conditions in the United States and specifically the opportunities for population to double in a generation where a fresh supply of agricultural land was unlimited. American founding father Thomas Jefferson had been aware of Malthus and commended his work.
As the USA’s geography kept growing, so did its population, reaching 23 million by 1850 and 76 million by 1900, far exceeding Britain’s. The ease with which the US absorbed what had been the northern half of Mexico after 1848 provides a graphic example. These huge territories contained an indigenous and Hispanic/Mexican population of barely 100,000. Within a few years of the annexation there were three times that number of whites in California alone.36
Initially the surging population of the United States that poured into these areas was the product of continuing high immigration from the British Isles and to a lesser extent Germany, buoyed by its own high birth rate and relatively low death rate. It brushed aside the natives, who were always relatively few in number–according to a Congress report, which may well have undercounted, there were barely 6,000 in the original thirteen founding states by 1830, their numbers decimated by disease and the loss of ancestral lands.37 African American numbers did continue to rise even after the slave trade was abolished and no new arrivals came from Africa, but by the start of the twentieth century they were barely 12% of the total US population, a smaller proportion than at independence. (They are a similar percentage today.) French settlers in the Louisiana area of the Spaniards or Mexicans were remarkably thin on the ground.
The African American experience, and the legacy of slavery in particular, is one part of the dark side of this story, the other part being the marginalisation and sometimes genocide committed against the indigenous populations. It is true that slavery had been part of almost every society, and true too that the British were pioneers in abolishing the slave trade and driving it out of the Atlantic. It is true that the Arab slave trade long pre-dated that of the Europeans and outlived it. Yet the sheer industrial scale of the Atlantic slave trade, not only to the US but also to the Caribbean and Brazil, continues to stagger. The value of the lives of those transported was callously disregarded, and in the US slavery lived on and was not abolished until 1865. Thirty years later, black labourers in Alabama still received barely 60% of the nutrition they required.38 The legacy survives, manifest in racial tensions in the US, and until recently in the underpopulation of Africa, although this is now fast reversing.
As the nineteenth century progressed, Europeans continued pouring into the United States but from increasingly diverse parts of the continent. In the hundred years up to 1920, when serious immigration controls started to be put in place, it is estimated that more than 8 million came from Britain and Ireland, 5–6 million from Germany, 4 million each from Italy and Austro-Hungary, more than 3 million from Russia and 2 million from Scandinavia.39 The scale of the challenge–settling an area as vast as the United States and turning it into the world’s greatest economy and superpower in the twentieth century–was simply too great even for the fertile people of the British Isles. But more than any other people, they contributed to populating the Republic. As the early as well as the most numerous immigrants, British Islanders provided the language other immigrants had to learn, and, very largely, the culture into which they had to integrate. As with those territories which remained within the British Empire, the United States, as it developed from its foundations until today, bears an unmistakably ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mark, and that was only possible because its great spaces were settled by people from East Anglia, Perthshire, Antrim and County Kerry. These were the people who won the West, and they won it largely because their numbers were increasing the fastest at the time.
Hubris
The world in 1900 was very different from the world in 1800. That can be said of any century, but in the nineteenth century something truly extraordinary stirred, and it stirred first and foremost in England and in the wider British Isles. This was the century that saw manufacturing industry grow in scale from low-level domestic activity to the employment of millions; which saw great continents settled by newly arrived populations and an international trade boom. Cities of millions sprang up across Europe and North America as Anglo-Saxon societies and then other European countries became increasingly urban. The population explosion lay at the heart of this. Without such economic change and development, the population of England, its colonies and its daughter republic, the USA, could not have grown sustainably. Equally, without the great boom in population, economic, social and political change could not have happened.
When in 1848 America debated what to do with Mexico, which it had just captured, some people argued for annexing the whole country, not just its northern part. They thought that its population, which was most certainly not welcome within the young United States, would melt away just as the ‘Red Indians’ had. Many thought that people of Anglo-Saxon origin would come to dominate the world. J. R. Seeley, whose famous lectures were published as The Expansion of England in 1883, declared that while 10 million Englishmen beyond the seas was admirable, it was ‘absolutely nothing compared with what will ultimately… be seen’.40 Cecil Rhodes, the famous (and, for some, infamous) British imperialist in Africa, not only shared this vision of an ever-expanding Anglo domain but believed it to be the work of God: ‘I shall devote the rest of my life to God’s purpose,’ he said, ‘and help Him to make the world English.’41
This kind of hubris was the product of the Anglo-Saxon lead in the demographic race. It seemed to those who were first out of the Malthusian trap that their advantage would last forever. They did not fully appreciate to what extent global dominance, whether imperial or economic, was built on foundations of population expansion, and that those forces which had caused the population expansion among the peoples of the British Isles and their colonial and American offspring could not be bottled, patented or otherwise restricted so as to prevent others from enjoying them in the fullness of time. In fact, others were not far behind. Population-expanding habits and technologies were, it turned out, not to be the preserve of Anglo-Saxons, and while Anglo-Saxons were destined to shape the planet they were not destined to have exclusive dominion over it.
4
The German and Russian Challenges
When, during the carnage of the First World War, wave after wave of soldiers met in battle on the Western Front, what ultimately mattered was not superiority of courage, technology or strategy but sheer weight of numbers. In the end it was the side that could continue to send men over the top that won. When the two sides had more
or less slaughtered each other to a standstill, what was decisive was the arrival–or at least the prospect–of seemingly endless numbers of fresh recruits from the United States.
The importance of numbers did not come as a surprise. In the decades preceding 1914, the rival powers had been sizing each other up, worrying about their birth rates and those of their potential enemies, as though already conscious of the attritional slaughter that lay ahead. The Daily Mail lamented as early as 1903 that the decline in Britain’s birth rate ‘is now beginning to menace the predominance of our race’. A French work entitled The Expansion of Germany (perhaps consciously echoing Seeley’s earlier The Expansion of England), published on the eve of the war, worried that ‘fecundity is a permanent feature of the German race’ and that ‘the growth of this population assures Germany… a parallel growth in its military power’.1 Meanwhile the influential German historian Friedrich Meinecke fretted that ‘almost the entire Slavic race points to an inexhaustible fertility’.2 Bethmann-Hollweg, chancellor at the outbreak of war, expressed concern about a Russia that ‘grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare’. Hollweg’s despondent analysis contributed decisively to Germany’s now or never gamble that led to war.3 The dynamic changes in Europe’s population–and in the population in countries settled by Europeans such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand–in the years leading up to the onslaught, were part of the cause of the war and contributed to its outcome.
It turns out the bizarre vision of Cecil Rhodes–that the whole world would be ‘made’ English–was simply not to be; neither was the vision of Anglo-Saxon supremacists in the US–that other peoples would ‘melt away’. It is true that today’s world was greatly shaped by the first ethnic/national group to experience a modern-style, sustained, industrially based population explosion, namely the people of the British Isles: their language predominates in the media, international business, diplomacy and academia; the states they founded remain (for now) the most powerful; and, taken as a group, they remain the richest and most economically powerful people on earth. But not only are they now in retreat in many fields on the world stage (in the face of rising Chinese power, for example); they have significantly retreated as an ethnic group within their own states. The US, Canada, Australia and the UK are all countries that are decreasingly populated by people who, to jumble nineteenth- and twenty-first-century phrases, could be labelled ‘of Anglo-Saxon heritage’ or indeed any wider origin within the British Isles.
What appeared an unbeatable and unique demographic formula turned out to be only a bit of a head start. Others learned to adopt precisely those techniques which had given the Anglos-Saxons their lead and, at least from a population perspective, caught up and overtook them, with major consequences for the balance of power and the outcome of history. In the last seventy or more years, it has been the people beyond Europe and North America who have made the running demographically, but the first challengers to Anglo-Saxon hegemony came from closer to home. Unsurprisingly, the technologies that allowed the British and their American cousins to take the first steps were copied by peoples most closely related to them culturally and geographically, namely other Europeans. As one might expect, when something new catches on, it is likely to catch on first among those closest to the source of the original innovation.
In the first place, it was the Germans and Russians who were in hot pursuit of the Anglo-Saxons. They were the first, thrusting, dynamic challengers to the Anglo-Saxon population leaders. In what follows we will look at why and precisely when this came to be the case, and at some of the also-rans–other European powers, who were slower off the block. (Russians are here considered as European, and we will not enter the great debate which consumed late nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals–whether they were European or not.) We will also see why all of this mattered and maybe even determined the outbreak and outcome of the First World War.
England Slows Down
Demography is not a competitive national sport. Aiming to get to the largest population through the highest birth rate and lowest mortality rate is rarely a chief policy goal of governments, although most are conscious that a falling birth rate (unless accompanied by a rising survival rate) will mean fewer potential soldiers and fewer potential producers (and consumers) in time, with military and economic consequences to follow.
As has been shown, England, and more widely Britain and its related overseas populations, maintained high or even rising birth rates with steady falls in mortality rates in the early nineteenth century, boosting its population size, but in the second part of the century changes began to set in. The most important of them was that women started to have fewer children. In the early part of the nineteenth century women had between five and six children on average, a level common in our day only among the least developed African states. It is possible to get a sense of this from Victorian novels, and those who are older may even have memories of it within their own families. Queen Victoria famously did more than her national duty, having nine children, all born in the early part of her reign. There is a tendency to think of the Victorian period as something of a monolith, but in fact conditions changed dramatically between 1837, when Victoria ascended the throne, and 1901, when she died. In the middle of his mother’s reign, Victoria’s son, later Edward VII, had five children with his wife Alexandra (a sixth died when only a day old), born in the 1860s, a decline from the number his mother had had and more in line with the nation as a whole at that stage. Later generations were markedly smaller. Of course, the British royal family is not typical of the UK. For one thing, it was not constrained by the same financial limits that influence most people and family size. But in a rough sort of way, it does illustrate what was happening generally to the population of the country. From the middle of the nineteenth century, when the average woman in England was still having around five children, there was a clear downward trend. By the outbreak of the First World War, the average woman was having just three. The birth rate (births per thousand of the population) fell by a third–from 36 to 24–between 1876 and 1914. Women who married in the 1860s had more than six births each; those who married in the 1890s had slightly more than four; and those who married in 1915 had less than two and a half.4
It is easier to determine why this was happening than how it was achieved. What was happening in late Victorian and Edwardian England (and more widely across the United Kingdom) was a modernisation process which involves populations increasingly living in cities, more people wanting to invest in their children (who now require education to progress) rather than seeing them as a source of labour in the fields and an insurance policy for old age. Also, when more children survive childhood, the message eventually gets through that parents can have fewer in the first place since nature is less likely to deprive them of them.
In country after country, continent after continent, fertility falls when infant mortality drops, or at least when infant mortality has fallen. This is an essential part of the pattern that is the human tide. It takes longer for the reality of lower infant mortality to translate into lower fertility rates in some places than in others, and there are exceptions to the rule. Change in population is not physics, it is not governed by iron laws, or at least by very few. But nevertheless the general pattern will become clear. And as the nineteenth century proceeded, so the conditions that are thought of as Dickensian–open sewers, child factory workers and chimney sweeps, the workhouse–started to change. By 1914 there had been great steps forward in public health, the provision of clean water and even the basics of a welfare state. The Great Stink of 1858, when Britain’s parliament had to be evacuated because of the unbearable miasma wafting from the polluted Thames, and the cholera outbreaks which had preceded it, were unimaginable in the London of fifty years later with its sewers and orderly public hygiene.
After 1870 at least a basic education was available to all, and an educated population was almost inevitably longer-lived, being b
etter able to understand how to take care of itself and its children. And it was not only conditions at home that improved: thanks to the opening of the prairies of North America, the spread of the railways and the introduction of iron-clad and steam-powered ships and of refrigeration, food was becoming cheaper and more plentiful. Ordinary people were beginning to live in more salubrious conditions and enjoy better diets. Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, life expectancy increased from around forty to the mid fifties. Perhaps this seems modest by today’s standards, when people expect to live to eighty or beyond, but it seemed revolutionary at the time.
Moreover, infant mortality was finally beginning to fall, from at or above 150 per thousand in the latter years of the nineteenth century to around 100 per thousand by 1914. The advances of Pasteur, Koch and Lister, an understanding of disease and the need for cleanliness in the preparation of food and drink and in medical procedures, generally helped reduce mortality but were particularly beneficial in saving the lives of the young. At this point, infant mortality started decisively on its sharp downward path from over 100 per thousand babies never making it to their first birthday to below 30 per thousand by the middle of the twentieth century and to around 4 per thousand today. This effect was compounded by the fact that there were more young women of childbearing age than in previous decades (the result of past population growth) and as more of the children born were surviving, so the population continued growing, albeit more slowly.