Preface

This book explores contemporary population issues in an historical context. It is a wide-ranging economic history of demographic change with emphasis on the well-being of the population. The population story told here ranges broadly over time and space. By choosing a large canvas, we mean to emphasize the commonality of human experience: that different people, at different times, in varying circumstances, responded to similar economic forces in more or less the same way. Given the available historical evidence, we emphasize the formative population history of Europe and North America over the years since the Middle Ages. Asia and the southern hemisphere are discussed, but to a lesser extent. As economic historians, we are always hostage to the availability of evidence and, for some societies it is less abundant or unavailable in English or French. This necessarily shapes our treatment. We are creatures of our own historical interests, linguistic abilities, and prejudices with respect to both research and writing.

Even if we were capable of an encyclopedic treatment, we have resisted such a scope on the ground that the major themes would get lost in excess detail. Such a broad span involved some hard choices. For instance, when discussing the phenomenon of diaspora as part of long-distance migration (Chapter Five), we focus only on the historical cases of the Chinese, the Irish and the Jews. Other cases are compelling, the Scottish diaspora for instance, but these three are chosen because each offers different aspects of the phenomena. In addition, the Black diaspora is not treated as such, rather it is discussed throughout the narrative as part of the American and British stories.

About 50 years ago the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla wrote a splendid little book entitled The Economic History of World Population. His task was to confront the great gaps in knowledge and to draw together the fragmentary historical evidence of population growth. Fifty years on, with a virtual eruption of demographic scholarship in the intervening years, our task is different. It is to draw together the welter of evidence and make a coherent narrative. The lens through which we see history is that of modern economics. When Cipolla’s book was published in 1962, the world’s population stood at 3.2 billion. Today we are more than twice that number. By coincidence, as Cipolla wrote his book in the 1960s world population trend growth rates turned downward. So the issues we face today are:

We have written this book for a general audience who are curious about such issues. Obviously this includes students as we have spent our careers at universities. There are few courses that cover this material explicitly, but population issues have come to play a more and more important role in many university courses. In many cases, the population issues discussed in one course are not connected to those in another (e.g., there is seldom a tie between discussions of the demographic transition of developed countries and those countries’ immigration policies). This book attempts to bridge that gap.

Organization of the Book

We address the economic history of these issues in three main parts.

Part One, Initial Conditions describes where we start. What are the pre-conditions of our history, and what assumptions do we make? It also considers some of the broad issues to be confronted by historical inquiry. It begins with a consideration of where the human race has come from and progresses to consider the evidence needed for a historical inquiry. Next, some of the major issues are highlighted. For this we have to develop a plan of attack – a method of analysis.

In Part Two, Growth and Dispersal of the Human Population, we analyze the growth and redistribution of the population. It may seem odd that this section begins with death. But that is the one thing that is certain in our history (apart from taxes as a wag once quipped); we all die, but the manner and timing of it is of deep historical significance. Furthermore, births, the second chapter of this part, are in some broad sense related to mortality rather than the other way around (again, noting the truism that one has to be born before dying). Next, we discuss the dispersal of the population around the world with particular attention to the story of the mass migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries. Once the phenomenon of geographic mobility becomes widespread, the movement of people within countries gives rise to one of the great population forces of modern history: the rural – urban shift.

In the next part of the book, Part Three, Health and Well-Being, our attention first turns to the larger picture of the family, its changing composition and function. This leads to a consideration of physical health and how it has changed, often (but not always) for the better. Families exist within a larger framework containing the aggregate economic forces that shaped their lives, and we examine those macroeconomic effects that contributed to the underlying growth of well-being. Last, there are the large, negative events that have affected us all throughout history. The population’s reaction to these externally-imposed catastrophes tells the story of battles fought (and yet to be fought) against environmental change and the ravages of sudden disease: the plague, HIV/AIDS and influenza.

In the concluding section we offer a brief guide to how history has provided a map to build expectations for the future.

At the end of each chapter there is a bibliography of the works cited and other selected readings. There is one exception to this. Some books by their very nature make an appearance in multiple chapters; for example, Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch and Gavin Wright, editors (2006) Historical Statistics of the United States: earliest times to the present New York: Cambridge University Press. For such books, we have created a separate bibliography of frequently used titles and have adopted an abbreviated title in the text (US Historical Statistics).