History/Projection Charts

Support Independent Analysis

Select a Country:

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Africa
The north of Africa has always belonged to the Mediterranean world. Its inhabitants, the Berbers and Egyptians, are 'whites' and their history is part of the European—Near-Eastern culture complex. South of the Sahara lies what the Arabs call `Bilad-as-Sudan', 'the land of the blacks', a quite different world, with a unique culture and ethnography. Until early modern times contacts between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the Old World were tenuous in the extreme: black Africa's history unfolded in its own way and in its own time.

Nowadays, 'black' is almost synonymous with 'Negro' but originally the sub-Saharan area was divided into four quite different black races — the Negroes, Nilo-Saharans, Pygmies and Bushmen. Geographically the division was roughly equal. The Negroes lived in the bush and forest country of the west, the Nilo-Saharans in the present-day Sudan and in the Sahel, the scrub zone south of the Sahara. The Pygmies lived in the tropical rain forest of the Zaire (Congo) basin and the Bushmen ranged across eastern and southern Africa. Besides these four 'black' peoples and the `whites' of the north, Africa contained a fifth race in the Cushitic peoples of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Members of the same ' Hamitic' linguistic division of the white race as the Berbers and Egyptians, they are more black than white to look at today and, as the geographical distinction between north and sub-Saharan Africa is less clear-cut in this part of Africa than elsewhere, it is reasonable to regard the Cushites as 'intermediate' in both the ethnic and the geographical sense. Altogether then we have five groups dividing the continent between them in the post-Glacial but pre-agricultural era. We can estimate their populations during that period as follows:

Berbers and Egyptians 100,000
Cushites 100,000
Nilo-Saharans 250,000
Negroes 250,000
Pygmies 200,000
Bushmen 350,000
1,250,000
Sometime around the 7th millennium BC agriculture was introduced into Africa from the Near East. The introduction via the continent's land connection with the Near East meant that the first African country to experience the `neolithic revolution' was Egypt and that it was along the strip of land watered by the lower Nile that African population densities first rose above the very low levels characteristic of the hunting and gathering stage of human development — in the range 0.01-0.1 per km2 — to reach figures of 1 or more per km2. In fact, relatively soon they were much higher than that, for Egypt has no reliable rainfall and agriculture there has to rely on irrigation, a style of cultivation that both requires and sustains large populations. Where contemporary neolithic societies in Europe took thousands of years to increase their overall densities from 1 or 2 per km2 to 3 or 4 per km2, the Egyptians had reached a density of 10 per km2 of habitable terrain as early as the opening century of the 4th millennium BC and by 3000 BC were living at densities of around 20 per km2. This level corresponds to a population of a million for the country as a whole and provides the demographic basis for the emergence of Egypt as a kingdom - the world's first political unit of significant size.

At this point in time — the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC — the demographic contrast between Egypt and the rest of Africa is about as striking as could be. In no other part of the continent is there any knowledge of agriculture at all. On the one hand we have a million Egyptians crowding the banks of the Nile, on the other family-size bands of hunters scattered across a vast landscape in a distribution so sparse that the total number amounts only to a million and a bit. Nearly half the population of Africa lives in Egypt, tills its fields and obeys Pharaoh.

For the next two thousand years Egypt continued to hold a cultural and demographic position way in advance of all the other African societies. By 1000 BC the total population of the continent had increased to more than 6. 5m, but with 3m living along the lower Nile the Egyptian share remained near 40%. The important change in the population pattern was a relative strengthening of the Negro and Nilo-Saharan positions. The Negroes were making the first moves towards the development of a genuine agriculture and their success in this was marked by a rise in their numbers to a total of 1 m. The Nilo-Saharans did even better, but then the pastoral way of life that was to be their characteristic mode of development being extensive rather than intensive, they approached their maxima of range and total numbers more rapidly than did the relatively sedentary Negroes. The losers were the Pygmies and Bushmen, who showed no advance on their mesolithic traditions and whose populations consequently remained static. The middle centuries of the last millennium BC brought two new peoples to Africa: the Phoenicians (Lebanese) who colonized Tunisia and Tripolitania and the Greeks who settled in Cyrenaica. The arrival of the newcomers brought North Africa west of Egypt properly into Mediterranean society for the first time: their introduction of the sophisticated agricultural techniques evolved in the Near East and Greece led to a rapid rise in its population. By the 3rd century BC the neo-Phoenician capital of Carthage, near modern Tunis, had become one of the great cities of the classical world and a power able to contest with Rome for the hegemony of the western Mediterranean. Carthage didn't win — indeed she couldn't really expect to when the population of her empire was of the order of 1.5m (half in north Africa, half in Spain) as compared to the 5m of Roman Italy — but though the victorious Romans first vented their spite by levelling the defeated city they eventually refounded it, made it the capital of their province of Africa ( meaning modern Tunisia) and carried the original Crthaginians' civilizing mission through to completion. In AD 200 present-day Algeria and Tunisia contained a thriving peasantry, the nomadic way of life was restricted to the tribes of the desert fringe and the total population was of the order of 4m. Add 0.5m for Libya and 5m for Egypt, subtract 0.5m for the untamed nomads, and you have a peak figure of 9m for Rome's North African provinces. This amounts to nearly half the pan-African total of 20m.

Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

The Balkans 0.55m km
Yugoslavia 0.26m km2
Albania 0.03m km
Greece 0.13m km 2
Bulgaria 0.11m km2
Turkey-in-Europe 0.02m km2

Because agriculture came to Europe from Asia via the Balkans, the Balkan peoples were the first Europeans to experience the neolithic transformation. As early as 5000 B C the area's mesolithic population of 25,000 had been replaced by a peasant society numbering 0.25m and over the succeeding millennia the total grew fast enough to bring it to 2m in the course of the later Bronze Age (13th century BC).
By this time Europe had imported a second art from Asia, the art of writing. The entry point was Greece, the script that evolved was the 'Linear B' that the Greeks used for their accounts, and from these it is obvious that their society had reached a degree of sophistication that puts it on a level with the contemporary civilizations of the Near East. Greece was far in advance of the rest of the Balkans, let alone Europe, a fact that we can be sure was reflected in the population distribution. If 2m people lived in the Balkans in 1250 BC, 1 m of them lived in Greece.

The Greek colonization of Cyprus dates to this period of prosperity, the colonization of Ionia to the next phase - the first Greek 'Dark Age'. During this little-known period literacy was lost and, given the degree of social disintegration suggested by this fact and by the archaeological record, the population may well have fallen back a bit. If it did it certainly rebounded. When the classical period opened in the 7th century BC the country was in the throes of a population explosion that was carrying its share of the Balkan total over the half-way mark and the absolute figure past 2m. State sponsored emigration created a Greek overseas population ( excluding Ionia and Cyprus) of not less than 0.5m, but completely failed to halt the rise in numbers at home. By the mid 5th century the Greek peninsula and archipelago contained 3m people 60% of the Balkan total of 5m.

Classical Greece an alpha-plus society on any ranking fits snugly into the idea that overpopulation brings out the best in people. For the Greeks at the time the situation was less comfortable: there were few places for would-be colonists to go that weren't already fully occupied, and taking other people's Places meant war of the sustained sort that the Greeks were least good at. After a few false starts the military set-up needed was evolved by the Macedonians and in the spectacular career of the Macedonian King Alexander the Great the Greek demographic crisis found its solution. As a result of Alexander's victories the whole of the Orient as far as India was thrown open to Greek settlement. Greeks became the rulers, the defenders and the bureaucrats of Egypt and Asia Minor: the population, the problems and the achievements of the homeland began to dwindle.

Greek numbers continued to fall throughout the last three centuries BC, which was a period of slow growth else- Roman Empire Greece contained only 2m people out of a Balkan total of 5m. The shift in emphasis continued into the Byzantine period: in the general decline of the 5th to 7th centuries the Greek loss was disproportionately large and by the time the first signs of recovery were vis- ible in the 8th century the population density of the peninsula was no greater than that of any other part of the Balkans.

The most important event of this era was the replacement of most of the native peoples of the Balkans by Slays from north of the Danube. This re- population created the ethnic basis for the modern states of Yugoslavia ( previously Illyrian) and Bulgaria ( previously Thracian) and inserted a strong Slav component into the other Balkan communities. But though the Slav flood swept over the whole of the Balkans it did not sweep away everyone. In Greece the littoral fringe and the islands provided a refuge for the Greek nation and language which were eventually to recover their original territory: in the Albanian highlands the Illyrian tongue survived as it does to this day.

In the medieval period the population of Greece picked up from less than a million to a million and a quarter, the population of the Balkans as a whole from 3m to 5m. The arrival of the Black Death and the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century put a stop to this recovery: the latter also introduced a new element of heterogeneity, for, by the early 16th century, in addition to 4m Christians ( 3m Orthodox, m Catholic), there were m Moslems, most of them colonists rather than converts. The numbers of both Christians and Moslems increased in the 16th century: then, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, there was a demographic recession in the 17th century before the strong rise typical of recent times began in the 18th.
By this time the Ottoman Empire was in decline and its subject races were struggling to regain their freedom. Serbia (the prototype of Yugoslavia) and Greece both managed to establish their independence by 1830, Bulgaria not till 1885. When the frontiers vis-à-vis Turkey were finally sorted out in the early 20th century, there were still large Moslem minorities in all these countries and the last new state to appear, Albania, actually had a Moslem majority. Since then migrations, forced or spontaneous, have steadily reduced the numbers of Moslems in Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (where the proportions are down to 1%, 8% and 10% respectively) while in Albania everyone is now officially communist.

Of the various Balkan countries Albania is the one with the highest growth rate: indeed, at 3% it has the highest growth rate in Europe. Yugoslavia has the biggest minorities (0.75m Albanians, 0.5m Magyars, 0.25m Turks but no Germans since the flight of the 0.3m who lived there before the Second World War). Yugoslavia also has the problem of tension between the Croats (Catholic and westward-looking) and the slightly more numerous Serbs ( Orthodox and eastward-looking). Greece is the most homogeneous, though its homogeneity has been achieved at a high price: after the final Greco-Turkish conflict of 1918-22 there was an enforced exchange of minorities which brought in 1.3m Greeks from Turkey and entirely removed the 0.3m- strong Turkish community in Greece.

The area likely to grow fastest in the remainder of this century is Turkey-in- Europe. The expulsion of its Greek and Armenian citizens 40% of the whole and the disfavour of the Turkish government after the move to Ankara had the effect of stunting Istanbul's growth in the first half of this century.
Now the increasingly European orient a strong resurgence in the economy and of the Turk and the opening of demography of this corner of the Bosporus bridge should lead to a continent.

Primary Sources

The classical Greek historians contain clear indications of the orders of magnitude involved in ancient Greek demography, though they provide very little to go on when it comes to the rest of the Balkans. The Dark Ages are a blank for both. The first overall data appear in the Ottoman period in the form of hearth counts: totals for the count of 1525 are given on p. 39 of Vol. 4 of the * Cambridge Economic History of Europe and in map form in * Braudel (Vol. 2, p. 662): the original publication is by 0. L. Barkan Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1 (1957), p. 9. For sure there are more Ottoman counts to be found: together with the counts taken by the Venetians in the islands (notably Crete, which they hung on to till 1669) and the Morea (which they briefly incorporated in their Empire in 1685-1715) this means that one day it should be possible to chart the course of Balkan demography since 1500 with a high degree of confidence.
The first censuses were taken shortly after independence in Greece (1828), Serbia/ Yugoslavia (1830) and Bulgaria (1888). They have been held irregularly — on average once a decade — ever since. Albania's first census was taken in 1923, the next not till 1945. For Turkey-in-Europe since the First World War the situation is the same as for Turkey-in-Asia (Asia Area la).
Bibliography

* Beloch devoted more space to 5th-century Greece than to any other part of the ancient world: on the whole his figures have stood the test of time. His overall figure for the Balkans in A D 14 is less well founded (for the area as defined here it works out at 4.5m) but is certainly acceptable. For the medieval period see * Russell, for the 16th century * Braudel and for the modern period * Clark. Their calculations do not differ significantly from ours.
Almost no work has been done on the demography of the prehistoric period: an exception is Colin Renfrew's article in Man, Settlement and Urbanism (ed. P. J. Ucko et al. (1972)). There is also an absolutely first class regional survey by W. A. McDon- ald and G. Rapp — The Minnesota Messenia Expedition (1972): this covers the whole span from the Early Bronze Age to modern times though it is basically concerned with the period before 1200 B C.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay 3.71 km2

Argentina 2.78m km 2
Chile 0.76m km2
Uruguay 0.18m km 2

Argentina and Chile
In AD 1500 the Amerindian cultures of the southern fifth of South America could not have been set out more methodically if a professor of anthropology had done it. In the north of Chile and the north-west of Argentina were peasants living on the outskirts of the Inca Empire; down in the far south some of the most primitive people ever recorded eked out a precarious existence in the wastes of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Between these extremes lived men at various intermediate stages of hunting and gathering, cultivation and agriculture. The total population amounted to something under 1 m, a number that translates into a density figure of the low order of magnitude characteristic of pre-Columbian America.

The Spanish occupation of this area was never complete and the number of Spaniards in it grew only slowly — from 70,000 in 1650 to 0.3m at independence ( which came in 1810 in Argentina and in 1818 in Chile). The number of Indians declined over the same period — from 0. 8m in 1650 to 0.35m in 1825 and, though by that date there were also 0.75m Mestizos to be reckoned with, both Argentina and Chile entered the era of independence markedly under populated. Even in 1850 they had less than 2.5m people between them and it is understandable that both did their best to encourage immigration from Europe. Only Argentina had any substantial success. While Chile has never recorded more than 5% of its population as foreign-born at any census, Argentina's 1914 census produced a figure of 30% and most censuses have reported more than 10%. All in all, since 1850, Argentina has received at least 2.5m net immigrants; Chile barely 0.2m.

The resulting differences between Chile and Argentina are substantial. The population of Argentina has multiplied 40-fold since independence, that of Chile only 10-fold. Moreover the white population of Argentina has risen disproportionately: from 0.15m in 1825 to 15m in 1950. (The bulk of Argentina's immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1950, the peak years being the 1910s. Nearly half of them came from Italy, a third from Spain.) The white population of Chile during the same period has increased only in proportion: from 0.3m to 3m. Consequently Argentina is now a nation of predominantly European origins, with barely 10% of its popula- tion claiming an Indian or a mixed ancestry, while Chile is a nation divided almost equally between whites and those of Indian or mixed descent. In both countries mixed is a much more important category than Indian: there are only about 0.3m reasonably pure-blooded Indians left today, most of them in Chile

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The census record is: Argentina, 1778, 1813, 1857, 1869, 1895, 1914, 1947, 1960,
1970; Chile, 1777, 1813, 1832, 1844, 1854, 1865, 1875, 1885, 1895, 1907, then
decennially from 1920 except 1952 for 1950. Argentina is well documented, most recently in J. Comadrán Ruiz, Evolución demografia Argentina durante el periodo hispana (15351820) (1969); E. J. A. Maeder, Evolución demografia Argentina 1810- 1869 (1969); F. de Aparicio (ed.), La Argentina: suma de geografia, Vol. 7 (1961). The demographic history of Chile between 1700 and 1830 is covered in an article by
M. Carmagnani in Journal of Social History 1, 2 (1967), the period since then by 0. Cabello in Population Studies 9, 3 (1956).
As usual, * Rosenblat is a good starting point for early population data, and * Sanchez- Albornoz for recent migration figures

Uruguay
The demographic history of Uruguay is that of Argentina in microcosm. The few hundred Amerindians of the area were succeeded by a few thousand Iberians during the 16th and 17th centuries: Montevideo made its appearance in the 1720s and numbers slowly inched up to reach 40,000 by 1800. Who owned the territory was a matter of dispute; the Spaniards looked to Buenos Aires, the Portuguese to Rio. Eventually the quarrel was resolved by Argentina and Brazil agreeing to the creation of the independent state of Uruguay (1830). Its population of 75,000 increased to 130,000 by 1850, 0.9m by 1900 and 2.25m by 1950. Today it stands at 2.75m, nearly all of whom are of European descent.

Immigration has played an important part in Uruguay's growth, the net input amounting to 0.5m people in the last 150 years. Most immigrants came from southern Europe in the later 19th century: a third of them got no further than Montevideo, which now contains half the country's population

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Uruguay's population history is adequately covered by E. M. Narancio and F. Capurro Calamet, Historia y análisis estadistico de la población del Uruguay (1939)
, and by J. A. Oddone, La formación del Uruguay moderno (1966). The odd feature of the primary data is the irregularity of the census: the sequence runs 1852, 1854, 1908, 1963, 1975.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Australia 7.69m km'

The most logical and the intellectually safest starting point for the population history of Australia is sometime after 10, 000 BC, when the post-Glacial rise in the level of the world's oceans had completed the isolation of the aboriginal Australians from the world beyond the Torres Strait. Before that break several waves of migrants had moulded the aboriginal population into substantially its present form. After it the aboriginal was left alone for some 10,000 years to seek and to find balance with the forces of nature.

That balance, in demographic terms, seems to have arrived many millennia before Christ. The maximum population that Australia could support as long as man remained a roving, hunting, gathering creature was about 300,000; and we will not be far wrong if we imagine that between 10,000 BC and the arrival of Western man in the late 18th century AD the population was fluctuating around the quarter of a million mark.

For the aboriginal the European impact was harsh and bitter. His world collapsed in the decades following the landing of the first settlers (mostly convicts) in 1788, and from this simple truth romantic anthropologists have generated the concept of 'cultural shock' as a cause of increased mortality. The more hard-headed demographers tend to prefer the idea that the natives lacked resistance to Western disease.

Whatever the explanation and there was some straightforward slaughter thrown in as well the aboriginal population began to fall and it continued to fall until the early 20th century. By then some tribes were extinct, notably the Tasmanians ( originally some 4,000 strong: the last died in 1876) and the overall number was down to 60,000. Recovery at least in demographic terms has seen a rise to some 80,000 today.

While the prehistoric Australians struggled and largely failed to come to terms with modern Western society, the somewhat sorry and entirely involuntary representatives of that society who had been dumped on Australia's shores in 1788 and the following half century or so until transportation ceased in the 1840s — wrote a success story, though with the traditional hazardous beginning. The original shipment of 736 convicts (188 of them women) and their guards had become a population of 10,000 by the late 1800s and 100,000 by the early 1830s. The pre-Magellanic maximum of 250,000 was reached in the 1840s, the 0.5m mark by the early 1850s and the million by 1860.

The year 1860 is a convenient point at which to pause and look back. Three quarters of the growth from virtually nothing to m in seventy years had been achieved by immigration. This immigration was overwhelmingly British, and before the Gold Rush of the 1850s, which doubled the population in a decade, it was substantially though after 1820 decreasingly the forced migration of convicts, nearly 150,000 in all.

After 1860 the pattern changed. Australia began to settle down to a more respectable and more urban (if only marginally more urbane) way of life. The contribution of migration to population growth dropped to around the 40% mark, before almost ceasing for a time at the end of the century. The migrants remained substantially British in origin, only one tenth coming from elsewhere in Europe — mostly from Germany, though there were some from Scandinavia and Italy as well.

The pattern established in the later 19th century has in many ways been followed to the present time. Net immigration has tended to come in bursts, at periods when the balance of push and pull has been favourable to emigration from the old to the new European worlds. Particularly favourable periods were the ten years before 1914, the ten years after 1918 and the period from 1945 to the late 1960s. These three high-input phases added approximately 0.3m, 0.4m and 2m net immigrants respectively to the Australian population. Up to the late 1940s these additions were still predominantly British in origin. Since then the British component has fallen to a third, the remaining two thirds being largely of central and southern European origin.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The population histories of the aboriginal and the settler populations of Australia must be considered completely separately — indeed, until 1967 the legally defined statistical population of Australia' was the non-aboriginal population.
For the aborigines — who were never properly counted until the second half of the 20th century — the best source is F. Lancaster Jones, The Structure and Growth of Australia's Aboriginal Population (1970). The quarter of a million pre-European population estimate is that of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in the Australian Official Year Book 23 (1930). F. L. Jones would like to reduce this to perhaps 215 ,000. The time needed for the original group of aborigines to multiply up to 0.3m is discussed by Joseph Birdsell (Cold Spring Harbour Symposium on Quantitative Biology, xxii ( 1957), p. 47).
For the history of the settlers see W. D. Borrie, Population Trends and Policies (1948),
W. D. Borrie and G. Spencer, Australia's Population Structure and Growth (1965), and the Australian Encyclopedia (1958) under 'Population' and 'Immigration'. The basic source is the census, decennial for the whole of Australia since 1881, and with a positive abundance of earlier state censuses: 8 for New South Wales from 1828, 3 for Tasmania from 1841, 6 for South Australia from 1844, 4 for Western Australia from 1848, 3 for Victoria from 1854 and 3 for Queensland from 1861 (and another in 1886). Needless to say, state census dates coincided only intermittently.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Austria 1.8 m km'

Austria is a mountainous country and its population density has never been high: total numbers amounted to only 20,000 in 3000 BC, when farming com- munities had already been established in the lowlands for more than a thousand years, and the Bronze Age was nearly over before the population reached 100,000. Even when respectable figures were attained 0. 5m in the late Iron Age, on the eve of the Roman conquest of 15 BC; 0.6m during the 2nd century AD when the Roman province had its best years — they were not sustained. As the Empire declined numbers fell back to 0.5m and after its fall they went as low as 0.4m.

The immediate post-Roman centuries the Dark Ages saw Slays, Germans and Hungarians fighting each other for possession of Austria. In the end the Germans came out on top, a result that is marked by the formal establishment of the Austrian state in the 10th century. The subsequent upturn in the country's fortunes was dramatic. New villages appeared everywhere, indicating significant expansion in both the intensity and extent of cultivation: population tripled, reaching 2m by the early 14th century. Austria had justified its place on the map of Europe.

The 14th-century crisis reduced Austria's population by a third, a loss which was not recovered until the early 16th century. Growth then resumed, the 2.5m mark being reached by the end of the 16th century and marginally exceeded by 1618, when the Thirty Years War began. Austria escaped direct devastation in this conflict but it could not escape the economic dislocation and outbreaks of plague that ac- companied it: once again numbers fell back and the 17th century ended with the population no greater than it had been 100 years earlier.

This slow-quick-slow pattern was repeated in the modern period. The rise from 1750 to 1850 was 45%, which sounds reasonable but was a lack-lustre performance compared to the overall European increment of 90%. From 1850 to 1900 things went much better, the increase of 50% matching the European average. Here immigration from the outlying provinces of the Hapsburg Empire to Vienna, its capital, was an important factor. Conversely, when the Hapsburg conglomerate was dismantled after the First World War, Austria lost impetus. The population gain since then has been barely a million and Vienna has actually shrunk from 2m in 1918 to 1.5m today. The city's cosmopolitan and polyglot image has also gone. The Nazis eliminated the country's last sizable minority, its 0.5m Jews, leaving Austria with a population that is remarkably homogeneous: it is now 90% Catholic and 99% German- speaking.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire

In 1526 the Hapsburgs of Austria inherited Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia and as much of Hungary as they could keep the Turks out of. The population of this bloc was not far short of 7m, a total which rose to 11 m with the liberation of all Hungary at the end of the 17th century. A further boost, to about 18m, came from the acquisition of a motley collection of new territories — Belgium, Milan, Sardinia and the southern third of Italy — during the war of Spanish succession (1701-13). Over the next few years the Italian provinces underwent a confusing series of changes, most of them unfavourable, and in 1742 Prussia annexed Silesia: however, Austria's share in the partitions of Poland (1772-95) brought in sufficient new people to raise the population of the Empire to a new peak of 24m.

Napoleon had it in for Austria and in his heyday the Hapsburgs were forced to renounce their Belgian and Italian provinces. The loss of Belgium proved permanent, but large parts of Italy were awarded to Austria at the Congress of Vienna ( 1815), and this territorial recovery plus an accelerating rate of natural increase carried the imperial population to a new high of 35m by 1850. The rate of increase now became so fast that the loss of the Italian provinces to the forces of the risorgimento caused only a small kink in the population graph. By 1914, on the eve of the war that was to prove its death knell, the Empire's population was 52m.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

From 1754 on the course of Austria's population history is sure for sufficient data are available to bridge the gap between the official population estimate made in that year and 1857, the year of the first proper census. The imperial authorities took a second census in 1869 and a decennial series in the years 1880-1910. The Republic has taken censuses in 1923, 1934 and decennially since 1951.

Before 1754 there is almost nothing; we can only assume that the demographic patterns followed our general rules and make estimates on that basis. Figures for the years 1754-1973 for the area of modern Austria are given in Statistisches Handbuch für die Republik Österreich, 1973. For the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 18th century see R. Gurtler Die Volkszählungen Maria Theresas and Joseph IIs (1909), and in the 19th-century * Sundbärg and the Handwörterbuc

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Belgium

The population of Belgium in upper palaeolithic times (c.15,000 B c) can be estimated at a few hundred at most: even in the mesolithic, around 8000 BC, the number was still only a few thousand. Settled farming, which first appeared about 4000 BC, caused a jump to ten thousand and then continuing growth to 30,000 (by the end of the neolithic), 100,000 (by the end of the Bronze Age), and 0.3m (at the time of the Roman conquest). At its most prosperous, the Roman province (Gallia Belgica) may have held as many as 0. 4m people.

In the 3rd century came the first wave of the Germanic tide that was soon to submerge Western Europe. The effect on Belgium was immediate and disastrous. Many provincials fled to safer lands and as the province emptied the Germans moved in. Half a century before Rome fell the Germans were already masters of the northern half of the country and the division between German-speakers (the present-day Flemings) and Romance-speakers (the present-day Walloons) was firmly established.

Recovery from the post-classical population nadir which in Belgium's case was around 0.25m began in the 9th century. By the year 1000 the population was back to the best Roman level and during the next three centuries the country notched up a rate of increase that kept it at the top of the European growth league.

Geography helped: situated at the centre of the emerging north European trade network Belgium was the chief beneficiary of the medieval economic boom. Belgian weavers set the pace in the most important of contemporary industries, the clothing trade; Belgian entrepreneurs made the name of Fleming synonymous with mercantile success. By 1300 the population was 1.25m and the country the most prosperous and densely populated in Europe.

The Black Death put a stop to all this. Under the recurrent attacks of plague that characterized the second half of the 14th century the population sagged, reaching a low of about 0.8m in 1400. There was, it is true, an almost complete recovery in the course of the 15th century. But the country never regained its old trading position. It was a faltering economy that the Spanish took over during the reign of the Emperor Charles.

Spanish rule was not a success. A policy of religious persecution drove the Protestants to the Netherlands and taxation killed trade and initiative; the result was that between 1550 and 1650 there was no growth in numbers at all. Towards the end of the 17th century the population total seemed to have stuck at not much more than 1.5m.

From these doldrums the country was rescued by the industrial revolution. Coal, iron and proximity to England all conspired to make Belgium the first continental country to undergo the industrial transformation and the first to feel the demographic effects of this change. Between 1700 and 1800 the population of the area nearly doubled and by 1900 it was close on 7m. Since then growth has been steady, except in war years. The 1975 population is just over 10m.

The diversity of the Belgian population already divided (almost equally) between Flemings and Walloons has been intensified in recent years by an influx of foreign workers. There are currently about 0.25m of these, a third of them Italians. The growth rate is no longer high: it is unlikely that the population will significantly exceed 11 m in the year 2000.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay 3.08m km2

Ecuador 0.28m km2
Peru 1.29m km 2
Bolivia 1.10m km2
Paraguay 0.41m km2

Agricultural experiments began in the coastal zone of Ecuador and Peru as early as 5000 BC. They led to the development of a village-based farming economy in the 2nd millennium BC and, about the beginning of the Christian era, to the creation of the second major focus of Amerindian civilization, the Andean culture sequence, of which the final expression was the Inca Empire of the 15th century AD. In population terms this means totals of 40,000 in 5000 BC, 0. 75m in 1000 BC, 1.25 in AD 1 and 3.75m in AD 1500. Inca rule, which spread out from the capital city of Cuzco in the course of the 15th century, eventually covered the whole area bar the sparsely inhabited east of Bolivia and the territory of Paraguay: the last of the Incas, Atahualpa, received the homage of more than 3m natives.

The destruction of the Incas by a handful of Spanish adventurers was followed by the decimation of their subjects. Brutality, cultural shock and, most important, disease brought the Amerindian population down to 2.5m by the mid 17th century and to about 2m by the late 18th century. However, there was not the total demographic collapse that occurred in other, less culturally advanced areas and eventually, around 1800, the native population began to increase again. In 1900 the number of Amerindians rated as pure blooded had risen to 3m; today it is reckoned at 12m.

Not only have the natives of the Andean zone survived as a people, they have always kept a numerical superiority over their conquerers the Spaniards. From 50,000 in 1600 the Spanish population increased to 150,000 in 1750 and 0.5m in the 1820s, the era of independence. By 1900 there were roughly 2m people of Spanish descent in the area, today there are more than 9m. The Mestizos, the third component in the population, have increased in the same proportion and to much the same final figure. The only country to show a different pattern from this Indian : Mestizo : white ratio of 4 : 3 : 3 is Paraguay, where the aboriginal population of 150,000 Indians has dwindled to a mere 30,000 today and the split is between Mestizos (75%) and whites (25%). Paraguay also deserves special mention for the spectacular population drop it suffered in the War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay: between 1865 and 1870 two thirds of the adult male population either died or disappeared and total numbers dropped from 0.6m to 0.3m

Since the original injection of conquistadors, movement in and out of Area 8 has been of relatively little importance, at least when judged by American standards. Peru imported a small number of black slaves, less than0.1 m, and in 1850-75 brought in indentured Chinese labourers to about the same total: neither race makes a significant contribution to present day demography

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The Incas were given to counting people and things by making knots in bits of string but as no one knows exactly what their system was, the few records that survive are of no present use. The early colonial period has left the usual collection of guesses, estimates, tax records and ecclesiastical soul counts: head counts start in the 18th century. The census record is: Peru, 1777, 1785, 1791, 1795/6, 1813, 1836, 1850,1862, 1876, 1940, 1961, 1972; Ecuador, 1905, 1950, 1962, 1974; Bolivia, 1831, 1854, 1882, 1900, 1950, 1972; Paraguay, 1886, 1899, 1935, 1950, 1972.

The population of the Inca Empire is subject to as wide a degree of estimation as that of pre-Conquest Mexico. Most older estimates varied between 4m and 10m, but recently a figure of 39m has been put forward by D. N. Cook in Anuario del Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas 8 (1965). Again we prefer * Rosenblat's much lower figure; his estimate for Paraguay, though, seems too high.

Peru is magnificently served by its historical demographers. Among the more recent works are an excellent compendium by the Centro de Estudios de Población y Desarrollo, Informe demografico Peru 1970 (1972); G. Vollmer, Bevölkerungspolitik and Bevölkerungsstruktur im Vizekönigreich Peru zu Ende der Kolonialzeit 17411821 (1967), and Cook's article. G. Kubler's work in English, The Indian Caste of Peru 1796-1940 (1952), is still very useful. W. Steward, Chinese Bondage in Peru (1970), covers this interesting episode. See also D. M. Rivarola and
G. Heisecke, Población, urbanización y recursos humanos en el Paraguay (1970) and
A. Averanga Mollinedo, Aspectos generales de la población boliviana (1956).

Acknowledgement
"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Brazil 8.51m km 2

When the Portuguese discovered Brazil at the beginning of the 16th century the whole vast area contained no more than 1 m natives. Settled agriculture and the relatively high densities of population associated with it were almost entirely limited to the lower reaches of the Amazon; in the rest of the country the people depended more on gathering than growing and the density figures were correspondingly low. In the years immediately following the arrival of the Portuguese this low density operated in the natives' favour: they were so scattered that neither the newcomers nor their microbes could easily get at them. However the pattern of contact, decline and destruction was only postponed. As white colonization progressed, so native numbers fell — to 0.7m in 1700, 0.5m in 1800 and 0.2m today.

Brazil is the enduring monument to Portugal's century of maritime glory but most of the effort made by the mother country at the time went into the creation of its empire in the East. It has been calculated that to maintain a force of 10,000 men in the East cost the lives of 100,000 Portuguese in the course of the 16th century, a heavy drain on a country with a total population of only 1.25m-2m. By contrast the settlement of Brazil was achieved with a net outflow (up to AD 1600), of no more than 15,000.

For a long time the number of Portuguese settled in Brazil remained very small. In 1550 the white population was only 15,000 and it took to the end of the 16th century to double. By 1650 it was about 70,000. These settlers ran a plantation economy manned first by virtually enslaved Indians, then, as these unfortunates died off, by specially imported and entirely enslaved Africans. In 1650 the latter outnumbered their white masters two to one. The total population remained at the million mark as the growth of white and black populations did no more than offset the fall in the number of Amerindians.

At the end of the 17th century a gold strike injected a bit of speed into this sleepy situation. There was substantial internal movement of population, a wave of new immigration from Portugal and a step-up in slave imports. This last was no flash in the pan: slave imports were to continue at a very high level till the mid 19th century. Indeed it was only after nearly everyone else had withdrawn from the Atlantic slave trade that the Brazilian end of it recorded its peak figures: a third of a million landings in the 1820s and the same again in the 1840s. It is this prolongation of the trade through the first half of the 19th century that puts Brazil at the top of the table of slave-importing countries. The final sum adds up to 3.5m Africans for the period 1550-1850, or 40% of the entire Atlantic traffic.

Brazil became an independent state in 1822. The extent to which its society rested on slavery is shown by the population figures for that date. Out ofa total of 4m more than 2m were black slaves, only 1 m free whites. Amerindians were down to 0.4m, the remaining 0.2m being free blacks and Mulattos.
Since independence two things have happened: the total population has grown very fast and the white element, because of massive immigration, has grown even faster. From 1 m (25%) at independence the whites have officially increased to 60m (55%) and if this over- states the genetic truth — because every- one who can get away with it calls him- self white — it doesn't do so by more than 10%. Blacks by contrast are down to an official figure of 15% (more like 25% in reality) with mulattos and mestizos sharing the remainder equally between them.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The census years are 1775, 1798, 1808, 1822, 1872, 1890, 1900, 1920, 1940 and every tenth year since then. The early censuses need careful interpretation; this (and much else) is supplied by D. Alden in Hispanic American Historical Review 43, 2 (1963). Early data, including apparently good figures for the colonists, are quoted by Paul Hugon in Demografia Brasileira (1973) and hr * Rosenblat, who gives his usual estimates for 1650, 1570 and 1492; he is again at the low end of the range of estimates of the pre-Conquest population, which runs from m to 3.5m.
Racial proportions are also given by Rosenblat (there is a good official estimate of 1818), and the trends discussed by T. Lynn Smith in Brazil: People and Institutions ( 1972). A great deal of work has been done on slavery in Brazil: * Curtin provides the best numerical introduction and represents the modern consensus. Migration since 1870 is covered by both Hugon and Lynn Smith, and net estimates are quoted by * Sanchez- Albornoz.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Primary Sources

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Canada
10.0m km

The first Americans had no option but to pass through Canada as quickly as possible, the land being almost entirely covered by the Wisconsin ice cap. Gradually, as the ice retreated north- ward, Canadian territory suitable for permanent colonization became available and the peopling of the country could begin. The first inhabitants came from the hunting communities established on the Great Plains to the south; later they were joined by the only two groups of pre-Columbian Americans who clearly arrived from Asia long after everyone else, the Indians of the Pacific north-west and the Eskimos. Between them these three groups brought the total population of Canada up to 0.m by AD 1000 and, with the addition of some maize-growing tribes to the St Lawrence area, to 0.2m by AD 1500. Contact with Europeans reduced this total to 0.m by 1900, but happily the 20th century has seen a more than complete recovery, the current figure being about 0.25m.

Leaving aside the abortive Norse discovery of AD 1000 we can take the years following Cartier's voyages (1534/5) as the period in which Europeans acquired a working knowledge of Canada's Atlantic coast. Despite this there were no more than a few hundred Europeans in Canada at any one time before 1650 and these were mostly fishermen temporarily established on the east coast. Proper settlement began in the mid-17th century.

In its first hundred years it was essentially French and centred on the St Lawrence. By the time of the British conquest in 1760 a population of 70,000 had been bred from just over 10,000 French immigrants, most of whom arrived before 1700. Frontier fertility produced a birth rate of 50 per 1,000 and a growth rate of 2.5% a year. This growth continued after the British takeover, which virtually ended French immigration. There were 0.2m French Canadians in 1800, 0.7m in 1850 and m by the mid-1870s, despite the emigration of around 0.m in the mid-19th century. Even so, the Canadian population of French origin fell from about three quarters of the total in the mid-18th century to 30% a century later, remaining at that proportion until recently.

Before the later 18th century, the British had little impact on Canada. Though they held the far north (Ruperts Land), they made virtually no settlement there, while their claims on the east coast, which amounted to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, produced very little in the way of results at first. Nova Scotia, which received 2,500 British settlers in 1749, still had a British population of less than 20,000 in the mid-1770s, while Newfoundland's population was only half that. The arrival of some 35,000 Loyalists — exiles from Republican America — was to double the British element in the Canadian population, which finally drew level with the French element soon after 1800.

Migration from Britain to Canada gained momentum after 1815, with 0.5m settlers arriving in the period 1815-60. This, plus natural increase, was sufficient to push the population up to its first respectable totals: 1m by 1825, 2m by 1840 and 3m by 1860. For the rest of the 19th century the story is an odd one: very substantial numbers of migrants continued to arrive at Canadian ports (nearly 1 m in the 1880s alone) but they left for the USA even faster. Between 1880 and 1900 there was a net annual loss of 20,000, which is why a population that multiplied five times in the first half of the 19th century could manage only to double in the second half.
In the 20th century the migration balance became positive again. The two great periods of immigration were the years around the First World War (1.2m net immigrants between 1900 and 1930) and after the Second World War (2m net immigrants between 1945 and 1975). The origins of these migrants changed significantly as the century advanced. The proportion of Canadians of 'other European origin', which was only 7% in the late 19th century, had risen to 26% by 1971, with French Canadians slip- ping slightly to 28% and 'Canadians of British origin' to 44% (not forgetting the original Canadians at 1.2%).

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The French Canadians are one of the best recorded populations in the world. Frequent censuses — thirty-six between 1666 and 1760 — and a good ecclesiastical registration system provide an almost complete record from the 17th century. This is summarized in Hubert Charbonneau (ed.), La Population de Québec: études rétrospectives (1973), and in English by J. Henripin and Y. Peron in * Glass and Revelle.

After the British conquest there were counts in 'Canada' proper in 1765, Nova Scotia 1766-7, New Brunswick 1767, Lower Canada 1784 and Prince Edward Island in 1798 and 1805. Upper Canada actually held an annual census in 1826-42, other parts joining in from time to time. A general Canadian census was more or less established in 1851, and regularly on a decennial basis from 1861. Newfoundland emphasized its separ- ateness by producing a series running 1845, 1857, 1869, 1874, 1884 before conforming. The federal census has been quinquennial since 1951.

Volume 1 of the 1931 Census has a full list of all previous counts and estimates, and post-1851 material is summarized by M. C. Urquhart and K. A. H. Buckley in Historical Statistics of Canada (1965). Useful general sources are: F. Veyret, La Population du Canada (1953) and J. Warkentin (ed.), Canada; A Geographical Interpretation (1968).

The basic source for the pre-European population of Canada is J. Mooney in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80, 7 (1928).

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay 3.71 km2

Argentina 2.78m km 2
Chile 0.76m km2
Uruguay 0.18m km 2

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

China 9.6m km'

The area within the frontiers of the People's Republic of China falls naturally into two parts: on the one hand, China proper the area bounded by the Tibetan plateau and the Great Wall which is big, densely populated and racially Chinese; on the other hand, the outlying areas which together are even bigger and which either still are, or were within living memory, sparsely inhabited with people of non-Chinese stock. To this second category we have added Taiwan (Formosa), which is small but, until relatively recently, was both underdeveloped and ethnically non-Chinese.
So we treat China under four headings:
4a Chinese Turkestan and Tibet area 3.6m km2
The province of Tsinghai, the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region and the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
4b Manchuria and Inner Mongolia area 2.0m km2 The provinces of Heilungkiang Kirin and Liaoning, the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and the Ningsia Hui Autonomous Region.
4c China Proper area 4.0m km2
The provinces of Kansu, Shensi, Shansi, Hopei, Shantung, Honan, Anhwei, Kiangsu, Chekiang, Kiangsi, Hupei, Hunan, Szechwan, Yunnan, Kweichow, Kwangtung and Fukien, plus the Kwangsi Chuang Autonomous Region, the Portuguese colony of Macao and the British colony of Hong Kong
4d Taiwan (Formosa) area 0.036m km2
Migrations between the constituent parts of Area 4 boil down to emigration from China proper to Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan, and so are treated in sections 4b and 4d. There are about 15m people of Chinese stock living outside Area 4, the majority of them accounted for by the Chinese communities in Singapore (1.75m), Malaysia (3.75m), Thailand (4m) and Indonesia (2.5m).
Chinese Turkestan and Tibet
Chinese central Asia is a desolate part of the world: two more hostile environments than the Takla Makan (the desert that occupies the Tarim basin) and the Tibetan plateau it would be hard to imagine. Yet the oases of the Takla Makan have probably been inhabited as long as man has walked the earth, for they provide the stepping-stones between Near and Far East. By 4000 BC we can think of a population of some thousands living in the Tarim oases, with a scattering of hunters and herdsmen over the rest of the vast area. The area is, in fact, so vast that even at a density of
1.3 per km2 we would have a total population of over 100,000.

Over the succeeding millennia man will have slowly learnt to make moreout of this unpromising habitat. The historical landmarks that suggest periods of relatively rapid population increase are the appearance of horse- riding nomads in the last millennium BC, the opening of the Trans-Asian silk route in the 1st century AD and the gen- esis of the Tibetan state in the 7th century AD. By AD 1 we can think in terms of a total population of 1m, in AD 1000 of 2m and by AD 1800 of 3m. Official estimates for the end of the 19th century suggest a moderate growth in the late 19th century, quickening in this century to produce a 1975 total of about 12m. Some third of this total would be Moslem Uighurs and roughly a quarter Tibetans
Manchuria and Inner Mongolia
The steppe country north of China proper is historically the domain of the nomads. With the evolution of the more efficient horse-riding style of herding in the last millennium BC we can assume that the population of the area doubled, reaching a figure of 2m by AD 1. In the next 1,000 years it is reasonable to believe that it doubled again, for the nomads increase steadily in political importance during this period and there is also a Chinese colony in south Manchuria to take into account. The growth of this colony was deliberately halted by the Manchus after their con- quest of China in 1644. With the aim of preserving the race the Manchus turned their homeland into a sort of human game reserve: Chinese immigration was prohibited so that the Manchu stock and the Manchu way of life might continue uncontaminated.
This policy had to be reversed when the Russians appeared on the scene. By the second half of the 19th century Chinese immigration into Manchuria was being positively encouraged in an effort to forestall a Russian occupation. The flow of migrants, initially only a trickle, became a flood with the opening of the Peking—Mukden railway. By the later 1920s half a million Chinese were pouring into Manchuria every year and it has been calculated that for the first half of this century the total number of immigrants was of the order of 20m. Nearly all of them were Chinese from the overcrowded provinces along the lower Huang Ho but about 1 m settlers came in from Korea.
Inevitably, the newcomers have swamped the Manchus. Though 2.4m people gave Manchu as their race in the 1953 enumeration it is believed that only 10% of these were actually living in Manchu-speaking communities. The rest had been culturally absorbed by the 40m Chinese who dominated the province.

Much the same thing has happened to the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. Perhaps a quarter of the 1.3m reported in 1953 were still leading the nomadic life: the rest were sinking into a Chinese population five times as large.

China Proper
The chronology of the Neolithic in China is still a matter of dispute but we do know that the first farming communities grew up along the lower Huang Ho ( Yellow River) and that their agriculture was based on wheat, not rice. By 3000 BC we can think in terms of a million peasants in the area either side of the lower Huang Ho, which, together with another million food-gatherers else- where in China, gives us a total figure for China proper of 2m.

The population rise during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods was slow. But it was also steady as, with the accumulation of agricultural exper- ience, crop yields improved allowing an increase in population density within the cultivated area. And the cultivated area itself expanded. However, even in the full Bronze Age — the era known as the Shang period because during it kings of the Shang Dynasty claimed overlord- ship over the whole of the lower Huang Ho area — the agricultural zone did not exceed 1 m km2, nor the population within it 5m, nor the population of China proper 6m.

With the collapse of the Shang hegemony around 1000 BC, civilized China split up into a dozen warring states. Surprisingly, the rate of popula- tion increase quickened. This was partly because an irrigation system was being developed in the Yellow River basin, and partly because the valley of the Yangtse was now being brought under cultivation. By 400 BC there were not less than 25m people in an agricultural zone that covered the northern half of the country. The contemporary population of the southern half — ethnically consisting of non-Chinese peoples related to the Thai — is unlikely to have exceeded 10% of the figure for the Chinese peasantry in the north.

In the last quarter of the last millennium BC, political unification, first achieved in 221 BC, provided the back- ground for continuing growth. Early on in the days of the Han Empire (206 BC- AD 220) the population passed the 50m mark. But thereafter it was to stay in the band 45-60m for a thousand years. This poor demographic performance matches that of Europe in the late Roman and early medieval periods with an exactness that is hard to explain.
The breakthrough to new demographic ground came during the Sung period around the year 1000. The basis for the new advance was fuller exploitation of the rice-growing potential of the Yangtse valley and there was consequently a southward shift in the country's political centre of gravity. The effect intensified in the years immediately after 1211, when Genghiz Khan first led the Mongol hordes across the Gobi to attack China proper. This was the beginning of one of the bitterest and most prolonged wars of conquest in world history. The Mongols, though hardly ever checked on the battlefield, had such trouble making lasting progress in the city- studded countryside of north China that they eventually switched from a policy of massacre in punishment for rebellion to one of straight genocide. Within a decade, flight and the Mongol fury had reduced the population of the northern provinces by three quarters or more. Though the subsequent conquest of the southern areas was faster and less bloody, the country as a whole lost per- haps a third of its numbers by the time the war was over. The loss — around 35m on this estimate — is a staggering one for the era.

Mongol Khans ruled China for a little more than a century. In the upheavals that accompanied their expulsion and replacement by emperors of the native Ming Dynasty, the demographic recovery that had begun in the late 13th century was aborted. But when growth was resumed it was sustained: a benign and orderly government encouraged the philoprogenitive Chinese to give full rein to their reproductive talents and the population doubled in the course of the next two centuries. On the eve of the Manchu invasion there were around 150m Chinese within China proper.

The Manchu conquest cost China about a sixth of her population — say 25m people. By 1700 this loss had been made up and in the political calm of the 18th century came a population surge that carried the total past the 300m mark. This rate of growth — 100% in 100 years — was too fast to be good: there was now little scope for further extensions to the area under cultivation and the techniques of cultivation had hardly changed for centuries. The Malthusian spectre of overpopulation had arrived. Few doubt that this was an important factor in the political troubles that now overtook China, the series of revolts of which the most famous and most damaging was the Taiping rebellion of 1850-65. The Manchus, against most expectations, succeeded in suppressing these rebellions. The cost has never been accurately determined — figures of the order of 25m are hazarded but was certainly sufficiently large to put a noticeable kink in the population graph.
The pattern of hopeless poverty and endemic strife was to continue into the20th century when the Manchu government finally collapsed. By the time the communists succeeded in restoring order in 1949, China had behind it a century of remarkably low population growth — something of the order of 25%. World population during the same period rose by more than 100%.

Of course, even small percentage rises can result in colossal absolute gains when the existing population is measured in hundreds of millions. With the return of peace and the appearance of the sort of growth rate one would expect in the case of an underdeveloped country in the 20th century, the magnitude of the increase in Chinese population becomes staggering — of the order of a million a month. The 1975 population of China proper is at least 720m and could be 100m more: projections for the year 2000 fall in the 9501,250m range.

Minorities and Enclaves
Figures as big as a billion make the statistics of the minority and enclave populations of China look silly. However, for what they are worth, here they are:

Minorities
(1) The 7m Chuang, who are related to the Thai, form roughly one third of the population of what is now the Kwangsi Chuang Autonomous Region in the south- west of China proper. In neighbouring Kweichow are 1.25m similar people going under the name of Puyi.
(2) Along the southern half of the border with Tibet in Szechwan and Yunnan provinces are 3.25m Yi and 2.5m Miao. The Yi are relatives of the Tibetans. The Miao rank as an independent member of the Sino-Tibetan group.

Enclaves
(1) Hong Kong. The area of present day Hong Kong had a negligible population (c.10,
000) when ceded to Britain in 1842. By 1900 the population was 0.25m, in 1975 it reached 4.25m. The projection for the year 2000 is 6m.
(2) Macao has been a Portuguese possession since 1849. Its population in 1900 was 0.
08m; it is now over 0.25m.

Primary Sources
Though the Chinese have been counting heads ever since the days of the warring states in the 1st millennium BC, the earliest surviving figure is for the number of households in the Han Empire — 11.8m. The figure refers to the year AD 2. For the period between A D 2 and 1194 Durand (see below) lists twenty-one enumerations of which some results — sometimes only the final total — are still extant. These enumerations, plus the figures that survive from the Mongol period, give the order of magnitude of the population of China proper prior to the first reliable count — the Ming enumeration of 1393. Since then, counts have been taken at irregular intervals and estimates issued to cover the intervening periods. As there is no registration of births or deaths, the estimates can only be crude: less than twenty years after the only half-way accurate enumeration held in this century, the count taken by the communist government in 1953, official estimates for the country's population vary by up to 7% on either side of the mean of all the estimates. Given the magnitude of the population, this means that the range of uncertainty is now 100m and growing fast.
Bibliography

For educated guesses at the population of China under the Shang (c.1100 BC) and during the period of the 'Warring States' (c.400 BC), see Wolfram Eberhard's History of China (1967), pp. 21 and 25. For the census figures for the Han period on, see J. D. Durand's article in Population Studies 13 (3) 1960, and for the Ming period onward, see Ping-Ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China 1368-1953 (1959). There is a good discussion of the 1953 enumeration and the likely population changes since then in Leo
A. Orleans, Every Fifth Child: The Population of China (1972).
Taiwan (Formosa)
When the Chinese began to colonize Taiwan in the 17th century it was inhabited by about 200,000 aborigines of Malayo-Polynesian stock. Presumably this native population, which has remained at the same level since, had grown slowly over the preceding millennia. The arrival of Chinese settlers started the island on a very different demographic course, immigration bringing the total population up to 2m by the beginning of the 19th century and 3m by 1900.

Growth accelerated during the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945) and moved into even higher gear with the establishment of the Chinese Nationalist government on the island in 1949. Though the 0.3m Japanese who had settled on Taiwan were expelled at the end of the Second World War, their places were more than filled by the 2m Chinese who arrived from the mainland in flight from the communists. These refugees boosted the birth rate to a record figure and though the rate of increase is now slackening it is unlikely that the island's population will be less than 20m when the century ends.
Primary Sources and Bibliography
The Manchus enumerated the Chinese population of Taiwan in 1811 and 1887: the Japanese instituted a quinquennial census in 1905. The data are presented by Irene Taeuber in an article on p. 101 of the 1961 issue of Population Index.

Primary Sources and Bibliography for Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia (Areas 4a and 4b)

Fragmentary data for the steppe zone go back as far as the Han period: A. K. Validi ( quoted by * Russell, p. 87) has used them to make crude estimates of the populations of Inner Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan in the 1st century BC and the 10th century AD. Manchuria became part of the Chinese world at the end of the 10th century: contemporary estimates of population in the 10th, 11th and 17th centuries are quoted in two articles in Population Index: 1945, p. 260, and 1952, p. 85. Tibet's first census followed the Mongol conquest of the country in the 13th century (see H. E. Richardson, Tibet and its History (1962)): the results of an 18th-century census are given in an article by W. Woodville Rockhill in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1891, p. 15).
The official 19th- and 20th-century estimates for all these areas are collected in Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China 1568-1968 (1969). Some of them are almost worthless. For example, the government of Manchuria completely failed to appreciate the scale of the late-19th-century immigration. It was only when the Japanese took over the administration in 1905 that it became apparent that the 1893 estimate of 5.4m was impossibly low. Nor are things all that much better today. The present government has admitted that in the case of 'remote areas where communica- tions were poor' figures in the 1953 returns were no more than estimates. Given the rate of increase in the outer areas, figures obtained by extrapolation from 1953 to 1975 are doubly insecure.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Czechoslovakia 0.13m km'

Upper palaeolithic man in Czechoslovakia probably numbered less than 1, 000, mesolithic man no more than about 5,000 and it was not until long after the introduction of farming that the total population reached 50,000. During the Bronze Age (2500-1000 B C), numbers rose to 200,000, while the last millennium BC saw a relatively rapid increase to a figure not far short of a million.

At this point the historical record begins. The country lay just beyond the boundary of the Roman Empire and did not directly experience the pax romana but it certainly benefited from the pros- perity the Romans brought to central Europe and shared in the general increase in population that took place in`Free Germany' in the 1st century AD. The Marcomanni of Bohemia (western Czechoslovakia) and the Quadi of Moravia (central Czechoslovakia) were reckoned among the strongest of the German tribes: the population of the country as a whole will have reached a peak of 1.25m by AD 250.
For the era this was substantial over- population and represented a significant component in the demographic pressure that was to be one factor in the fall of Rome. In the early 5th century, when this event finally occurred, the pent-up energies of the Germans were discharged in an out-migration that emptied the Czechoslovak area and allowed its re-peopling with the Slav immigrants who have given the country its present name. From now on the Czechs ( in Bohemia and Moravia, which together form the western two thirds of the country) and Slovaks (in Slovakia, the eastern third) form the overwhelming majority of the population.

At the best of times the departure of the Germans and the arrival of the Czechs and Slovaks would have caused a dip in the population graph. Coming as they did in the Dark Ages the movements caused a sharp drop to a low of 0.7m in AD 600. But by the year 1000 the loss had been recovered and for the three centuries following, the boom period of the medieval population cycle, there was rapid growth to a new peak of 3m.

The process of clearing and colonizing new land, which went on all over Europe at this time, was spearheaded in the Czech area by German immigrants: they brought their superior skills to both countryside and town and all along the perimeter of Bohemia established themselves as a substantial minority the Sudeten Deutsch. Their arrival emphasized the political incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia in the German Empire just as the relative absence of Germans from the eastern, Slovak, third of the country reflected the fact that this area lay beyond the imperial frontier.
Czechoslovakia seems to have suffered less from the Black Death than the rest of Western Europe. Though growth was halted, reversed and resumed in a pattern not so dissimilar from that o the continent as a whole, the fall in numbers was relatively slight and the medieval peak comfortably exceeded by the year 1600. By that date the Czech and Slovak populations totaled about 4. 5m. This figure proved to be another isolated peak, however, for it was in Bohemia that the notorious Thirty Years War broke out (in 1618) and here that it did its worst damage. By the time the peace of 1648 was signed the population had shrunk by a fifth by a quarter in Bohemia and it was not till the end of the century that the antebellum levels of population were regained.

The 18th and 19th centuries were a period of accelerating growth. The population rose from 4.5m in 1700 to 6. 75m in 1800 and 12.25m in 1900. And natural increase was even higher than these figures indicate. Because of the limited economic opportunities in their homelands, Czechs migrated in great numbers to other parts of 'Greater Austria' (by 1910, 8% of all Czechs lived in the Austrian capital, Vienna) and Slovaks to other parts of 'Greater Hungary' (by 1910, 5% of all Slovaks lived in the Hungarian capital, Budapest). Both Czechs and Slovaks also left for the New World in droves, something like 2m between 1850 and 1914.

The Czechoslovak state established after the First World War experienced far less emigration. However, the rate of natural increase fell off so sharply dur- ing this period that the population had only risen to 14.4m by 1939. The Second World War drastically lowered even this figure. Those of the Sudeten Germans who did not flee when the Russians liberated the country were soon expelled by the new Czech government: altogether 2.4m people moved out, reducing the 1945 population to a figure of 12.2m no greater than the population of 1900. Since then the loss has been made up but little more than that: at 14.6m the present population total is only marginally greater than the pre-war figure.

Primary Sources
A considerable amount of primary material exists for Czechoslovakia for the pre- census period, but it is difficult to obtain an adequate idea of it in the West. Bohemia shares in the general European pattern of taxation counts existing from the late Middle Ages, and parish registers from the late 16th century. Summaries survive of a 1702 count of all people over the age of ten. The picture for Moravia is less satisfactory, the earliest taxation data being 17th century. Both Bohemia and Moravia were covered by the Austrian military census of 1754 and the subsequent revisions, and by the series of true censuses starting in 1857 (see Austria). In Slovakia there is almost nothing to go on prior to the military census which, because of Hungarian objections to the procedure, was not taken in this area till 1784. Since the creation of the Czechoslovak state, censuses have been held in 1921, 1930, 1947 (Bohemia and Moravia only), 1948 (Slovakia only), 1961 and 1970.

Bibliography
There is a useful summary of the demographic history of Czechoslovakia in Demek and Steide, Geography of Czechoslovakia (1971). The earlier sources are surveyed by V. Husa in * Colloque (p. 237). The material for the Czech lands from 1754 on is usefully summarized in two articles in * Annales de démographie historique, 1966 and 1967.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Scandinavia 1.15m km2

Denmark 0.04m km 2
Sweden 0.45m km' (0.03m km2arable)
Norway 0.32m km2 (0.01m km2 arable)
Finland 0.34m km2 (0.03m km2 arable)

The Ice Age lasted longer in Scandinavia than in any other part of Europe, the peninsula emerging from the ice only in the course of the 9th millennium BC. A few thousand reindeer hunters moved in then. Behind them, in the next millennium, came a rather more numerous population of mesolithic food- gatherers, and finally, around 5000 B C, the first farmers. Denmark, the only sizable area immediately suitable for agriculture, straight away became the demographic heavyweight among the Scandinavian countries. If there were 150,000 people in the area by the time the local Iron Age began in 500 BC, two thirds of them will have lived in Denmark: comparable figures for 200 BC would be 400,000 and 50%.

The first clear case of overspill is the migration by some of the Goths of Sweden to Germany in the last century BC. Other Scandinavian clans followed during the next 200 years and the movement probably came to an end only when the fall of Rome — an event in which the continental Goths played a prominent part — relieved population pressure throughout the Teutonic world.

The next time the lid blew off in a much more spectacular way. By the end of the 8th century AD the Scandinavians had developed Europe's first really efficient sailing ship, the square-sailed Viking longship. This enabled them to export their surplus population over an amazingly wide area. The movement began with the Norse (Norwegians), who established colonies in Scotland, northern England, and the empty islands of the north Atlantic (the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland: see Area 15). The Swedish adventurers, the Varangians, travelled east; they sailed along the great rivers of Russia to set up the principalities of Novgorod and Kiev, and traded and raided as far as the Caspian and Black Seas. The Danes concentrated on the shores of the English Channel. There they founded the Duchy of Normandy (in the early 10th century) and, after many attempts, finally succeeded in conquering England(1016). Altogether, we can reckon that some 200,000 people left Scandinavia for good between the end of the 8th century and the beginning of the 11th, of whom perhaps half lived long enough to tell their children how they sailed with Ragnar Lothbrok, Rollo or Sveyn Forkbeard.

The reflux effects of the Viking movement brought Christianity and better manners to Scandinavia which,in the years immediately before and after AD 1000, settled down into the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. For a long time the Danish kingdom was the most important of the three: it was the most densely populated (it still is), so it was relatively easy to administer; it was also the biggest in absolute numbers because its traditional boundaries included the southern part of Sweden and a fifth of its inhabitants. The gradual development of the north changed this picture. By the middle of the 17th century the Swedes were strong enough to force the King of Denmark to give up his hold on the south of their country: by its end they outnumbered the Danes 2 to 1. In fact Swedes then constituted half the population of the area, more than ever before or since.

Sweden's relative decline in recent times is a consequence of Finland's rise. Nowhere has the frontier of cultivation been pushed northward so dramatically as in Finland. The result of this is that the 100,000 Finns of late medieval times have been able to multiply up to a present total of nearly 5m. There have been dreadful setbacks within the over- all success, most notably in 1697 when a crop failure was followed by a famine in which 100,000 people, a third of the country's population, died. Recovery took a generation. And though this was the worst ever loss it was far from the last one: as late as 1867 8% of the population died following an exactly similar crop failure.

In modern times Scandinavia's over-population problems have found a peaceable solution in emigration to the New World. Between 1815 and 1939 there was a net outflow of 2.75m people, of whom 1.25m were Swedes, 0. 85m Norwegians, 0.35m Danes and 0. 25m Finns. Relative to size, Norway's contribution is much the largest, which is understandable given its traditionally maritime outlook.

The populations of the Scandinavian states are homogeneous. In the far north some 20,000 Lapps, descendants of the reindeer hunters of palaeolithic times, still cling to the old ways. There are about a third of a million Swedish speakers in Finland: they represent the descendants of a colonizing wave that crossed the Baltic during the period when Finland was under Swedish domination. There are a similar number of Finns in Sweden but they are very recent immigrants attracted by the greater economic opportunities of the Swedish labour market. All these minorities are tending to decline.

Primary Sources

These are almost non-existent until the 17th century, when a start was made with parish registration throughout the area. Denmark levied a poll tax (1660) and the Norwegians compiled a muster roll (1664-6). In the 18th century all is light. National collections of parish registers are available from 1730 on. A proper census was taken in Sweden and its dependency Finland in 1749 (the first ever held in continental Europe): Denmark and its dependency Norway followed suit in 1769

The Swedish and Finnish censuses were repeated in 1760 and have been taken regularly, usually quinquennially, ever since. The Danish census was repeated in 1787, 1801 and 1834, and either quinquennially or decennially from 1840 on. The Norwegian census was repeated in 1801 and, with a few irregularities, decennially from 1850 on.

Bibliography

For acceptable guesses as to the population of the Scandinavian countries in the 11th century AD see the Cambridge Medieval History (Vol. 6 (1929), p. 367), and for Norway in the 14th century the * Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Vol. 4, p. 38). * Russell's medieval figures seem too low to us.
For the Danish poll tax of 1660 see A. Lassen, Sc. Econ. H.R. 14 (1966), for the Norwegian muster rolls S. Dyrvik, Sc. Econ. H.R. 20 (1972), and for the whole area in this period H. Gille, in Population Studies 3 (1) 1949.

This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay 3.08m km2

Ecuador 0.28m km2
Peru 1.29m km 2
Bolivia 1.10m km2
Paraguay 0.41m km2

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Egypt is a desert country of which a thin snake-like strip — less than 5% of the whole — is watered and brought to life by the Nile. The body of the snake is known as Upper Egypt: it has a width of only a few kilometres. The triangular head, Lower Egypt, is formed by the delta of the Nile: in its short length it contains as much productive land as all Upper Egypt.

One feature of the delta is an extensive spread of marshes. These must have provided a happy hunting ground for primitive man and because of them Lower Egypt probably supported the majority of the 25,000 inhabitants one can postulate for the country as a whole in late mesolithic times. With the arrival of the first farmers about 6000 BC the pendulum will have swung in favour of Upper Egypt. Here irrigation techniques could be practised in their most simple form and here the village-based economy that has characterized Egypt ever since will have achieved its first flowering. Population now grew steadily,reaching 100,000 in about 5000 BC and 250,000 in 4000 BC: it was on the million mark in 3000 BC when the Upper Egyptian King Menes conquered the delta and became Pharaoh of all Egypt.

Menes founded the first in the long succession of dynasties that ruled the Nile valley in the centuries before Christ. During the initial phase, known to scholarship as the Old Kingdom and lasting through most of the 3rd millennium BC, the population increased from 1 m to 2m; during the Middle Kingdom (2100-1700 BC) from 2m to 2.5m. A new peak was reached in the New Kingdom or Empire period (1600-1200 BC) during which the Pharaohs conquered and held Palestine and part of the Sudan. In demographic terms these provinces were not very important: Nubia (the Sudanese province) contained at the most 100,000 people and Palestine no more than 250,000, figures that have to be compared with the 3m in Egypt proper. Internal development was now focused on the delta: the creation there of four new nomes (administrative districts) brings Upper and Lower Egypt into balance at twenty-two and twenty nomes respectively.

During the last millennium BC the irregular increase of the Egyptian peasantry slowed: in the first two centuries AD it ceased altogether. The available land was being exploited as fully as was possible with the available techniques,and at about 5m the population reached a maximum that was not exceeded until modern times. Plague, famine and war will, of course, have reduced the population below this level from time to time and during particularly bad spells — the economic collapse of the 4th century AD, the plagues of the 7th and 14th centuries and the stagnation in the last stage of Ottoman rule — the population must have been nearer 3m than 5m. But for something near 3,000 years the size of the Egyptian population remained within these relatively narrow limits. Christianity came and went; Islam came and stayed; the fellahin tilled the fields,and the economy, like the pyramids, remained unchanging.

Egypt was shaken out of its medieval torpor by the arrival of Napoleon in 1799. In the first half of the 19th century numbers rose from 3.5m to 5.5m: in the second half the introduction of perennial irrigation, the entry into the world cotton market and the opening of the Suez Canal provided the economic basis for an even faster rate of increase, with the 10m mark being reached in 1900.

In the 20th century the story has been less satisfactory. In the first half the number of Egyptians exactly doubled (to 20m) but the Egyptian economy did not do so well: as a result living standards dropped. In the period 1950-75 both demographic and economic growth accelerated, but whereas the population gains were steady and the final figure 37m — impressive by any standard, the economic performance was more erratic. And though the increase in Arab oil revenues and the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Israel offer the hope of a better final quarter to the century, the absolute rate of increase — now running at over a million a year — is so high that it is difficult to be very optimistic. By the year 2000 the Egyptian government will have to provide food and jobs for a population that is unlikely to total less than 60m and could well be 10m more.

The Egyptians are a remarkably homogeneous people, the only important division being between Christians (10%) and Moslems (90%). The Christians are all of the native Coptic variety: the European community, which built up to a strength of 0.15m in the colonial era, is now down to nothing. To either side of the Nile, in the western and eastern deserts, there are a few bedouin: once they may have numbered 0.m but today the total is certainly less than this.

Primary Sources
No country is easier to survey than Egypt, no people easier to count, and records that would be as purest gold to the historical demographer have certainly been compiled since the days of Menes. Unfortunately, nothing in the way of a total survives from the country's early days, except a tradition, recorded by various classical historians, that Pharaonic Egypt had a population of 7m. This figure is too high. Diodorus, quoting Hecataeus of Abdera, gives a figure of 3m for 300 B C (Diodorus 131; for the dispute about the exact text see * Beloch, p. 256) and it is exceedingly unlikely that the population had been significantly greater at any earlier date.

There are no primary data for the medieval or early modern periods, the next figure worth discussion being the estimate of 2.5m produced by the French savants who came to Egypt with Napoleon in 1799. In 1848 the country held its first census: after allowing for considerable underenumeration the result was published as 4.5m. The correction needed in the case of the next (1882) census, a 12% addition to the raw total of 6.8m, was less substantial but it is only with the census of 1897, the first in the decennial series instituted by the British authorities, that we reach firm ground. The decennial censuses were held on schedule up to 1957 but the census for that year had to be repeated in 1960 because of uncertainties introduced by the hostilities with Israel. There has only been one census since, held in 1966, so that there is some doubt as to the exact size of the present (1975) population.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Egypt

Egypt is a desert country of which a thin snake-like strip — less than 5% of the whole — is watered and brought to life by the Nile. The body of the snake is known as Upper Egypt: it has a width of only a few kilometres. The triangular head, Lower Egypt, is formed by the delta of the Nile: in its short length it contains as much productive land as all Upper Egypt.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

East Africa 1.72m km'
Uganda 0.21m km2
Kenya 0.57m km2
Tanzania 0.89m km2
Rwanda and Burundi 0.05m km2

Bushmen were the sole inhabitants of East Africa until well on in the last millennium BC. Their culture was that of Stone Age hunters and gatherers, their numbers meager, certainly no more than 100,000 in all. This remained the total population of the region as late as 500 BC, when the first groups of cattle- herders moved in from the north.

The various tribes of cattle-drivers, who were of Cushite or Nilo-Saharan stock, didn't have the pastures of East Africa to themselves for long. By AD 1 advance parties of Bantu were crossing the present-day Zaire Uganda frontier and settling on the shores of the eastern lakes. As agriculturalists, the Bantu naturally lived at higher densities than the pastoralists and by the time they had spread over the whole area which took till about AD 500 they comfortably outnumbered them. The total population will have been over the million mark by then: by AD 1000 it will have further increased to 3m.

East Africa's isolation from the rest of the world had ceased to be absolute by this time. Arab seamen, shopping for ivory and slaves, began regular visits during the 10th century and by the 14th century there was a string of small trading posts along the coast. Their effect was strictly limited: the slaves exported amounted to a few hundred annually, perhaps as many as a thousand in an exceptional year, but even the higher figure is of no significance in relation to overall population figures of 4m or 5m.

Towards the end of the 18th century the Arabs did step up the scale of their operations. By the 1780s the export rate had risen to 2,000 a year, by the early 1800s it was more than 3,000. To get this number of captives the slavers had to send marauding expeditions into the interior. At the peak of the trade, in the 1850s and 60s, these raids regularly reached across the whole width of East Africa and some 20,000 people were being taken to the coast for sale every year. Double this figure to allow for the loss of life caused by the raids and the total is probably big enough to stunt the growth of the area's population, even though this was now more than 10m. Even so the effect was momentary. In 1873 the British, full of the moral fervour that marks reformed sinners, forced the local Arabs to give up the trade and Zanzibar, the last great slave mart in the world, shut up shop.

The British action heralded the beginning of East Africa's colonial era. Initially the 13m people that the area contained in 1900 were divided between the British (6.7m: 3m in present-day Uganda, 3.5m in present-day Kenya and 0.2m in the Zanzibar islands) and the Germans (6.3m: 3.8m in Tanganyika and 2.5m in Rwanda and Burundi). After the First World War the British took over Tanganyika and the Belgians Rwanda and Burundi. Population growth was rapid in all parts and by the early 1960s, when the east African state: of today achieved their independence their numbers were double or more than double what they had been at the beginning of the century. They have continued to grow at an accelerating rate since, so the area seems likely to contain something like 100m people by the year 2000.

Most East Africans are Bantu, the proportion varying from 70% in Uganda and Kenya to 90% in Rwanda and Burundi and 95% in Tanzania. East African society, however, is less harmonious than these figures suggest. For several centuries the Bantu peasantry of Burundi have been ruled by the Nilo- Saharan Tutsi even though they out- number their masters by nearly ten to one. Until a spectacularly bloody up- rising in 1962 the same was true in Rwanda. In Uganda there is consider able religious tension between Moslems (5% of the population) and Christians ( 60%) and this is a potential source of trouble everywhere in East Africa, which has a large number of Christians (48%) and a smaller but increasing percentage of Moslems (12%).

Alien minorities include 0.12m Arabs (mostly in Zanzibar), 0.m Somali (in northern Kenya) and 0.3m Indians ( in Tanzania and Kenya). The Indians, originally brought in by the British to run the railways, have established them- selves as the most successful — and unpopular — of these groups. At one time there were another 0.m in Uganda but in 1972 they were expelled en masse and without warning: most of them ended up in Britain.

Primary Sources
The first estimates of the population of East Africa were made in the years immediately following the Anglo-German occupation of the area. By the beginning of the First World War the estimates were reasonably well grounded in administrative experience and there had actually been a count in Zanzibar (1910). The first count on the mainland was carried out in Uganda in 1931. The first census in the area was a simultaneous joint effort by the administrations of Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1948. The second round was held in sequence in Tanganyika (1957), Zanzibar (1958), Uganda (1959) and Kenya (1962) and a third in Tanzania (1967) and Uganda and Kenya (1969). In Rwanda and Burundi there have been only sample counts.

Bibliography

East Africa, It’s People and Resources (ed. W. T. W. Morgan, 1972) has a chapter on demography by J. G. C. Blacker which gives all the data for Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. For an excellent account of the Ugandan and Kenyan populations in this century see An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda by R. M. A. van Zwanenberg and Anne King (1975). For Rwanda and Burundi see the report by the UN Department of Social Affairs, Population Division (Pop. Studies No. 15) The Population of Ruanda-Urundi (1953).

Acknowledgement

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

England and Wales 0.15m km 2

Until the 6th millennium B C England was joined to the continent and post-Glacial man was able to come and go as he pleased. If,as seems likely he preferred to come in the summer and go in the winter the population of the country will have been a seasonally fluctuating one, with its upper and lower limits slowly rising from zero/a few hundred in the upper palaeolithic period to a few hundred/a few thousand in the mesolithic. Around 5500 B C the rise in sea level caused by the melting of the ice caps created the English Channel and put a stop to these fluctuations. The population graph then steadied within the 2-3,000 band.

The arrival of the first farmers is dated to about 3500 BC. By the end of the neolithic (2000 B C) the population had grown to 50,000, by the Late Bronze Age (1000 B C) to 100,000, while in the Iron Age, when severalwaves of immigrants from the continent brought with them a better system of agriculture, there was a relatively rapid increase from 0.2m (in 500 B C) to 0.6m (in A D 1). Previously, farming had been more a matter of stock-raising than ploughing: now the plough became the farmer's mos important tool and,in the south of the country at least, permanent villages became the normal pattern of occupation.

The Roman conquest brought law and order: the population increased, finally reaching a peak of 0.8m in the 4th century AD. Unfortunately, when the Romans left at the beginning of the 5th century they took their law and order with them and left behind a community that was no longer capable of organizing its own: Anglo-Saxon invaders poured in from Germany and the British were hustled westward. Between the area of immediate German success along the east and south coasts and the area that remained under the rule of the natives - now known as Welsh - lay a no-man's land that may have amounted to a quarter of the total. The population will have fallen by an equivalent amount and at its Dark Age nadir around A D 700 can hardly have exceeded 0.6m: more than half will have been descendants of the 0.m Anglo-Saxons who had landed during the period AD 450-550.

Demographic recovery came as the Anglo-Saxons pushed the conquest to near completion, driving the Welsh into Wales. By 800 the population was passing the Roman peak, by 1000 it was around 1.5m and by the time of the Norman conquest, 1.75m, of which the Welsh accounted for rather less than 10%.

Population growth over the next six centuries went in fits and starts. The period 1100-1300 saw a big rise. This is the era of medieval expansion, with both acreage under the plough and total population reaching record levels. Indeed, the final figure of around 3.75m seems to have been well over the optimum for the agricultural technologyof the time, for, as more and more marginal land was brought into use, both productivity and standards of living fell. Since the norm was little better than subsistence, the nutritional state of the population declined dangerously. By 1300 the population was having difficulty maintaining itself and before the bubonic plague had ever been seen in England the stage was set for disaster.
As in Europe generally, the initial at- tack of the plague, the 1348-9 epidemic which is known (retrospectively) as the Black Death, killed something like a third of the population. Further out- breaks through the remainder of the century thwarted any recovery and by 1400 the population of England and Wales was down to 2.5m. It took the whole of the 15th century and perhaps some of the 16th for the population to regain its pre-Black Death level and, though figures then broke new ground, epidemics of one sort or another frequently placed the increase in jeopardy. The final outbreak of bubonic plague in England — the 'Great Plague' of 1665 — was, in fact, less severe than the plagues of 1603 and 1625 but was remembered as the Great Plague because it was the last in the series.
Curiously, the absence of plague brought little immediate change in the demographic situation, long-term popu- lation growth in the late 17th and early 18th centuries being almost impercept- ible. Then, in the late 18th century, came the demographic revolution: the popu- lation curve turned sharply upwards as the processes of industrialization and urbanization became explosive. From 6. m in 1750 the population grew to 9.2m in 1800 (a 50% gain) and to 18m in 1850 (a 100% gain). There was only a slight slackening in the second half of the 19th century (when the growth rate was still over 75%, yielding a 1900 population figure of 33m), but in the 20th century the fall-off in the rate of increase became more noticeable, the population rise being of the order of one third in the first half of the century; it will probably be only a quarter or less in the second half. That will still give England and Wales a density of nearly 370 per km2.

Since the early 19th century there has been considerable migration into and out of England and Wales. Prior to 1950 the input was very largely Irish and Catholic. The native Catholic popula- tion had gradually dwindled under the repressive legislation that followed the Protestant Reformation, falling from about 20% of the total in 1600 to little more than 5% in 1700 and a bare 1% in the 1780s. The beginning of significant Irish immigration dates to this period of near zero native Catholic population, so the figures for Catholics after this date can be taken as a measure of Irish immi- gration plus, as time passed, the natural multiplication of the immigrants. By 1850 the Catholic percentage was back to 5% (0.9m), by 1900 to 6½% (2.35m), and it is currently around 10% (5m).

The Jewish community has a more recent history. Following the pogroms in Russia during the 1880s there was a large influx of East European Jews into London and, though most of them merely used the city as a port of call on their way to the New World, something like 0.3m had settled in England permanently by 1914. The present-day community numbers about 0.4m.

While the Catholic and Jewish communities grew, the Welsh were (in a linguistic sense) absorbed. At the beginning of the 18th century Wales had still been predominantly Welsh-speaking: by the early 20th century the percentage of natives who only spoke Welsh had fallen below 10%

Up to the period immediately after the First World War, the various input figures for England and Wales were offset by a far larger output. The actual numbers are somewhat speculative, but for the period 1850-1950 a total immigration of about 5m was outweighed by the emigration of some 8m, nearly all of whom went to North America or Australia. In the period from 1950 to 1962 (when stringent immigration controls were introduced) the situation was reversed: immigration from the new commonwealth countries' (the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent) created a positive balance of about 0.5m and a present-day coloured community of approximately 1.75m 40% Caribbean, 60% Indian.

The native English birth rate has been falling fairly steadily in recent years and projections for the year 2000 have been progressively lowered. The current estimate is around 53m: the age structure of the 'new commonwealth' population suggests that their proportion of the whole will have risen to at least 5% by then.

Primary Sources

British demographers are lucky in possessing two exceptionally early surveys: the Domesday Book, compiled in the 1080s, and the record of the poll tax of 1377. Continuous statistics get off to a much later and shakier start in the 16th century, which produced muster rolls, fiscal assessments and Thomas Cromwell's instruction to parish priests to register baptisms, marriages and burials (1538). The first attempt to calculate the country's population dates from the end of the next century, when Gregory King came up with a figure of 5.5m: he based his calculations on the hearth- tax returns for 1662-82.
The first official census was held in 1801. This and the next four in the decennial series were supervised by John Rickman. During his period in office he also called in and analysed a sample of the material obtainable in the parish registers for the 18th century and produced retrospective figures back to 1700.
The decennial census has been held on schedule since 1801 with a single exception, the wartime year of 1941.

.Bibliography

Educated guesses for the earliest periods up to Roman times are given in Chapter 6 of Grahame Clark's Archaeology and Society (1947). For the medieval period the standard work is J. C. Russell's British Medieval Population (1948), though his Domesday figures are now thought to be a bit low. For a discussion of the margin of error in calculations derived from the Domesday Book and the 1377 poll tax records see M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (1972). For the 16th century see J. Cornwall, Economic History Review 23(1) 1970. Gregory King's estimate is discussed and revised by Glass in * Glass and Eversley. For the 18th century see Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959 (1967), pp. 5, 6. For the Roman Catholic and Jewish communities in England see John D. Gay, The Geography of Religion in England (1971).

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

England and Wales 0.15m km 2

Primary Sources

.Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Scandinavia 1.15m km2

Denmark 0.04m km 2
Sweden 0.45m km' (0.03m km2arable)
Norway 0.32m km2 (0.01m km2 arable)
Finland 0.34m km2 (0.03m km2 arable)

Primary Sources

Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

France
0.55m km'

France, with some 10,000 inhabitants in the upper palaeolithic (c.15,000 B C), can fairly be called the heartland of early prehistoric Europe. This position it lost when the climate improved: the population in the mesolithic era (c.7500 BC) never grew beyond 50,000 and the country entered the neolithic, food-producing stage considerably later than most of its neighbours. By the end of the first full millennium of the neolithic, in 3000 BC, numbers were up to 0.5m, by 2000 BC the total was 1 m, by 1000 BC 2m and by 400 BC 3m. But there were less people in France than in Italy, and they were less sophisticated too. The result was the Roman conquest of Gaul, dramatically completed by Julius Caesar in the middle years of the last century B C.

Once accepted, Roman rule ushered in a prosperous phase during which numbers increased to a peak figure of 6.5m in AD 200. The turning point came fifty years later when the Germans broke through the Rhine frontier and roughed up the Gauls in a way they never really recovered from. This disaster, plus the measures the authorities took to repair it, triggered off a reversal of the previous trend with a fall in numbers to 5m' by AD 400.

At this point the western half of the Roman Empire disintegrated and the Franks,a German people from the lower Rhine, moved in to become the area's new rulers. The Franks had neither the wish nor the capacity to revive the old Gallo-Roman economy and while they were evolving their own feudal system of government the fall in population continued. It eventually bottomed out at about 4.5m in AD 600.

What was gradually lost over the four centuries up to AD 600 was gradually recovered in the fourcenturies following: by AD 1000 France once again had a population of 6.5m. This time it was at the beginning, not the end, of a phase of rapid growth. Despite an outflow of adventurous sons to England, Italy and the Holy Land the second half of the 11th century produced a rise of a million. In the 12th century the gain was more than 2.5m (for a total of 10.5m) and in the 13th century more than 5m. The great cathedrals built in these years are memorials to this upsurge, which carried the country's population to 16m by the beginning of the 14th century, and perhaps a million more — though after 1300 the rate of increase certainly fell off very sharply — by the time the Black Death struck in 1348.

Whatever the exact number it was too high. The medieval cycle had reached its Malthusian limit, with the mass of the peasantry in poorer health than it had been a hundred years earlier. This explains why the toll exacted by disease in the period 1348-1400 was so terrible. And terrible it was. Not only did a third of the population die in the initial pandemic of bubonic plague but repeated attacks of this and other diseases in the second half of the century turned this temporary reduction into a new equilibrium point. Not till the opening years of the 15th century was there any sign of sustained recovery, not till well into the 16th century did the French population reach its 1348 level again.

Surpassing the previous best was only part of the demographic achievement of the early modern era: during the period 1550-1650 there was an additional gain of 30% which took the population over the 20m mark. Then there was a pause due partly to bad luck, partly to bad management. The bad luck came in the form of epidemics and famines, the bad management was supplied by Louis XIV. Out of sheer bigotry Louis expelled 0.2m of his hardest-working subjects, the Huguenots, while by his incessant and ultimately unsuccessful wars he succeeded in temporarily ruining the country's economy. The reign that had begun in confidence and glory ended in bitterness and poverty.

After Louis' death things soon picked up again, though the first sign that they were beginning to do so was a peculiarly alarming one, an outbreak of plague at Marseilles in 1720. This was locally devastating - it killed half the 80,000 people in the city - but it didn't spread beyond Provence, showing that the disease had lost some of its penetrating power. In fact it turned out that as far as Western Europe was concerned this was the plague bacillus's last throw: there were no more epidemics after this one. Right across the continent population figures began to rise, at first moderately then with unprecedented speed.

France's population rose along with the rest, though less rapidly. Indeed - and in this France is unique - the new cycle boosted numbers by a smaller percentage than had the medieval cycle. In isolation the figures are fairly impressive - 29m in 1800, 36m in 1850. Compared to the rest of Europe they are feeble. Moreover, in the second half of the 19th century, though the population managed to rise to 4m, this increase was entirely due to the greater individual longevity that resulted from the improvement in health and general living standards.

Emigration has never played a significant part in French population history. The reason why numbers grew so slowly was that the birth rate fell. Frenchmen were it goes without saying, approaching their traditional business with traditional vigour, but to their customary skills they now added a final flourish. Coitus interruptus, it seems, became a national habit: fleeting pleasures were not allowed to undermine the good life.

One of the results of this self-control was that by 1870 there were ore Germans than Frenchmen. That same year Bismarck wrested France's traditional primacy from her. In the First World War France showed that she had enough guts - and enough allies - to get it back, but the cost was so high (1.3m war dead and an equally large birth deficit) that the country was actually weakened by its victory. There wa a widespread feeling,abroad as well as at home, that France could not afford to sustain another such struggle. And in the event her speedy defeat in the Second World War showed that she couldn't, or wouldn't. Defeat had its price too - 0.5m dead, a 0.25m birth deficit - but it was within the nation's means.

After the war there was a remarkable and quite unexpected upswing in the French birth rate. This,together with the arrival of 0.8m refugees from Algeria in 1962/3,pushed the population totals towards today's figure of 53m. Some 3.75m of these are foreign workers,specifically Italians,Spaniards, Portuguese and native Algerians, but as France has had a substantial foreign community for a long time — it was 1m in 1900 and 3m in the 1930s — too much can be made of this element. Of the native minorities and most important are the 2m Alsatian speakers, the 2m Bretons and 0.3m Corsicans (of whom only half live on Corsica): the most interesting is the French share of the Basque population in the Pyrenees which amounts to 0.m out of 0.85m (the rest being Spanish).

Population of Gaul, the Kingdom of France, the French Empire and the French Republic

Roman Gaul was about 15% larger than modern France, the Kingdom of France at its inception in the 10th century about 20% smaller. Population figures need adjus- ting accordingly. By 1700 the gap between France then and now had narrowed to 10%; in the 1760s it was near enough closed by the annexation of Lorraine and Corsica.
The French Revolution was followed by the incorporation of Belgium into France. Then followed the dizzying series of Napoleonic annexations which brought the population of the Empire (not including satellites) to near 50m by 1812. All these gains were soon lost again and in 1870 Alsace and Lorraine went too. The recovery of these two provinces in 1918 — by which time their population had doubled to 2m brings the French frontiers to their present position.

Primary Sources

Though Caesar gives some indications of the size of the Celtic tribes in his Gallic War the first overall data are found in the hearth tax returns of 1328. Exactly what they add up to is debatable for they only cover about half the present area and some of the individual figures are demonstrably wrong (e.g. the figure for Paris). The first reas- onably reliable estimate was made by Vauban in 1697-1700 on the basis of data specially provided by the provincial administrators; the material has been reworked and extrapolated recently to produce figures for the contemporary Kingdom (20m) and the present area (22m). The first in the present series of censuses was held in 1801.
Civil registration was established in France only in 1792, so for the interval between Vauban's estimate and the 1801 census demographers have to rely on parish registers. These are reasonably reliable from 1667 on and a lot of work has been done on them in recent years. Some registers also contain earlier material but here it is difficult to know how far it is reasonable to make them the basis for generalizations.

Bibliography

The classic work on the demographic history of France is E. Levasseur, La Population Française (1889); it is still the best introduction to the subject, though it needs to be read in conjunction with the relevant sections of * Belch and * Russell. There is nothing much to add to these at the prehistoric end — the site-count method used by L.-R. Nosier in Population 9, 2 (1954) is highly suspect and the figures it produces much too large. For the 1328 hearth tax see the article by F. Lot in Bibliothéque de l'École

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Germany 0.36m km2
West Germany 0.25m km' East Germany 0.11m km2

When the last Ice Age came to an end the few thousand hunters who were roaming the North German plain followed the reindeer to Scandinavia, leaving the country to various food-gathering groups of only marginally more sedentary habits. This mesolithic population gradually increased in size until by the 6th millennium BC it numbered some 25,000. At this point the first farmers appeared. They came from the south- east, bringing with them the simple techniques which mark the beginning of the neolithic: they soon made Germany an important centre for the further diffusion of the Indo-European ethnic group to which they belonged. Numbers rose to 0.3m by 3000 BC (the end of the neolithic) and to 1m by 700 BC (end of the Bronze Age).

As the Indo-Europeans multiplied they differentiated. In Germany there was a polarization between the Teutons of the north (and Scandinavia) and the Celts of the south (and Gaul). Either because they were fiercer, or multiplying faster, or both, the Teutons had the Celts on the run from the start. By 58 BC when Julius Caesar arrived on the Rhine there were few Celts left on the German side of the river and a Teutonic invasion of Gaul was imminent. Luckily for Caesar the 3m Germans of his day were split into so many quarrelling tribes that he was able to defeat the few who crossed over without too much difficulty: Celtic Gaul survived as a province of the Roman Empire.
For the next four centuries the Romans prevented the Germans from expanding westwards and surplus Germans — whole tribes of them sometimes — had to seek their fortunes in the east. Then in AD 406 Rome's Rhine frontier collapsed. With the em- pire at their mercy (and the Huns at their heels) the Germans poured across the river, the most adventurous to found kingdoms as far away as Spain and North Africa, the more prudent to carve out fiefs from the nearer parts of Gaul. The dramatic success of this out- migration, the 'famous Völkerwanderung, did more than relieve population pressure in Germany, it turned the east of the country into a demographic vacuum. Slays from Poland soon lapped over this area.

West Germany became part of Christian Europe when it was incorporated in Charlemagne's empire (A D 800). Less than two centuries later it formed the core of the major political unit of the time, the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation'. The Empire was, to put it mildly, a disappointment, but the coincident demographic and economic upsurge was real enough. Between 1000 and 1300 the population of Germany more than doubled, rising from under 4m to 9m: everywhere old villages grew larger while new villages were founded where previously there had been only virgin woodland and heath. The development proceeded from west to east, borne on a tide of migrating German peasantry which was eventually to overwhelm the Slays of the eastern part of the country and restore the ethnic unity of the whole.

This chapter of Germany's demogra phic history was closed by the bubonic plague. By 1400 the population was down to 6.5m. Growth was resumed, at first with some hesitation, in the 15th century. By its end the population was not far short of the previous peak of 9m and by the end of the 16th century the total was 12m. By the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 it was 13m.

The demographic effects of the Thirty Years War have been the subject of much academic dispute. In some instances the apparently catastrophic losses have been shown to be due to short-term flight by people who returned to their homes when the armies moved on. And clearly it is dangerous to generalize from the places where severe loss has been substantiated because the war left parts of the country relatively unscathed. However it is generally accepted now that there was a significant drop in population in most areas. The war did enormous damage to the economy and as a result the nutritional standard and health of the community were undermined. Plague and other diseases struck repeatedly and harshly. By the time hostilities ended Germany was a sad place: its people were certainly much poorer and probably about 2m fewer.

By 1700 the losses of the war had been repaired, by 1800 Germany was a country of 18m people, and in the early 19th century, as the effects of the demographic revolution became apparent, the authorities began to talk of the problems of overpopulation. In some of the more despotic principalities there was an attempt to force the birth rate down by legislating against the marriages of juveniles or paupers: more enlightened states did what they could to encourage emigration. The outflow increased as the century progressed. By 1900 nearly 5m Germans had left for the New World — a figure that has been increased in this century by a further 1.5m.

Even so, the growth in population was very fast. By 1914 the area within the present-day frontiers contained 53m people. Urbanization and industrialization enabled these millions to support themselves at a better level than anyone could have expected but nevertheless so huge an increase was bound to strain any society. That it had done so was apparent in the political demand for Lebensraum, one of the features that made Germany such a worry for her neighbours. The course was set for the first of the two world wars.

Germany paid heavily in these conflicts. The first cost 1.6m German lives, the second 3.5m (0.5m of them civilians). Curiously, the greater loss does not kink the population graph, for it was offset by the arrival at the war's end of 4m refugees from the East and the Sudetenland.

The two states into which Germany has been divided since its defeat in the Second World War have very different demographic courses. East Germany has suffered a steady loss of population to its more prosperous neighbour: this, in a nation with a near-zero natural growth rate, has caused a fall in total numbers from 18.5m in 1946 to 17m today. The West German story is the opposite. As the 'economic miracle' has unfolded, so people have been sucked into the country from progressively further away. At first the strength of the pull was concealed by a continuing flow of refugees (another 6m since the immediate end-of-the-war influx): then it seemed that it could be satisfied by movement mainly of Italians within the EEC. But since the 1960s special arrangements have had to be made to bring in `guest-workers' from Yugoslavia and Turkey. Altogether there are more than 2.5m of these `guest- workers' in West Germany today. The increase in total population has been in line with the expansion of the economy a rise from 46m in 1946 to a present day figure of 62m. However, though the economy is still expanding, population growth appears to have ceased and it may well be that in the year 2000 neither West nor East Germany will contain significantly more people than they do today.

Bibliography
* Russell gives a series of figures for the late classical and medieval periods which seem very reasonable to us. His first figure is compatible with the range proposed for the late Iron Age by G. Mildenberger in Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Germanen ( 1972); his pre-Black Death figure is in agreement with that suggested by Beloch in ' Die Bevölkerung Europas im Mittelalter', Zeitschrift far Socialwissenschaft 3: 405-423 (1900). Another series of figures, this time covering the period 1200-1800, is given in the Jahrbuch far Nationalokonomie und Statistik 1935 (quoted by * Clark, p. 95). For the early censuses in the individual German states see E. Keyser, Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands (1938), pp. 202-21 and 291-3. For the 19th century see the syntheses in * Sundbärg and the * Handwörterbuch.

There is a bibliography of the controversy over the demographic effects of the Thirty Years War in D. V. Glass, Numbering the People (1973), p. 35, n. 72. No one has done a really satisfactory job on the 18th-century material. For early Prussia see Otto Behre in Geschichte der Statistik im Brandenburg-Prussia (1905) and in Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv, Vol. vii (Tubingen, 1914). Also the * Handwörterbuch, pp. 672-3.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Primary Sources

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Hungary 19.6m km 2

In the prehistoric period Hungary's population grew from the few thousand who lived there in the mesolithic to 100, 000 in the neolithic and some 300,000 in the Iron Age. Recorded history begins with the Roman conquest of the western half of the country in 9 B C. This half, which contained two thirds of the population, became the province of Pannonia and the River Danube, which divided it from the relatively empty eastern half, the frontier of the Empire.

The frontier held till the 3rd century AD. Then barbarian invasions brought successive waves of depopulation and repopulation as the original inhabitants fled and were replaced by wandering tribes of Germans, Huns or Slays. The demographic nadir was probably reached during the Avar supremacy in the 7th century AD. The Avars, like the Huns, were full-blown nomads from Central Asia and as such liked to keep their grazing land free of peasants. In their day Hungary probably contained no more than 200,000 people, half of them Avars and their dependants, half of them frightened peasants of debatable ancestry.

Hungary received its definitive repopulation at the end of the 9th century when the Magyars, a people of Finnish stock but Turkish habits, arrived from the Russian steppe. A hundred years later the Magyars had abandoned paganism and pastoralism in favour of Christianity and settled cultivation, Hungary had joined the medieval European community and the population of the area had begun to increase.
Medieval Hungary, though increasing in prosperity with each generation, remained by European standards a relatively under populated country. As such it suffered less severe and less lasting damage than the rest of Europe during the 14th-century pandemic of bubonic plague known as the Black Death. By 1500 the population had reached a record level of 1.25m. On the horizon however was a new threat, the Ottoman army, which was to prove a harsher brake on population growth than the plague bacillus. The Ottomans followed their easy victory at Mohacs ( 1526) by occupying half Hungary: by failing to occupy the other half they condemned it to the even worse fate of a no-man's land in what now became an unending struggle between Cross (as represented by the Hapsburgs of Austria) and Crescent for the Balkans. While in the rest of Europe there was steady growth, the population of Hungary barely held steady at the pre- Mohacs figure.

These dark days ended with the Turkish failure before Vienna in 1683 and the subsequent liberation of Hungary by the Austrians. The 18th century was one of rapid growth, a sort of catching-up performance that more than doubled the population. There was a slight slowing-down in the rate of increase in the early 19th century, then after 1850, the growth rate picked up again as Hungary became involved in the pan-European processes of urbanization and industrialization. Taken as a whole the 19th-century growth rate matches that of the 18th.

Hungary has not done so well in this century. Though the dismemberment of the Kingdom of Hungary at the end of the First World War was carried out according to virtuous principles it is difficult not to feel that people who had picked the winning side, like the Romanians, did better than people who had sided with the Central Powers. Hungary's ethnic purity (it is now homogeneously Magyar) was created by allotting to the new state only impeccably Magyar areas. As a result although there are no Romanians in Hungary there are 1.5m Magyars in Romania. An attempt to reverse the verdict of the First World War during the Second proved abortive, and after a temporary expansion at the expense of its neighbours Hungary resumed its Versailles frontiers. It had lost 0.5m dead in the process, a heavy blow for a country of 9m people. Moreover growth in the post-war period has been very slow: the 1975 population is only 10. 5m and the projection for the end of the century no more than 1m.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

See under Romania.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Malay Archipelago 1.84m km2
Indonesia (less West New Guinea) 1.50m km2
Malaysia and Singapore 0.34m km2

Man in this part of the world did not settle down to proper agriculture until after 2500 BC. The innovation is associated with a movement of Malay peoples from mainland South-East Asiinto the archipelago: before this happened the population, a group of peoples of proto-Melanesian stock, can- not have numbered more than 100,000.
By AD 1 the Malay peasantry had multiplied up to about 2m. This population was concentrated on the southern tier of islands and in particular on Java, a state of affairs that has persisted ever since: its culture was forming in a Hindu mould as Indian traders probing the islands in their search for spices brought in their habits as well as their custom. The emergence of the Hindu Kingdom of Srivijaya, which through the early medieval period controlled or claimed to control most of Malaya and western Indonesia, marks the maturity of this initial phase in the area's history. Also introduced from India at this time was the technique of wet rice cultivation: this supported a further increase in the population, which reached 4m by AD 1000 and 8m by AD 1500.
In Indonesia as in India Hindu culture was to be harshly challenged by Islam. From an enclave established at Malacca in the 14th century Moslem adventurers steadily spread eastwards; by the early 16th century they had created a string of coastal sultanates that stretched as far as the fabled spice islands of Tidor and Ternate. However, before these petty states could coalesce into an Indonesian empire, indeed while the area was still in a state of political disruption, the Europeans arrived and seized the imperial role.
The Europeans, of course, fought a great deal among themselves and it was only in the early 19th century that the imperial pattern of the area was finally laid out, with the Dutch in control of most of the archipelago (though not properly in some parts until 1900) and the British in possession of the Malay peninsula and the northern and north-western parts of Borneo. Well before this division was finally agreed the demographic upsurge that coincides with the appearance of the Europeans was in full swing: the population of the area rose by no less than a third in the 18th century to reach a total of 13.5m. The exact machinery of this rise is unrevealed; although trade flourished under the Europeans — that was why they were there — it was largely traditional trade conducted in a traditional way, and therefore had little impact on the bulk of the population.
The 19th century brought further change. The population growth of the area accelerated, carrying the total from 13.5m to 40m; the colonial powers turned from trade to the exploitation of natural resources. Their methods were interestingly different. The Dutch enforced state-controlled production of coffee and spices by the inhabitants of Indonesia themselves. The British al- lowed a free-for-all in the production of tin and rubber which resulted in an influx of immigrants — from the archi- pelago and from China — which also supplied the region with its traders. The result is the present complex 145m population of the area: a predominantly Chinese city state of 2.5m in Singapore (where there was virtually nobody in 1800, and only 22,000 people in 1900); a multi-racial nation of 12.5m in Malaysia (46% Malay, 43% Chinese, 9% Indian); and a relatively uniform state of 130m in Indonesia, though one in which the split between the three quarters Moslem population and the Hindu and Christian minorities has caused great difficulties.
Brunei
Brunei is a sultanate in North Borneo which has held aloof from the Malaysian federation; it has a population of about 150,000 now, as against 20,000 at the beginning of the century.
Primary Sources

The only pre-19th-century figure of any value is a contemporary Dutch suggestion that the Kingdom of Mataram, covering about 80% of Java, had 2.5m subjects in 1630 ( quoted by B. Schrieke in Indonesian Sociological Studies, Part 2 (1957)). The first estimates based on direct counts were produced in the early 19th century by Raffles ( Java 4.8m in 1815) and Bleeker (Java 9.4m in 1845). Crawfurd's figures for Malaya and Indonesia in 1830 are 0.35m and 11m respectively (see * Fisher).
From 1849 annual official estimates exist for Indonesia, based on quinquennial assessments. The first proper census in Dutch territory was taken in 1905: there were further censuses in 1920 and 1930 but of these only 1930 is really reliable. The Indonesians themselves have counted their population in 1961 and 1971. In the British area there were reliable censuses from 1901 on.
Bibliography
For Malaysia as a whole there is a most useful survey by T. G. McGee in Wan Gunguni ( ed.), Malaysia: A Survey (1964). For North Borneo in particular see The Population of Borneo by L. W. Jones (1966).
The basic discussion of the sources and problems of Indonesian demographic history ( both of which are many) is the book by Widjojo Nitisastro, Population Trends in Indonesia (1970). For a less diffident approach to the dirty business of estimating total population one needs to turn to the brief discussion by * das Gupta, and to the article by B. Peper in Population Studies 24 (1) 1970.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.
Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Iran
Iran 1.65m km 2

There are village sites in western Iran that archaeologists have claimed are among the oldest agricultural settlements in the world, and though views on when and where the neolithic revolution began are currently in a state of flux there can be no doubt that agriculture in Iran is very old indeed. On the other hand the pattern of rainfall restricts the practice of agriculture to a mere 10% of the land surface. Another 20% can be used for grazing: most of the rest is desert and waste of the most depressing sort. The result is that the overall density of population has always been low and the overall totals far from imposing. The likely mesolithic population is of the order of 30,000; the likely population in the early neolithic period (the 5th millennium BC) not more than 0.5m and the comparable figure for the Late Bronze Age (around 1000 B C) no more than 2m.

By this time Iran was inhabited by horse-riding pastoralists as well as agriculturalists. The pastoralists, who dominated the central plateau, were of the same 'Iranian' stock as the present- day Persians: the peasantry in the mountain folds that form the western border of the plateau were in the linguistic sense Transcaucasians, i.e. similar to the Georgians of the Caucasus Mountains. During the 8th and 7th cen- turies BC these Transcaucasian peoples of Iran suffered severely from the warfare that raged between the Iranians of the plateau and the Assyrians of north Iraq: when the war ended with the triumph of the Iranians, the Transcaucasians were already slipping towards extinction. The Iranians the Medes and Persians of the Bible - became the masters of an empire that stretched from Greece to India.

As tribute flowed in to the heart of the new empire the population of Iran rose from around 2.5m to 4m. A new equilibrium between the settled and nomadic ways of life was established by the development of the qanat system of underground water-courses for irriga- tion, and in both style and numbers the Persians now achieved a stable state. Their society was to continue almost unchanged through the conquest of Alexander the Great, the rule of his successors and the restoration of native power by the Arascid kings of Parthia. Under the Sassanid Dynasty (A D 226- 649) this traditional Iranian culture reached its apogee: the population peaked to 5m. It was already beginning to slip from this high level when, in the 7th century, the armies of the Arabian caliph mounted the plateau and forcibly converted its inhabitants to Islam.
After the initial upheaval was over, Islamic Persia reached a level of prosperity that certainly equalled and possibly surpassed the Sassanid best. In fact, in a demographic as opposed to a political sense, it was not the arrival of the Arab that is the significant event in medieval Persian history but the arrival of the Turk. For the Turkish invasions a series of migratory movements that continued over the whole period be- tween AD 1000 and 1500 added a new component to the population of the country. Moreover, as each Turkish tribe moved into the area the balance swung from agriculture to pastoralism. The effect was usually immediately vis- ible in the form of a massacre of Iranian peasants by nomad Turks.
The first Turkish invasion, the migration to which the Seljuks have given their name, was not too destructive, for most of the Turks passed on to Turkey; the bad one came in 1220 when the armies of Genghis Khan appeared from the north-east. For the next forty years Iran and Iraq were subjected to merciless slaughter and a 25% drop in population is a minimum estimate. Moreover, the 14th and 15th centuries cannot have seen any significant recovery for a cluster of reasons the renewed dominance of pastoralism, the arrival of the Black Death and the final outburst of terror during the reign of the last of the nomad conquerors, Tamburlaine. By 1500 1 m of the 4m people living in Iran were Turkish- speaking nomads. The newcomers dominated the provinces of Azerbaijan and Khorasan and far outnumbered the only other important minority in the country, the 0.5m Arabs who lived in the provinces bordering Iraq.

The 15th century was probably the high point of the pastoral way of life in Iran. Gradually during the next three centuries the greater potential of settled agriculture reasserted itself and as the total population rose towards 6m the percentage of nomads dropped towards 20%. By 1900 there were 10m people in Iran, a far higher figure than had ever been attained before: at the most only 2m of these were nomads.

Since then the process has accelerated as the population explosion has hit Iran with full force and the urban and agricultural populations have soared. There are currently about 34m Persians, of whom 27m are Persian-speaking, 4m Turkish and 2m Arabic. Only about 0.5m, mostly Turks, continue to practise pastoralism: by the end of the century, when, if anything approaching the cur- rent rate of increase is maintained, Iran will have a population of about 50m, it seems most unlikely that any of them will be nomads.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

For the prehistoric period there is a series of estimates of population density per km2 of productive land in an article by Frank Hole and K. V. Flannery in Proceedings of the Prehist. Soc. (1967). Taking the productive area as 10% of the whole, their figures imply overall population estimates much the same as ours. For a guess at the medieval population, again comparable with ours, see * Russell, p. 89.
The population since 1900 is the subject of an excellent article by Julian Bharier in Population Studies 22 (2) 1968. His figures and the few estimates available for the 19th century are summarized in B. D. Clark's contribution to * Clarke and Fisher. The 20th- century figures are based on registration (which got off to a shaky start in 1928), a partial enumeration covering the twenty-five most important population nuclei (carried out in 1939-41) and two post-war censuses (1956, 1966).

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Iraq 0.44m km' (about one fifth productive)

The north-west of Iraq is hill country with sufficient rainfall to support agriculture: the rest of the country is arid except where directly watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. The north- west, modern Kurdistan, is part of the zone within which agriculture was first practised, while the south, ancient Sumeria, is the site of an equally important social advance it was here that villages first grew into towns. Both these `revolutions' had important effects on Iraq's population. The first, the neolithic revolution, involved an increase from something under 10,000 to something over 100, 000, though, as the change was spread over the whole of the period from the 7th to the 5th millennia BC it is better described as evolutionary than revolutionary. The second, the urban revolution, was comparatively abrupt. During the middle centuries of the 3rd millennium the population of Sumeria surged up to the half-million mark, its villages became towns and the towns became the political powers of the area.

The Sumerians were historically the most important element in ancient Iraqi society but they were never a majority: equally important were the hill farmers of Kurdistan and the nomads of the desert. Indeed demographically Kurdistan was much more stable than Sumeria. From the start the irrigating agriculture of the south was menaced by an insidious enemy, salt. The water table of south Iraq is saline and so near the surface that it only takes a bit of injudicious over-irrigation to bring it up to root level. When this happens the crops die and the fields become barren. In the end the area has to be abandoned to the nomads.

Sumerian society at the end of the 3rd millennium BC: the contemporary influx of Amorite bedouin, which some have seen as a cause, turns out to be a con- sequence. It was not a permanent change: in time the fields recovered and the cycle could begin again. This happened at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and again at its end. We can reasonably postulate population rises to maxima of 1 m and 1.25m in these two instances, with falls to 0.75m and 1 m between and after.

In the final millennium BC there was an even more dramatic boom and bust. The political expression of the boom was the Assyrian Empire, the creation of the city state of Assur at the northernmost point of the irrigating area. The number of Assyrians must have been tiny a few tens of thousands at most but as in the case of Rome a few were enough to conquer the world as they knew it. By the 7th century BC Assyrian governors were installed throughout the Near East from Egypt to Iran: a steady stream of captives and adventurers flowed into the new capital of Nineveh, bringing the total population of Iraq to an all-time high of 2m. The end came with dramatic suddenness. All the enemies of the much- hated empire ganged up together, razed Nineveh to the ground (612 BC) and turned the territory of Assur into an empty land.

Many centuries were to pass before Iraq regained the levels of prosperity and population achieved under Assyrian rule. Iraq became an adjunct of Iran and a province of the successive Iranian empires Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid. Its population fluctuated between 1 m and 1.25m. Then in the 7th century AD the Arabs conquered Iraq and in the 8th century the Abbasid caliphs made it the centre of the Arab Empire. From their new city of Bagdad they presided over an empire of 30m and a metropolitan province that reached a 9th-century peak of about 2. 5m. It was Islam's and Iraq's golden age.

In the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries this prosperity gradually ebbed away again. The Abbasid caliphs were respected throughout the Middle East but outside Iraq they were not obeyed: once again mounting salinization reduced the country's agricultural productivity. By the time the pagan armies of the Mongol Khan Hulagu reached Bagdad Iraqi society was in full decline. Hulagu's sack of the capital in1258 set the seal on the national humiliation. There was a rapid drop of population to the million mark as nomadism again became the dominant way of life. What had once been the wonder of the Islamic world became a backward and impoverished district ruled by Ottoman pashas.

By contrast the 20th century has seen the population increasing at a rate that is exceptional even for the Middle East. The upturn began about 1850, with the 2m level being reached shortly before the end of the 19th century and the 5m mark in the late 1940s. The current population is 1m. As the totals have risen, the percentage of nomads has fallen — from 40% in 1850 to less than 5% in 1950 and a mere 2% today.

Primary Sources and Bibliography
The only bases for estimates of the population of ancient Iraq are provided by studies of urban and rural densities. For the sizes of ancient Mesopotamian cities see the Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd edn, Vol. I, Part 1 (1970), p. 332; H. Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (1965) and David Oates Studies in the Ancient History of North Iraq (1968). For rural densities see Braidwood and Reed (Cold Spring Harbour Symposium on Quantitative Biology XXII (1957), p. 19)), who have proposed a figure of 0.5m for Sumeria in 2500 B C on the basis of a rural density estimate of 15 per km2: this is compatible with a population for Iraq as a whole of 0.75m.
No one apart from * Russell appears to have attempted any reasoned estimates between this figure for 2500 B C and one of 1m for A D 1800 put forward by * Bonne. Absurd figures like 20m appear in accounts of the Bagdad caliphate but these belong in the realm of the Arabian Nights. Unfortunately they seem to have influenced the normally sober Russell, who allows Iraq 9m and apparently believes that the population had been as high as 15m under the Sassanids. Luckily his method calculation is quite implausible. There is, in fact, no reason for believing that medieval Iraq was capable of supporting more than 5m people or that the number of people who actually lived there ever exceeded half this figure.
The results of a Turkish count of households in the Bagdad and Basra provinces ( equivalent to the southern half of Iraq) at the end of the 16th century have been published by 0. L. Barkan in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (ed. M. A. Cook, 1970, p. 168). The figure of 88,000 households can be equated with an overall Iraqi total of just under the million mark if multiplied by 5 (per household) and 2 (for the other half of Iraq). The proportion of nomads was a third.
For the recent period M. S. Hasan gives a series of estimates starting in 1867 (Bulletin of Oxford University Institute of Statistics, 20, 1958). These are based on a partial Ottoman census of 1890, British official estimates of 1866-7, 1900-1908 and 1919, and a partial enumeration in 1934. Proper censuses were taken in 1947, 1957 and 1965. The whole of this period is summarized by R. I. Lawless in * Clarke and Fisher.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Ireland
Ireland's prehistoric population buildup was proportionately slower than England's. Starting from a few hundred in the mesolithic, the number is unlikely to have risen to more than a few thousand in the neolithic and 100,000 in the Iron Age. Medieval growth was more impressive from 0.3m at the beginning of the 11th century to 0.8m by the end of the 13th century and in the early modern period the total finally reached the million.

At this point the. English control over the island, hitherto nominal, became both actual and bloody. Ireland's refusal to follow England along the path of religious reform led to a series of ferocious wars in the course of which the north-east province of Ulster was cleared of natives and 'planted' with 100,000 Protestant settlers, mostly low- land Scots.

Despite these upheavals, the Irish rate of multiplication was now sufficiently fast to produce a doubling of the population within the 17th century. And the rate itself was rising: during the 18th century it more than doubled (to 5.25m) and at the growth rate then existing the 10m mark would have been reached by 1850. This was alarming. England, with its industrializing economy and its rapidly growing cities, might be able to absorb a comparable increase, but in Ireland neither industrialization nor urbanization had even begun: the extra population would have to find its living on the land. The potato, introduced in the late 16th century, went some way towards making it possible to sustain the increase, for a field of potatoes can feed four times as many people as the same area under wheat. Nevertheless, the history of early 19th-century Ireland was one of increasing impoverishment.

By 1845 up to a quarter of the population was without work and, during the winter months, almost without food. Since 1800, 1.5m people had emigrated: roughly m to settle in the New World and 0.5m to work in the new factories in England and Scotland.

The emigration from Ireland in the early 19th century was a movement without precedent, but it was not enough to avert catastrophe. In 1846 and 1847 the failure of the potato crop (due to blighting by fungus) turned Ireland into a disaster area. By 1851 the sequence of famine years had caused at least 0.75m excess deaths. For millions there was but one hope escape to happier lands and the only positive feature in the situation was that the emigration of preceding decades had established outlets across the Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean. What had been a stream now became a flood: during the years 1846-51 a million people left the stricken island and, although the threat of famine then receded, lack of work kept emigration figures at a level that would have been considered incredibly high by all standards except those of the immediate post-famine years. From 1851 to 1900 another 3m people left (making a total of 5m for the 19th century): the island's population fell from the 1845 peak of 8.5m to 4.5m in 1900.

In the early 20th century the fall in numbers continued, a low of 4.25m being reached in 1930. Since then there has been a slight recovery to 4.5m. Emigration, which in this century has amounted to about 1.5m, has not been the only factor in this restabilization of the population: there has also been a fall in fertility of a peculiarly Irish type, brought about by less and later marriage.

Since 1921 Ireland has been divided between the almost entirely Catholic Free State in the south ( population 1921-75 stable at 3m) and the Protestant-dominated (but one third Catholic) ) U K province of Ulster in north (population increasing from 1.25m in 1921 to 1.5m in 1975).

Primary Sources
Data adequate for a calculation of Ireland's population begin only with the introduction of a hearth tax in 1662: they were first so used by Sir William Petty in 1672. The first proper census was carried out in 1821 and censuses have been held decennially since then with the exception of the years 1931, 1941 and 1951. During this period north and south took their censuses separately, the north in 1937 and 1951 and the south in 1926, 1936, 1946 and 1956.

Bibliography
Pointers useful in estimating the medieval population of Ireland are summarized in J.
C. Russell's British Medieval Population (1948). The period from the late 17th century to the pre famine peak is fully covered in K. H. Connell's The Population of Ireland 1750-1845 (1950): the table on p. 25 gives his final estimate for the period 1687-1841. For the mortality during the famine years see S. H. Cousens, Population Studies 14(1)

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Italy 0.30m km'

Throughout the later prehistoric period Italy was the second most densely populated country in Europe (the first being Greece): we can think in terms of 0.5m people by 3000 BC, 1m by 2000 B C and 2m in 1000 BC. In the early Iron Age around 700 BC the rate of increase quickened: by 400 B C the area contained 4m people and when Rome succeeded in unifying the peninsula (which it did in the fifty years on either side of 300 B C) the manpower at its disposal immediately made it the leading power of the Mediterranean world. And success fed on itself: as tribute and slaves flowed in, Italy's population rose to reach 5m by the end of the Punic wars (200 BC) and 7m by the beginning of the imperial period (AD 1).

Seven million was more people than the Italian farmer could feed and it was only because Rome now commanded the resources of the Mediterranean basin and could bring in wheat from North Africa (particularly Tunisia and Egypt) that such a figure could be sustained. Even so the situation was a vulnerable one and when the Roman Empire got into trouble, which it did in the mid 3rd century AD, Italy's population was among the first to register a decline. With the complete administrative collapse that followed the Barbarian invasions and the sack of Rome in the early 5th century the decline became precipitous. Finally Justinian's reconquest, which was accompanied by famine and plague on an apocalyptic scale, brought the population to a 6th-century nadir that can be estimated at around 3.5m.

During the early Roman period the northern third of the country had been the peninsula's underdeveloped area. It caught up in the imperial heyday and by the time Italy emerged from the Dark Ages it was the north that was setting the pace. Indeed it set the pace for Europe as a whole: by the 12th century it had become the most economically advanced part of the continent. Its two major seaports, Venice and Genoa, almost monopolized Europe's trade with the Levant, while the goods and services generated by them and by such inland cities as Milan and Florence were the essential elements of the medieval trading network. As part of this upsurge Italy's population passed the best Roman levels in the course of the 12th century to reach a total of 10m by the end of the 13th.

In Italy as elsewhere in Europe the Black Death cut the population back by a third. However the economic base remained unimpaired, recovery during the 15th century was steady and by the early 16th century the figures for most areas were as high or higher than the pre-Black Death equivalents. The set- back that took place at the beginning of the 17th century was more sinister, for it reflected the economic consequences of the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama — the shift of Europe's economic centre away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and away from Italy to the Low Countries. The Italian standard of living began to de- cline. At the end of the 17th century the population was little larger than it had been at the beginning, the country as a whole a great deal poorer.

In the 18th century the population did begin to increase again. The situation remained unhealthy, however, for the increase was greater in the countryside than in the towns: Italy, which had once had the most urbanized and sophisticated population in the continent, seemed to be in danger of becoming a rural slum. In the early part of the 19th century the trend was much the same: then industrialization and emigration began to alleviate the situation. Industrialization, which was almost entirely restricted to the north, allowed Italy to recover a little of its former economic status. Emigration helped too, though the quantitative aspects of this are more than usually difficult to assess because Italians emigrating as young adults often returned to Italy when their working days were over. A fair summary is that over the years 1881-1936 the net effect was a reduction of about 6m in the total for Italy. Or, to put it another way, the population on the eve of the Second World War, which was 44m, would have been 50m if there had been no emigration at all.

The pace of industrialization has quickened in the 20th century and as a result the Italian standard of living has greatly improved. However, Italy, though homogeneous in terms of religion and language, remains in economic terms two nations to this day: the north is thoroughly European, the south almost North African. Internal migration is as yet only mitigating not closing the gap between the two. Sicily, for example, with near enough 10% of the area and population of Italy, is responsible for only 5% of the gross national product

Primary Sources

As might be expected, more population figures have survived for Roman Italy than for any other part of the classical world. But though it could well be true that the census of Roman citizens was an institution as old as Rome itself— the Romans believed it — the earliest extant figures, which purport to relate to the 6th century B C, are merely notional and anyhow refer to too small a part of Italy to be of much moment. By the late 3rd century BC the available figures are far more interesting, being consistent, believable and covering most of the peninsula. From this date until the death of Augustus in AD 14 there is sufficient information available for us to chart the population of the country with confidence. For the late Roma period there are no reliable data. The hiatus lasts through the Dark Ages and up to the establishment of the first of the Renaissance archives in the 12th century. All Italian city states in the Renaissance period collected demogra- phically useful data, usually for fiscal purposes but occasionally in the form of direct enumerations. By no means all the data survive, but by the 16th century we are once again in a position to make a reasonable estimate of the country's population. There- after, despite the political fragmentation of the country, the course of the population graph is sure, if tedious to calculate. The first in the present series of decennial censuses followed immediately on the unification of the country in 1861.

Bibliography
The controversies over the interpretation of the Roman statistics are reviewed and resolved in P. A. Brunt, Italian Manpower 225 BC-AD 14 (1971). For the period AD 500-1450 see J. C. Russell's contribution to the * Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. 1. The period from 1500 on is covered by Julius Beloch in his monumental, posthumously published Bevölkerungsgeschichte Italiens (3 vols., 1937, 1940, 1961). A summary of his figures, adjusted for the area of modern Italy, is given in Cipolla's contribution to * Glass and Eversley.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Japan 0.37m km' (0.06m km' arable)
Agriculture reached Japan comparatively late, its introduction to Kyushu being dated to about 250 BC. At first its spread along the island chain was rapid farmers had reached the Kanto, the plain round Tokyo, by the beginning of the Christian era. The last leg went more slowly, the northern quarter remaining the exclusive property of the pre-agriculturalists, the Ainu, until around AD 900. As for Hokkaido, the development of the special agricultural techniques necessary for the colonization of this, the least welcoming of the Japanese islands, took place only in the late 19th century. So throughout Japan's history two processes have been going on side by side: an increase in total numbers and a movement of the demographic centre of gravity outwards along the island arc.

Towards the end of the food-gathering stage, that is around 400 BC, the population of Japan consisted of about 30,000 hunters and fishermen. With the introduction of wet rice cultivation the rise in numbers must have been rapid: certainly the 300,000 figure will have been reached by AD I and the 3m mark by the time the Japanese state emerged in AD 650. All the indications are that the population continued to grow fairly steadily over the next millennium, increasing on average by about two thirds every two centuries with a slight quickening of the rate in the late 15th century bringing the total up to 30m by 1700. What followed, an 125-year period of zero growth, has usually been regarded as a textbook example of Malthusian checks operating in a closed society. From this unhappy condition the Japanese were liberated by Commodore Perry, who in 1853, on the orders of the United States government, forcibly opened up Japan to Western shipping and Western ideas. So goes the story. In fact, there is convincing evidence to show that population growth cannot have been checked by sheer want because the Japanese improved their standard of living and their national resources during this period. It is now considered that, by allowing time for the processes of urbanization and capital accumulation to mature, the policy of isolation, whatever its initial rationale, served an important social purpose, and that the Japanese could not have coped as well as they did with the problems of Westernization without this period of consolidation. The limitation of family size which allowed the increase in wealth seems to have been achieved partly by infanticide, partly by later marriage.
Once Westernization was under way the population soared. Between 1850 and 1950 the rise was from 32m to 84m, a gain of over 150%. Part of the nation's surging energies went into the creation of an overseas empire, an adventure that at first cost relatively few Japanese lives but ended up with the Second World War, economic collapse and 2.4m dead. It now seems a curious aberration in a process of industrialization which has gone from victory to victory.
Since the Second World War the Japanese have recognized that they have a population problem on their hands. By terminating 1 m pregnancies a year they have kept this within bounds and the hope is that the steadily falling birth rate will permit the country to enter another period of zero population growth at the turn of the century. By then there will be about 125m people in the Japanese and Ryukyu archipelagos which, considering that only 16% of the land area is cultivatable, seems like enough. The Ainu, incidentally, have declined slowly over the last 2,000 years: there are now less than 10,000 of them left.

Primary Sources

Japanese tradition tells of a population count held in the year A D 610 which returned a figure of 5m. Totals of this type cannot be accepted as suggesting more than an order of magnitude, but there can be no doubt that proper surveys of Japan's population were made from the 9th century onwards because fragments of household registers and land- allotment records survive. These can be used as a basis of moderately reliable calcula- tions of the overall population in the period 800-1600. In the second half of the 17th century the quality of the surviving information improves sharply: there are records of enumerations carried out in many different counties, in some of them on several oc- casions. And since the early 18th century the demographic record is clear, for in 1721 the shogun (regent) ordered a nationwide count and in 1726 a regular six-yearly census was instituted. This census has its gaps (1738, 1810, 1816 and 1840) but was kept going until the middle of the 19th century. In 1871 a registration system was introduced which, in theory at least, made annual population figures available. The first of the present quinquennial series of true censuses was held in 1920.

Bibliography
All the historical data are given in The Population of Japan by Irene B. Taeuber (1958). For the interpretation of the statistics of the 18th and 19th centuries see the article by Hanley and Yamamura in * Glass and Revelle, pp. 451 ff.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Ireland-pre1750

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Egypt Pre-1750

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

England&Wales Pre1750

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Afghanistan 0.65 km2 (about 12% productive)

Although today remote from the currents of world affairs Afghanistan was sufficiently close to the heartland of the Old World where agriculture was invented to get off to a good start demographically. By 5000 BC the 15,000 or so pre-agricultural inhabitants of the area had been replaced by five times as many farmers: by 1000 BC some 1 m people were occupied in tilling the plains on the northern border of the country and the fertile valleys hidden within the moun- tains of the central massif.

This population had risen to around 2. 5m in the 2nd century AD when the Kushan kings made it the centre of a half-Iranian, half-Indian empire of the type that is characteristic of Afghanistan's brief moments of glory. It is probable that the population was no larger when such a moment came again in the years immediately before and after AD 1000. This time the empire was Moslem (the Kushans had been Buddhists) and its prosperity was based
under the excuse of religion on the plunder of north India. A deserved retribution came in the form of the pagan Genghiz Khan in the early 13th century: the cities built from the spoils of India were sacked so thoroughly that the population of the country fell below 2m for the next century and a half.

Afghanistan now began to slip out of the mainstream of history. Periods as a border province of such empires as Timur's or the Moghuls' alternated with periods of chaotic independence. In the 19th century British and Russians came to see that their interests were best served by leaving Afghanistan alone: in this relatively tranquil period numbers went up significantly for the first time in centuries: from 3m in 1800 to 5m in 1900.

Growth in the 20th century has been faster, to about 9m in 1950 and to 16m in 1975. Afghans (Pathans) constitute about 60% of the population, Tajiks about 30%. The remaining 10% is ac- counted for by a series of small tribal groups of which the Uzbek Turks with about 5% are the most important. In 1960, between a quarter and a fifth of the population was still nomadic, though as a way of life pastoralism, in Afghanistan as everywhere else, is clearly in decline.
Primary Sources and Bibliography
There are no primary sources for Afghanistan — at least, though some counts of sorts have been made in recent years, there has never been a proper census. The government estimates — issued annually since 1920 — are held to be much too high by Donald N. Wilbur (in 'Afghanistan', Human Relations Area Files, 1962), who suggests 9m for c. 1960 (cf. the official estimate of 13.3m for 1959). Wilbur possibly goes too low but seems to be the only writer to have seriously considered the question.
Perhaps the best approach is to compare Afghanistan with Iran. Afghanistan has about half the cultivable area of Iran: if its population is in proportion it would have been about 11m in 1960 — half way between the official figure and Wilbur's. This would fit with a World Bank estimate of 14.6m in 1971. For earlier periods a population roughly half that of Iran seems a reasonable hypothesis in the absence of any actual evidence.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

East Africa 1.72m km'
Uganda 0.21m km2
Kenya 0.57m km2
Tanzania 0.89m km2
Rwanda and Burundi 0.05m km2

Bibliography

Acknowledgement

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Indo-China 0.75m km2
VietnBC 0.33m km2
Laos 0.24m km2
The Khmer Republic 0.18m km2

In the 3rd millennium BC the indigenous population of Indo-China, some 40,000 strong, was transformed into an expanding community by the acquisition of agriculture. By AD 1 this community had multiplied up to the million. It was already polarized both ethnically and culturally, the north being inhabited by the Viet, who were politically and socially under the influence of China, the south by the Khmer, whose culture derived from India. The history of the following 1200 years is essentially a matter of the changing balance between these two forces, with the Lao (who are a Thai people) playing a spectator's role in the underdeveloped hinterland.
At first the south predominated and direct or indirect Khmer rule spread over southern Thailand, southern Laos and south and central Vietnam. The grandiose ruins of Angkor means 'City of testimonial to the magnificence of this Khmer Empire at its peak: the name —it means 'City of Water'—is a reminder of the Khmer's development of an irrigating agrhw centre of Indo-China firmly in their zone. Of the 2.5m Indo-Chinese alive in AD 1200, the majority lived in the Khmer sphere of influence
After 1200 the balance tipped the other way: the Viets got stronger, the Khmers got relatively weaker. The Khmer's poor performance is symbolized by the decline of Angkor, which was eventually abandoned to the jungle at the back of it seems to lie an agricultural failure the exact nature of which is obscure, but for which the Dry Zone Sinhalese civilization affords interesting parallels (see Asia Area 7b). By the early modern period European travellers were mentioning the Khmer Kingdom only in passing, as a Thai or Viet satellite: by the mid 19th century its 2m inhabitants had become for all practical purposes subjects of the Vietnamese emperor. The Vietnamese Empire in fact contained all the area's 9m people except for the 1 m in the Laotian principalities, which were then an adjunct of Thailand.
At this point the French intervened. Their piecemeal annexation of the area (1862-93) brought Indo-China into being as a political unit. The rate of increase now became substantial, so that by the middle of the 20th century, when the colonial era was drawing to its bloody close, the number of Indo- Chinese had risen to 33.5m. And growth continued throughout the subsequent American—Vietnamese conflict, a remarkable tribute to mankind's ability to make love and war simultaneously. The special factor here was the spread of people and rice-growing into potentially fertile but previously under-utilized areas, a move that may well have been given added impetus by the destruction of the majority of towns and villages in the war zone. Today there are some 55m Indo-Chinese, of whom 44m live in Vietnam. 8m in the Khmer Republic and 3.25m in Laos.

Primary Sources and Bibliography
The only historical discussion which talks in terms of figures is that of Irene Taeuber in Population Index 11 (1945); her estimate of 4m for the Khmer empire at its height (i.e. including much of Thailand and Malaya) is probably of the right magnitude. The next estimate is Crawfurd's of 1830 — 5.2m excluding Laos (see * Fisher).
Primary data start with a French count in Cochin-China in 1876, followed by a quinquennial series of partial counts and estimates that only really become at all reliable in the inter-war period. The post-independence crop of censuses has been lamentably sparse — North Vietnam in 1960, Cambodia in 1962, and nothing at all as yet from South Vietnam and Laos.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

The Islands of the Western Indian Ocean 0.6m km2
Madagascar 0.59m km 2

The island of Madagascar received its first colonists at the beginning of the Christian era. They came not from Africa but from Indonesia and the voyage across the 3,000 miles of Indian Ocean that separate the two must have been either totally accidental or of the `blind migration' type usually associated with Polynesians rather than Indonesians. Intended or not, the colonization of Madagascar was successful: by the end of the 1st millennium the island contained some 0.2m Malagasy, all descended from the few boatloads of Indonesians who had arrived over the previous ten centuries. No one in Indonesia, indeed no one anywhere, knew of the colony's existence.

The era of total isolation ended in the 14th century, when the Arabs trading along Africa's east coast finally got this far south. The Arabs introduced two new elements into the island's ethnography themselves and their Negro slaves yet neither the newcomers nor their commerce really prospered. Malagasy society was too unsophisticated to generate much in the way of demand, there were no natural resources of significance and slaves were more readily obtained from the mainland. Even the Portuguese, who in 1500 became the first Europeans to reconnoiter the island, could find nothing to detain them. The Malagasy 0.7m of them by this time were left to their own devices until the coming of the French.

The first French move was made in 1643 when Fort Dauphin was established on the south-east corner of the island. The hope was that East Indiamen would find it useful as a revictualling station. However, it soon became clear that the nearby island of Réunion was far better suited for this function. Fort Dauphin was abandoned and the French connection was reduced to visits by slavers operating from Réunion and, later, Mauritius. About a third of the slave population of Réunion and Mauritius apparently came from Madagascar, which means that the island's rate of export in the 18th century will have been around 500-1,000 a year. This is of no numerical significance in relation to a population that must now have been over a million and anyhow it is likely that many, maybe most, of the slaves exported from Madagascar had been brought over from the mainland of Africa in the first place. Probably the most significant effect of the slave trade on the island's population was the appearance of a definite Bantu element as a result of escapes and emancipations at the slaving ports.

France resumed official contact with Madagascar in the 1880s: this time she came to stay. In 1895 a French expeditionary force landed on the island and reduced the Malagasy who at this time numbered about 2.75m to colonial status. During the subsequent period the conventional wisdom was that Madagascar was under populated: there was even talk of re-colonizing the island with more prolific peoples from Africa or Asia. Actually the Malagasy were reproducing at a perfectly respectable rate and, by the time the French left in1960, there were 5m of them. Now, in common with most underdeveloped countries, an accelerating rate of population increase is a factor threatening future prosperity, for the current population of 8m is likely to have multiplied up to 15m by the end of the century.

Primary Source
The first population estimate produced by the French administration was based on a census of taxpayers in 1900: later estimates were based on greater administrative experience but on equally indirect data. The situation has improved a bit lately: in 1966 a sample census was taken which is estimated to have covered about 12% of the island's population. However, there has been no true census to date.

The Comoro Islands 2,170 km'

The Comoros, which lie in the Mozambique channel between Africa and Madagascar, were probably unin- habited when discovered in the 14th century by Arab seamen from Zanzibar. Gradually they collected a population ofNegro and Malagasy underdogs ruled by a few Arab overdogs. Annexed by the French in the 19th century, they were estimated to have a population of 80,000 in 1900. Today the figure is thought to be about 300,000.

Reunion 2,511 km2

Previously uninhabited, Réunion was colonized by the French in 1665. The intention was to provide a revictualling station for their East Indiamen. Popula- tion grew from 1,000 in 1700 to 15,000 ( two thirds of them slaves) in 1750 and 65,000 (three quarters of them slaves) in 1800. Following the abolition of slaveryin 1848 indentured labourers from India, Indo-China and China were brought in to work the sugar planta- tions which had become — and still remain — the island's economic raison d'être. By 1900 the population was 175, 000; today it is over half a million.

Mauritius 1,865 km2

The Dutch planted a colony on Mauritius in 1638. It never prospered and the few hundred souls there were evacuated in 1710 when the success of the Cape Colony made its revictualling function superfluous. A few years later the island was settled by Frenchmen from nearby Réunion: they successfully developed the island's present sugar plantation economy. In 1750 the island's population was 10,000; by 1800 it had grown to 60,000. Nearly 50,000 of the60,000 were slaves whose origins lay in Madagascar or Mozambique.

In 1810 the British took Mauritius. They prohibited first the slave trade, then slavery, introducing Indian coolies instead — 300,000 of them between 1834 and 1910. As a result the island's population zoomed from 176,000 in 1850 to 370,000 in 1900 and 500,000 (
two thirds Indian) in 1950. The present figure is 900,000.

POPULATIONS OF THE SMALLER ISLANDS OF THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN

Populations in thousands, to the nearest 10,000
1500 1600 1700 1750 18001850 1900 1925 and islets
60 80 120 160 300
120 180 190 260 500
180 370 390 500 900
20 30 40 60

COMOROS 1the 20 30 40 5cean
REUNION 20 70
MAURITIUS 10 60
SEYCHELLES
1950

The Seychelles, a group of ninety-two islands and islets in the Indian Ocean with a total area of 400 km2, were colonized by the French in the 1770s and annexed by the British in 1810. They then contained a few hundred colonists and a few thousand Negro slaves. By 1900 the population had grown to 20,000, today it is about 55,000.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The precolonial population of the Comoros could be a subject for controversy if anyone was interested; there are no data bearing directly on the subject and numbers have to be inferred from general considerations and back projections from the first French estimates. By contrast the material on Réunion and Mauritius is all one could wish; counts were made right from the start and there is no doubt about the size of the population of either at any time. For a simple tabulation of the figures for Reunion and Mauritius (and the Seychelles) see the statistical appendix in Auguste Toussaint Histoire des Iles Mascareignes (1972). We have been unable to find anything on the Comoros beyond the material in the standard handbooks.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Malay Archipelago 1.84m km2
Indonesia (less West New Guinea) 1.50m km2
Malaysia and Singapore 0.34m km2

Man in this part of the world did not settle down to proper agriculture until after 2500 BC. The innovation is associated with a movement of Malay peoples from mainland South-East Asiinto the archipelago: before this happened the population, a group of peoples of proto-Melanesian stock, can- not have numbered more than 100,000.

By AD 1 the Malay peasantry had multiplied up to about 2m. This population was concentrated on the southern tier of islands and in particular on Java, a state of affairs that has persisted ever since: its culture was forming in a Hindu mould as Indian traders probing the islands in their search for spices brought in their habits as well as their custom. The emergence of the Hindu Kingdom of Srivijaya, which through the early medieval period controlled or claimed to control most of Malaya and western Indonesia, marks the maturity of this initial phase in the area's history. Also introduced from India at this time was the technique of wet rice cultivation: this supported a further increase in the population, which reached 4m by AD 1000 and 8m by AD 1500.

In Indonesia as in India Hindu culture was to be harshly challenged by Islam. From an enclave established at Malacca in the 14th century Moslem adventurers steadily spread eastwards; by the early 16th century they had created a string of coastal sultanates that stretched as far as the fabled spice islands of Tidor and Ternate. However, before these petty states could coalesce into an Indonesian empire, indeed while the area was still in a state of political disruption, the Europeans arrived and seized the imperial role.

The Europeans, of course, fought a great deal among themselves and it was only in the early 19th century that the imperial pattern of the area was finally laid out, with the Dutch in control of most of the archipelago (though not properly in some parts until 1900) and the British in possession of the Malay peninsula and the northern and north-western parts of Borneo. Well before this division was finally agreed the demographic upsurge that coincides with the appearance of the Europeans was in full swing: the population of the area rose by no less than a third in the 18th century to reach a total of 13.5m. The exact machinery of this rise is unrevealed; although trade flourished under the Europeans — that was why they were there — it was largely traditional trade conducted in a traditional way, and therefore had little impact on the bulk of the population.

The 19th century brought further change. The population growth of the area accelerated, carrying the total from 13.5m to 40m; the colonial powers turned from trade to the exploitation of natural resources. Their methods were interestingly different. The Dutch enforced state-controlled production of coffee and spices by the inhabitants of Indonesia themselves. The British al- lowed a free-for-all in the production of tin and rubber which resulted in an influx of immigrants — from the archi- pelago and from China — which also supplied the region with its traders. The result is the present complex 145m population of the area: a predominantly Chinese city state of 2.5m in Singapore (where there was virtually nobody in 1800, and only 22,000 people in 1900); a multi-racial nation of 12.5m in Malaysia (46% Malay, 43% Chinese, 9% Indian); and a relatively uniform state of 130m in Indonesia, though one in which the split between the three quarters Moslem population and the Hindu and Christian minorities has caused great difficulties.

Brunei
Brunei is a sultanate in North Borneo which has held aloof from the Malaysian federation; it has a population of about 150,000 now, as against 20,000 at the beginning of the century.

Primary Sources

The only pre-19th-century figure of any value is a contemporary Dutch suggestion that the Kingdom of Mataram, covering about 80% of Java, had 2.5m subjects in 1630 ( quoted by B. Schrieke in Indonesian Sociological Studies, Part 2 (1957)). The first estimates based on direct counts were produced in the early 19th century by Raffles ( Java 4.8m in 1815) and Bleeker (Java 9.4m in 1845). Crawfurd's figures for Malaya and Indonesia in 1830 are 0.35m and 11m respectively (see * Fisher).

From 1849 annual official estimates exist for Indonesia, based on quinquennial assessments. The first proper census in Dutch territory was taken in 1905: there were further censuses in 1920 and 1930 but of these only 1930 is really reliable. The Indonesians themselves have counted their population in 1961 and 1971. In the British area there were reliable censuses from 1901 on.

Bibliography
For Malaysia as a whole there is a most useful survey by T. G. McGee in Wan Gunguni ( ed.), Malaysia: A Survey (1964). For North Borneo in particular see The Population of Borneo by L. W. Jones (1966).

The basic discussion of the sources and problems of Indonesian demographic history ( both of which are many) is the book by Widjojo Nitisastro, Population Trends in Indonesia (1970). For a less diffident approach to the dirty business of estimating total population one needs to turn to the brief discussion by * das Gupta, and to the article by B. Peper in Population Studies 24 (1) 1970.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Mexico 2.0m km 2
By 7000 BC the food-gathering of the Mexicans was beginning to assume the form of 'incipient cultivation', which meant that meso-America had started on the road to civilization. By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC this road had led to village farming and a population of 0.5m; by the middle of the 1st millennium BC to towns, an elaborate religious system and a population of 1 m; and by the middle of the 1st millennium AD to city states with massive ceremonial centres, scribes capable of accurate calendrical inscriptions (if not quite of true writing) and a total population of 2m. The culminating point was reached in the 15th century with the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. Their empire extracted tribute from more than half the 5m people then living in the area.

What happened next is like a time-warp story from science fiction. In 1518 the Spanish adventurer Hernan Cortez landed on the Gulf Coast to find himself in a world of pyramids and human sacrifice, of stone idols and flint knives. There could be no compromise between Catholic Spain and this fantastic neolithic structure. The Aztecs hurled themselves forward to be slaughtered by the harquebus’s, swords and pikes of Cortez' tiny army. And also by disease. For even more deadly than their weapons were the new microbes the invaders had brought with them smallpox, influenza and measles. Within a few years all Mexico was under Spanish rule and its population was falling fast. The decline in native numbers continued until the beginning of the 17th century, when the figures stabilized at about two thirds of the pre-Columban maximum. It stayed much the same for the next two centuries, during which time the Spanish element increased from 0.m (in 1600) to 1 m (in 1800) and the Mestizo element grew to a similar total. During the 19th century there was a modest rise in the number of Indians (to 4m), a considerable increase in the number of Spaniards (to 2m) and a massive rise in the Mestizo population (to 7m, more than half the 1900 total of 13.5m). This ratio 55% Mestizo, 30% Amerindian, 15% white has proved remarkably stable, presumably because the tendency of the Mestizos to reclassify themselves as white balances their higher reproduction rate.

In the first half of the 20th century the growth in Mexico's population was rather slower than might have been expected: 100%, as compared, for example, with Central America's 130%. A short- term explanation of this is to be found in the events of the 1910s, when a bloody civil war and the influenza pandemic reduced the 1910 census population of 15.2m to one of 14.8m in 1921. Emigration to the USA also played its part. There were already 0.2m Mexicans living in the USA in 1910: by 1930 this chicano population (immigrants and descendants) numbered 1.5m. Since 1950 growth rates both at home and in the USA have been very high. The Mexican 125% in 25 years, and the number of total has shot up to 60m, an increase of chicanos has risen to 7m.

Primary Sources and Bibliography
The size of the population of Mexico in 1492 has lately become the subject of much academic argument. There are two basic approaches to the problem: one (exemplified by R. S. MacNeish on the Tehuacan valley in P. Deprez (ed.), Population and Economics (1970)) seeks an average density figure by looking at the cultural, economic and archaeological evidence. The other utilizes post-Conquest documents, particularly taxation records (see S. F. Cook and W. Borah in Essays in Population History I (1971)).

The debate is summarized by * Sanchez-Albornoz and by * Stewart. The main proponents are * Rosenblat (besides the general reference see also his La Población de America en 1492 (1967)) and S. F. Cook and W. Borah (in The Indian Population of Central Mexico 1531-1610 (1960) and many other places). The point at issue is this: was the population in Mexico in 1492 no more than 5m (Rosenblat) or was it more than 30m (Cook and Borah)? Comparison with other parts of the world at comparable levels of culture leads us to throw in our lot with Rosenblat. This saves us from having to face the second improbability in the Cook—Borah thesis, a fall of 90% in the course of the 16th century. History knows of no population of comparable magnitude suffering such a catastrophic decline.

After 1600 Mexico's population is relatively well documented and little debated. The primary sources are summarized by Cook and Borah in Essays in Population History I ( 1971), while the 1960 Census Summary Volume gives a list of the results of the large number of counts and estimates. The first proper census was taken in 1895; others followed in 1900, 1910, 1921 and the series became regular and decennial in 1930.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Romania 0.24m km'

With the introduction of agriculture in the 6th millennium BC Romania's population rose sharply from its mesolithic level of some 10,000 to more than 100,000. By the Iron Age the total number of inhabitants must have been around 0.75m, of whom three quarters will have lived in Dacia, as Transylvania was known at this time. The other half of Romania, Transcarpathia, was part of the Scythian realm, an empty world of occasional herdsmen and even more occasional family camps: its only agricultural settlements were a couple of Greek colonies on the coast and a scat- tering of villages along the southern and eastern fringes of the Carpathians.

The distinction between settled and pastoral lands remained much the same during the Roman period (A D 106-270), during the German occupation of the Carpathian area (270-370) and the Hun supremacy (370-470). Following this the Slays moved in and for the first time the Transcarpathian steppe received a sprinkling of peasants. Despite razzias by whichever nomadic tribe was temporarily dominating the Russian steppe, this Transcarpathian peasantry survived until the second half of the 11th century, when the Patzinak Turks, driven westward by the Cumans, moved into the area. In the presence of the Central Asian Turk no settled life was possible. From then until the end of the 13th century Transcarpathia was desolate again, the preserve of the nomad and his flocks. As a result its population in the year 1200 was probably little greater than it had been in 200. However, for Romania as a whole the figure was up a bit: Transylvania was beginning to share in the rising prosperity of the Hungarian Kingdom of which it was politically a part.

In the late 13th century the nomad tide finally ebbed, peasants returned to the steppe and the history of modern Romania begins. The Romanians say that the colonists on this occasion were descendants of the original Romanized inhabitants of Dacia still speaking a language of Latin type (which Romanian undoubtedly is) and now emerging from their Carpathian refuges after a thousand years of total obscurity. Most historians, on the other hand, incline to the view that the Romanian speakers (Vlachs) came from south of the Danube where there is no doubt that Latin-derived languages had continued in use throughout the Dark Ages. Whatever their origins, the Vlachs made a success of their colonization; the population of Transcarpathia began to increase rapidly and, despite a dip in the curve following the Black Death, the figure for Romania as a whole was over 2m by the first quarter of the 16th century.

The Turks of the steppe may have withdrawn from Romania for good but by the 15th century the Ottoman Turks were advancing from the south. The Romanian principalities, Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia, became Ottoman protectorates, a condition which exposed them to both Turkish exploitation and Christian assaults. Economic and demographic growth was stunted and remained so until the 18th century. Then came comparative peace and a quickening national pulse. Both in Transylvania (liberated by the Austrians at the beginning of the century) and Transcarpathia (increasingly protected from Ottoman exploitation by the Russians) the population more than doubled between 1700 and 1800. It was to double again in the 19th century. By the time of the creation of the modern state of Romania at the end of the First World War the population had reached 13m. Not all of them were Romanians: the population included 0.75m descendants of the German colonists who had settled in Transylvania as far back as the 13th century, 0.75m Jews and no less than 1.75m Magyars.

Romania is one of the few European countries that have retained a high rate of increase in the 20th century: the 1975 figure is nearly twice that for 1900 and the projection for the year 2000 is 25m. The population is more uniform than it was at the beginning of the century: the Jewish community was all but an- nihilated during the Second World War; there are less than half a million Germans left and though there are still 1. 5m Magyars they now amount to less than 7% of the population instead of over 10%.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Since the end of the First World War the Romanians have held censuses in 1930, 1941, 1948, 1956 and 1966, the Hungarians in 1920, 1930, 1941, 1960 and 1970. During the inter-war period Hungary had the same frontiers as today but Romania was considerably larger: a figure for the 1930 population of the present Romanian area is given in * Frumkin.
For the period prior to the First World War the data are best considered under the headings not of Hungary and Romania but of Ciscarpathia (Hungary and Transylvania) and Transcarpathia ( Wallachia and Moldavia).

Ciscarpathia * Beloch's guess at the population in Pannonia — 4.7 per km2 — needs reducing to 3 or so for Ciscarpathia as a whole. This is actually the density proposed by Kovacsics (*Colloque, pp. 249 ff.) for AD 900. Kovacsics' survey covers the medieval and early modern periods; he quotes what figures are available, though these do not really amount to much before the expulsion of the Turks. The earliest Austrian enumeration (a gross underestimate) was carried out in 1715: the first accurate returns are those of 1787. In 1857 there was a proper census, another followed in 1869 and a decennial series covers the years 1880 to 1910. Figures for the area of modern Hungary are not too difficult to extract from these Austrian censuses: a series starting in 1840 is given in M. Pecsi and B. Sarfalvi, The Geography of Hungary (1964).

Transcarpathia The evidence prior to the first Romanian enumeration, that of 1859, is reviewed by Stefan Pascu in * Colloque, pp. 283 ff. It amounts to no more than a few incomplete tax rolls for the period from the late 16th century on and though these give an idea of rates of growth they yield figures for total population that are far too low. Even the count of 1859 underestimated the population by about 1begin with the quinquennial censuses held between 1884 and 1899. The best figures for the 19th century as a whole are those calculated by * Sundbärg: the gap between them and the beginning of the First World War is covered by the census of 1912.
Approximate figures for the area of modern Romania can be obtained by adding one third of the figure for Ciscarpathia to the figure for Transcarpathia.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Mongolia 1.57m km2
Sometime in the third quarter of the last millennium BC the Mongolians learned to ride: their entire culture has been centred on the horse ever since. The changeover from a footbound pastoral society, perhaps 30,000 strong in 500 BC, to one of horse-riding clans, numbering not less than 200,000 by 250 BC, created the unchanging Mongolia of the historical period: the demographic base was of the same order of magnitude - about 800,000 when in the 13th century Genghis Khan set out from Mongolia to conquer the world, and it was still in the same band — in fact slightly lower, about 600,000 — when the Chinese established control over the country in the 18th century. Following the recovery of independence in 1911 the population grew towards its historical upper limit again, reaching 0.75m in about 1940.

In the last two decades the first tremors of the demographic revolution have reached Mongolia; there has been a sharp rise in the rate of increase, which has now reached the Asian average. It looks as though the population, currently 1.5m, will reach 3m by the end of the century.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

A. K. Validi (quoted by * Russell, p. 87) suggests a figure of 0.5m for Mongolia in the 6th-9th centuries AD. This is no more than an informed guess, for only one figure of use survives from the pre-modern period, the size of Genghis Khan's army. This was estab- lished at 129,000 men, which H. D. Martin, The Rise of Chingis Khan and His Conquest of North China (1950), p. 14, considers compatible with a total Mongolian population of around 0.75m. C. R. Bawden (The Modern History of Mongolia (1968)) quotes a mid- 19th-century Russian estimate of 'not much over 0.5m' and G. S. Murphy (Soviet Mongolia (1966)) one made in 1918 of about 0.7m. The first census was taken in 1956, the second in 1969.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Mozambique 0.78m km 2
Mozambique's original inhabitants were Bushmen, about 50,000 of them. They were displaced by Bantu, who entered the area from the north and west in the 4th and 5th centuries A D. By A D 1000 the Bantu had multiplied up to a third of a million and the Bushmen had vanished: Mozambique has been a Bantu country ever since. The name, however, is Arabic: it comes from the first point of contact with the outside world, the trading post established by the Arabs of Zanzibar in the 13th century.
The Portuguese replaced the Arabs in Mozambique town and indeed as masters of the whole coast in the early 16th century. Most of the Bantu there were about 1m of them by this time were quite unaffected by the change, though the Portuguese did attempt to establish some sort of control of the interior, particularly along the line of the Zambesi. They were hoping to find gold, but didn't. Nor did they do very well out of the slave trade. Mozambique was off the main slaving routes and its contribution to the Atlantic traffic initially amounted to only about 2½% — equivalent to an export rate of 100 or so a year in the 16th century and no more than 600 a year even in the 17th century.
In the 18th century there was a sharp acceleration in the local traffic in slaves: the French had settled nearby Réunion and Mauritius and naturally looked to Mozambique to meet their needs in this department. By the end of the century the total annual shipment of slaves from Mozambique had reached 10,000. And there it stayed, even after the official abolition of the traffic in 1810. The British Navy's small anti- slavery squadron was fully occupied off West Africa, so the Portuguese in Mozambique were able to supply their compatriots in Brazil without interference from anyone. Mozambique's slice of the shrinking Atlantic traffic rose tenfold, to a quarter. Between 1810 and 1860 (when the anti-slaving laws were finally made effective) 0.5m slaves were shipped from Mozambique for a cumulative total of 0.9m.
The late-19th-century scramble for Africa by the European powers forced the Portuguese to define the frontiers of Mozambique and establish control over the hinterland. As elsewhere in the continent the imposition of an effective administration was followed by a marked upturn in the rate of population growth: in the first half of the century numbers increased from 3m to 5.75m and today on the eve of independence the total is 9m. All are black; the 150, 000 Portuguese settlers all got out as soon as the handover of power was announced.

Primary Sources
The first in what has become a decennial series of counts was taken in 1940: the quality of these has gradually improved and it is fair to regard the 1970 count as a census. Before 1940 we have to rely on official estimates: these are only of any value within this century.

Acknowledgement
"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Nepal 0.14m km
The 18th and 19th centuries saw the establishment of the nation of Nepal in its modern form, largely as a result of the activities of the Gurka clan. Before then we must think in terms of a collection of borderland valleys of which that of Katmandu was the most significant, inhabited by a borderline people, part Mongol and part Indian with Indian influence usually predominating. In population terms there were perhaps 1m people by the first century AD, and 2m by 1500. Growth since 1800, when the population was 4m, has been faster, but not spectacular by Asian standards; numbers reached 5.5m in 1900 and 12. 5m in 1975.A 10 per cent addition to these figures takes care of the other Himalayan states, Sikkim (to the west of Nepal: area 0.01m km2, current population 0.2m) and Bhutan (to the west of Sikkim: area 0.05m km2, current population 1m).

Primary Sources

There are records of the Indian population being counted as far back as the middle of the 1st millennium BC but the practice, apparently flourishing under the Guptas, fell into disuse later, and no records seem to survive. So one is left with the problem of applying multipliers to the surviving, not very reliable, records of villages, monasteries, armies and elephants. Local population records do survive from Moghul times onwards, but they haven't been thoroughly explored yet and present many difficulties as sources of general subcontinental estimates. Early European counts, both in India and Ceylon, are perhaps more useful, but even on these work is only just beginning.

The first all-India census was taken between 1867 and 1872, followed in 1881 by the first in a regular decennial series. Coverage of both area and population can be regarded as substantially complete from 1901. India and the two halves of Pakistan continued the series after independence but the break-up between (West) Pakistan and Bangladesh caused their 1971 censuses to be postponed to 1972 and 1974 respectively. Sri Lanka has a decennial series from 1871 to 1931, which then proceeds irregularly - 1946, 1953, 1963 and 1971. Nepal has some partial 19th-century counts, then a series of increasingly accurate censuses at roughly decennial intervals from 1911.

Bibliography

There are two general guides to the estimation of the population of the Indian subcontinent before the 20th century: the paper by Ajit das Gupta in * Glass and Revelle, and the section of * Durand dealing with India. The two most recent sets of estimates are those of J. M. Datta, for 1600 onwards, in the Population Bulletin of India 1 (1960) and those by J. C. Russell in two articles in the Journal of Indian History 47 (1969) and 50 ( 1973). There is reasonable agreement between most estimates back to 1600; before that date Russell gives a series that is generally lower than other estimates, but in line with the assumptions of this book.
For the 19th and earlier parts of the 20th century, the basic source is Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (1951), while a useful recent consideration is that of * das Gupta. For post-1947 population movements the * United Nations 1974 World Population Conference background paper on migration is useful, and there is an article by C. Jayawardena in the Geographical Review 58 (1968) on Indians overseas.
Sri Lanka is covered by Irene Taeuber in Population Index 15 (1949), and by N. K. Sarkar Demography of Ceylon (1957). There is little on Nepal apart from K. J. Krotki and H. N. Thakur in Population Studies 25 (1), 1971, and the official statistics.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

New Zealand 0.27m km 2

Australia has only two stages in its population history before and after 1788. New Zealand at least manages three, indeed four if we count the absence of population as a stage: the islands of New Zealand were uninhabited well into the Christian era. Prehistory begins around AD 750 with the arrival of the first inhabitants, probably from the Marquesas in eastern Polynesia. On the basis of an economy which essentially involved out maneuvering the flightless moa, these original New Zealanders managed to increase from a few boatloads in the 8th century to a population approaching 15, 000 in the 14th century.

By the mid 15th century the moa- hunter was no more; he was out maneuvered in his turn by the semi- agricultural Maori, also immigrants from Polynesia. This time a few boat- loads in the 14th century increased to a population of a quarter of a million by the 18th century. When compared, in terms of density, with the Australian population, a measure is gained of the advantage of agriculture, even in its Polynesian form and even when practiced in a not very suitable climate which confined the Maori mainly to the North Island.

Western man's first contacts with New Zealand were tentative. Proper settlement began only after 1840 but by then even tentative contact had wrought its inevitable havoc. European diseases and European guns had between them reduced the Maori population to some 100,000 by the 1840s, and it continued to fall substantially until it reached about 50,000 at the end of the Maori wars in 1872. After that date, though there was a continuing downward drift, it was relatively slow and came to a halt in the 1890s at the 42,000 mark. There was then a steady rise to 100,000 in the mid-1940s and since then a spectacular rate of growth, of up to almost 4% a year at times, has taken the Maori population of New Zealand to nearly a quarter of a million once more.

The pattern of growth of the originally European population of New Zealand in fact largely British with a considerable Scots contingent has been almost the reverse of that of the Maori people. In the mid 19th century growth was rapid. The thousand settlers of 1839 had become about 25,000 by 1850 and 300, 000 by 1875, reaching 0.5m in the early 1880s and 1 m in 1911.

Within the 19th century period of settlement, the rapid growth of the first decades came to a peak in the Gold Rush years of the 1860s, when the population doubled in the first half of the decade. After the excitements of the 1860s the pattern settled down to one of continued steady migration before slowing down in the 1880s, when for the first time natural increase became more important than immigration as a contribution to the overall growth of the population of New Zealand. Since 1900 the pattern has been much the same as Australia's, with substantial migration period since the Second World War, in the ten years before and the ten years after the First World War and in the particularly in the late 1940s and in the 1950s.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The demography of New Zealand is very well documented but very little written-up. There were censuses of the white population in 1851, 1861, 1864, 1867 and 1871, and of the whole population — white and Maori — in 1858, 1874 and 1878. Since 1881 there has been a regular census held quinquennially except for 1931 and 1941 (no census taken) and 1946 (census taken the preceding year). All this raw material is summarized in the usual census publications and also in A Survey of New Zealand Population (Town and Country Planning Branch, Ministry of Works, 1960).

Estimates of the pre-European population are given in K. B. Cumberland and J. S. Whitelaw, New Zealand (1970), and are discussed also by * Hollingsworth. The prehis- tory of New Zealand is open to considerable debate; there may have been a whole series of Polynesian contacts and settlements from the 8th century onwards. However the arguments work out, the population graph is going to look much the same.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Scandinavia 1.15m km2

Denmark 0.04m km 2
Sweden 0.45m km' (0.03m km2arable)
Norway 0.32m km2 (0.01m km2 arable)
Finland 0.34m km2 (0.03m km2 arable)

Primary Sources

Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Pakistan, Indiasubcontinentsh 4.22m km2

Pakistan India 0.80m km2 3.27m km2
Bangladesh 0.14m km 2
The population of the Indian subcontinent in 10,000 BC can be estimated at about 100,000. Its rate of increase was low and remained so until 5000 BC, when the practice of agriculture began to spreads into the north-west, the Indus valley, from Afghanistan. By 4000 BC there was a respectable population in this area, perhaps as high as a million: by 2000 BC, when the Indus valley civilization usually named after one or other of its two chief towns, Mohenjodaro and Harappa reached its full flowering, there were possibly 5m in the Indus valley as against 1m in the still mesolithic remainder of the subcontinent.
The Indus valley civilization collapsed and disappeared, surprisingly completely, around 1600 BC. Apparently this was a result of the invasion of Iranian tribes — the legendary Aryans coming from the far side of Afghanistan. Certainly Indo-European languages of the Aryan group now became dominant throughout the northern two thirds of the subcontinent while the Dravidian languages spoken by the creators of the Indus valley civilization were confined to the southern third. On the other hand many of the cultural peculiarities that now characterize the northern 'Aryan' zone seem to have been evolved by the Dravidians before the Aryan invasion, so presumably the newcomers imposed themselves on the natives there rather than exterminated them. The cultural setback was major though, with no urban settlement on the scale of Mohenjo-daro or Harappa appearing anywhere in the subcontinent for the next thousand years.

The upturn from this dark age began with the introduction of iron-working from Iran in the 8th population and the development of rice cultivation at much the same time. Iron tools cleared the Ganges valley, rice supported a population boom there and the demographic centre of the country now moved firmly to where it has always remained since, the Gangetic provinces of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. By 500 BC the subcontinental total had reached 25m, of whom 15m lived in the Ganges basin: by 200 BC, when consolidated Bihar had put together the first major Indian empire, the figures were 30m and 20m.

The next fifteen hundred years consolidated without significantly altering this pattern. The population totals slowly mounted, reaching the 6th century, 80m in the 12th, and 100m by the end of the 15th. Presumably the vicissitudes of empires, the onslaught of epidemics and the fluctuations of food supply kinked the graph on many occasions, but of these we know almost nothing. The political fragmentation of the country makes it difficult to generalize from such local data as exist and, before the Moghul era, little is left from the few brief moments of near-unity that did occur. The comparison with China's graph, so often notched by catastrophe, is striking but could easily be due to China's better records. Happy is the graph that has no history.

With the rise of the Moghuls we arrive at modern times: In the course of the 16th century the new dynasts brought most of the subcontinent under their rule: their advance coincided with an unprecedented demographic and economic upsurge which boosted the population total from 100m in AD 1500 to 145m in AD 1650. How far, if at all, this impetus was lost in the years of Moghul decline is uncertain. Though the period is clearly one of considerable local disorder it is difficult to believe that overall totals fell at any time in the 18th century: certainly by the century's end growth was accelerating again. When the British took control in the years immediately before and after 1800, the population of the subcontinent proper was approaching 200m.

Rapid growth continued in the 19th century, though when it becomes possible to examine the process in detail (i.e. after the institution of the census in 1867-72) it is apparent that progress was far from smooth. There was, in fact, a peculiar staircase effect in which decades of rapid increase alternated with decades of little or no growth. The last such pause occurred in 1911-20 when, largely because of the 20m deaths caused by the influenza pandemic of 1918, the population actually fell slightly Since 1920 long-term growth has been unimpeded, even though at times famine has taken a massive toll several millions in Bengal in 1943 for instance. The explanation of this acceleration is straightforward. Better administration and better transport made it possible to contain an increasing proportion of famines, then the more easily controlled diseases declined under the impact of simple public-health measures. Death rates fell, birth rates continued as high as ever, population totals rose to staggering heights to 43m in 1950 and 745m in 1975. If the next quarter century sees the same rate of growth as the last and the evidence suggests that it will the figure in AD 2000 will certainly not be less than 1,200m.

In 1947 British India was split three ways in an attempt to give as many as possible of the Moslems their own nation, Pakistan. The division was not made easily. Minority groups that found themselves on the wrong sides of the new borders were often forced to flee under threat of massacre: about 17m people moved; 0.25m who didn't died. The division was also an awkward one. The original Pakistan consisted of two geographically separate areas which gradually pulled apart politically. In 1971 India helped the eastern half to secede under the name Bangladesh, so now Pakistan means the western half only. (We use it in this way in the rest of this section, even when referring to the 1947-71 period.)

Both Pakistan and Bangladesh are relatively homogeneous nations. Pakis- tan is 97% Moslem and 66% Punjabi- speaking. Bangladesh is 80% Moslem and 98% Bengali-speaking. India is by any standard heterogeneous. Though the initial partition of 1947 was made on religious grounds India is still 11% Moslem, which means that it has a current Moslem population of 66m. It also contains 15m Christians, 12m Sikhs, 4m Buddhists and 3m Jains, not inconsiderable minorities even though the nation as a whole is more than 80% Hindu. But the real diversity is in language. Less than a third of the population speaks the officially recognized national tongue, Hindi. Very sizable numbers speak Bengali ( 48m), Marathi (42m), Urdu (30m) or Gujerati (28m) the other major Aryan languages while about a quarter speak languages of the quite unrelated Dravidian group (Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kanarese).

In absolute numbers India has a far larger population than either Pakistan or Bangladesh: 600m as against 70m and 74m respectively. But Pakistan has the highest growth rate, a situation which, as can be seen from the retrospective estimates in the table below, has existed since the mid 19th century. A low initial density and a steady expansion of the irrigated area have helped to sustain this. In Bangladesh an equally high fertility has been counterbalanced by the high mortality sadly characteristic of this overcrowded and disaster-prone land. With a current density figure of 529 per km2 (contrast India's 183 per km2, Pakistan's 88 per km2 and the 400 per km2 of Europe's top-ranker, the Netherlands) Bangladesh has the Third World's problems about as badly as possible. In India the trouble is really one of scale. The geometric increases that now threaten are so enormous as to make clear thinking about them difficult. If Pakistan and Bangladesh continue at their present rates of growth they will add 78m and 56m to their present populations by the end of the century, figures that are comprehensible. If India carries on as now, her population in the year 2000 will be larger by 400m, a really fearsome addition to a land already overloaded with people.

Despite the pressure of poverty and overpopulation Indians are reluctant emigrants. Though the total outflow over the last century and a half amounts to about 35m, the return movement has been so high that the net efflux works out at only 7m, hardly enough to affect the statistics of the homeland at all. The most important overseas populations are in Sri Lanka (2.8m), Malaysia (1.m) and the U.K. (m); communities between 0.5m and 0.75m strong exist in South Africa, Mauritius and Burma and smaller ones (between 0.25m and 0.5m) in East Africa, Trinidad, Guyana and Fiji.

Area of: 1850 1875 1900 1925 1950 1975

Bangladesh 23 24 29 34 42 74
India 189 210 237 260 356 600
Pakistan 11 12 16 22 33 70

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay 3.08m km2

Ecuador 0.28m km2
Peru 1.29m km 2
Bolivia 1.10m km2
Paraguay 0.41m km2

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay 3.08m km2

Ecuador 0.28m km2
Peru 1.29m km 2
Bolivia 1.10m km2
Paraguay 0.41m km2

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

The Philippines 0.30m km 2
The original inhabitants of the Philippines were the negritos, a race of pygmies who get their name from their, superficially negroid features: there are currently about 10-20,000 of them and it is unlikely there were ever many more. The first Filipinos arrived from Indonesia around 2500 BC; more followed in the course of the centuries until by A D 1000 the newcomers had colonized all the important islands. At this stage the overall density was still very low, and the figure for total population no more than 0.1-0.2m in all.
Until the 16th century the Philippines remained unknown to the world at large: then the Filipinos suddenly found themselves being fought over by Spaniards from Mexico and Moslems the Moros — from Borneo. (The islands are named after the Spanish king of the time, Philip II of Armada fame. The Spanish are also responsible for calling the Moslems Moros, meaning Moors.) The Moros arrived a little ahead of the Spanish, but, except in the case of the most southerly islands, Mindanao and Jolo, their hold was never more than tenuous: faced with the superior weaponry of the conquistadors they were soon forced to retreat to these strongholds, leaving the rest of the archipelago to the rule of Spain and the missionary activities of her priests.
During the course of the 16th century the population of the Philippines passed through the 0.5-0.75m band and by 1800 steady growth of the order of 100% a century had brought the total to 2.5m. In the 19th century the pace quickened, the population doubling each fifty years: in the first half of the 20th century it more than doubled, reaching 20m in 1950. In the last twenty-five years the rate of growth has become truly hair raising, the increase from 1950 (20m) to 1975 (42m) being over 100%.
Thanks to the long occupation by Spain (1565-1898) and the shorter occupation by the USA (1898-1945) the Filipinos are now overwhelmingly Christian (90%), indeed overwhelmingly Roman Catholic (80%). The Moros of Mindanao and Jolo constitute the major part of the remaining 10%.

Primary Sources and Bibliography
During the 19th century the Spanish produced reasonably reliable estimates of the population under their control, which amounted to about 90% of the whole. The US authorities instituted a proper census in 1903: five more have been held at irregular intervals since. For the historical data see Irene Taeuber's article on p. 97 of the 1960 issue of Population Index.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Poland 0.31m km2

Prehistoric Poland was a sparsely populated land with no more than 5,000 inhabitants in the mesolithic, 25,000 in the neolithic and 100,000 in the Bronze Age. By the beginning of the Christian era the population had risen to 0.5m, and by the 10th century, when the first Polish state appeared on the political map of Europe, to 1.25m. Translated into densities per km2 these are very low figures — a fact which explains not only the late appearance of the Polish principality but much about its subsequent history.

Medieval Poland was overshadowed by its much bigger and socially more advanced neighbour, the German Empire. From the 12th century on, German immigrants were moving into the western provinces of Poland in significant numbers and they soon set an economic pace that the natives could not match. During the early 14th century this process reached its inevitable conclusion: Germans of one sort or another annexed Poland's northern and western provinces Prussia, Pomerania, the New Mark of Brandenburg and Silesia. Poland lost control of something over one third of her population: say 1.25m out of 3.5m.

The Black Death brought Poland a respite from German aggression. At a stroke it abolished the population pressure that had been the main force behind the Teutonic Drang nach Osten and as the thinly populated provinces remaining to the Polish state suffered relatively mildly from the epidemic there was actually a shift of military power in favour of Poland. By the late 15th century the verdict of the medieval centuries had been partially reversed. Germany's share of Polish territory and population was reduced to less than a quarter — say 0.8m out of a total that had recovered to the pre-plague figure of 3.5m. Nevertheless, the loss was considerable and looked like being permanent, for the process of Germanization was accelerating in the provinces over which the Germans retained political control. There had been a significant shift in the ethno-linguistic frontier.
In the 16th and 17th centuries German Polish relations were relatively tranquil. Behind the scenes, however, the old forces were building up again and though Poland retained her position in the population league (between 1500 and 1750 her population grew 75% to a total of 7m) she failed to develop the economic and diplomatic skills necessary for survival. Indeed, the Poles seemed to have a natural ineptitude for power politics. By the third quarter of the 18th century this ineptitude had become almost an art form: all three of Poland's neighbours, Prussia, Russia and Austria, were so thoroughly antagonized that they agreed to sink their differences and partition Poland between them. In 1795 the job was done and, though a Duchy of Poland made a brief appearance during one of Napoleon's recastings of the political map of Europe, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 there was no place for the Poles. Of the 10m people living within the present-day Polish frontiers 4.5m found themselves in Prussia, 4m in Russia and 1.5m in Austria.

Depressing though the situation was, the Poles did not lose heart; the reproductive work they did in the 19th and early 20th centuries ensured the survival of the Polish nation. Between 1815 and 1914 total numbers expanded by a staggering 300% to reach a final figure of 30m. The actual increase was even higher, for in the second half of this period no less than 3.6m Poles emigrated: 2. 6m to the USA, 0.2m to other parts of the New World, 0.4m to Germany, 0.3m to Russia and 0.m to other parts of Europe.

Whether or not this reproductive achievement had to have a Malthusian ending, the First World War found Poles fighting on both sides and using their homeland as a battle ground. By the time it was all over the Poles had recovered their independence but the area within the present-day frontiers had suffered a population drop of 4m. The Second World War was an even greater disaster, not so much because of the fighting ( which claimed 0.5m dead) as because of the Germans' meticulously planned extermination of the 3m-strong Jewish community in Poland and the Poles' understandably ruthless expulsion of Germans from the western provinces, now finally reclaimed for the Polish state. Having been German-ruled since the 14th century, 7.75m of the 9m people in these provinces were now German- speakers: between 1944 and 1948 all of them fled or were expelled. This outpouring was only partially offset by the transfer of 1.5m Poles from the eastern provinces simultaneously re- annexed by Russia and the slow return of most of the 3m Poles who had fled or been deported during the war years: at 24m the population of the new Poland was no greater than it had been in 1914.

Poland has made a rapid recovery from the Second World War: the population is at an all-time high of 34m and though growth is now slackening the total is likely to be at least 40m by the end of the century. Also flourishing are the Polish communities abroad. There are 6m people of Polish descent in the USA, 0.4m in Brazil and 0.25m in Canada. Despite repatriations there are still about 1.5m in the USSR. Two other Old World communities are of more recent origin, the 0.5m Poles in France being mainly inter-war migrants who worked in the coalfields and the 0.15m in England mostly Second World War ex-servicemen.

The Kingdom of Poland—Lithuania (1385-1772), Post-Partition Poland (1773-93), Congress Poland (1815-1914) and Versailles Poland (1920-39)
One of medieval Poland's reactions to German aggression was to unite with Lithuania, at that period master of much of European Russia. In its initial form this Polish—Lithuanian state covered about 1 m km2 and contained some 7m people: in the early 16th century it lost 0.2m km2 and a corresponding amount of its population. The lost area was recovered at the beginning of the 17th century only to be lost again in mid-century and more with it. The final version of Poland—Lithuania covered 0.75m km2 and contained 7.5m people in 1650, rising to 12m in 1772, the year of the first partition. This reduced the area of Poland to little more than0.5m km' and its population to 8m. Two more partitions (1793 and 1795) and the Polish state vanished completely.

Russia's share was greatly increased at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when the central block of provinces, which later became known as 'Congress Poland', was handed over to her. 'Congress Poland' covered 127,000 km2: its initial population of 4m increased to 14m over the next century. 'Versailles Poland', the sovereign state that was created in 1920, was much bigger than this. Though the Germans yielded little, the collapse of Russia allowed the Poles to gain a very favourable frontier in the east. As compared to present-day Poland, 'Versailles Poland' was considerably larger in size (390,000 km2) and had a slightly larger population (27m in 1920 and 35m in 1939). However, it was less Polish — it included 6m Russians in the east and left out 2m Poles in the west. It was only after the Second World War that Poland recovered its original, medieval geography and a truly homogeneous population.

Primary Sources

Estimates of Poland's population before the 14th century are based on nothing more than general ideas about likely densities. For the 14th century there are some tax rolls, though whether they provide an adequate basis for even the crudest estimate is debat- able (see * Russell, pp. 146-9). The first really definite figures — definite not necessarily being the same thing as accurate — are those produced at the time of the 18th-century partitions. For this period, for the whole of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th there are statistics collected and issued by the partitioning powers
Prussia, Austria and Russia.

The reappearance of the Polish state at the end of the First World War was followed by the holding of the first national census (1921). Since then there have been censuses in 1931, 1946 and decennially since 1950.

Bibliography

The Poles are in the process of producing a multi-volume history of the population of their country which, when complete, should contain more than anyone would want to know on the subject. The only volume available so far is K. Dziewonski and L. Kosinski, Rozwoj i Rozmieszczenie Ludnosci Polski w XX Wieku (Growth and Distribution of Poland's Population in the 20th Century), Warsaw, 1967. Table 26 on
p. 130 gives figures for the area within the present-day frontiers during the period 1900-1950. Until the appearance of the remaining volumes in the series the best overall account — and one that has the advantage of being available in English translation — is contained in the History of Poland by Aleksander Gieysztor et al. ( 1968), a volume which pays particular attention to demography.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Portugal 0.09m km'
(excluding Madeira and the Azores)

A pattern of prehistoric development similar to Spain's took Portugal from a population of a few hundred in the late palaeolithic to a few thousand in the mesolithic and to a few tens of thousands after the establishment of farming (3000 B c). By the time of the Roman conquest there were 0.4m people in the area, a number that rose to nearly half a million by the end of the 2nd century AD. From there to a third of a million at the Dark Age low point, 0.6m by AD 1000 and 1.25m by 1300 is a relatively better performance than average; in fact it puts the country — as is only right — in the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean category.

The Atlantic was to be Portugal's highway to success. In a sustained pro- gramme of exploration through the 15th century, Portuguese seamen mapped out the Cape route round Africa to India: in the 16th century the rewards flowed in. The new-found wealth supported a 60% rise in the country's population (to 2m), an increase achieved despite the very considerable manpower drain — a net loss of 125,000 — imposed by the new overseas commitments.

After 1600 most of the fizz went out of this situation. The Dutch elbowed their way into all the best routes, leaving Portugal with only Brazil and a ram- shackle collection of outposts that had little rhyme, reason or profit to them. In the homeland numbers slumped (to 1. 75m in 1650), recovered (to 2m in 1700) and though they then started to grow again there was little economic justification for this. To escape the life of rural drudgery that otherwise faced them some 2m Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the period 1700-1950: this outflow held the increase in the homeland down to a factor of 4 over this period as against a European average of 5.

Following the Second World War emigration rose to new heights. Another 0.3m people left for Brazil, government settlement schemes in Africa built up the white populations of Angola and Mozambique from less than 0.2m to more than 0.6m, while the spontaneous movement of workers to France created a resident Portuguese population there of 0.5m. The subtractions were sufficient to prevent much increase in the numbers at home: between 1950 and 1975 the population only managed to increase from just under to just over 8m. Now that the African settlers are all hurrying home and job opportunities for foreigners in France are contracting, Portugal's population must start to go up again faster than this. It is likely to be nearer 9m than 8m by the end of the century.

Primary Sources
Population estimates for Roman Iberia are better founded than most, for Pliny (Natural History III, 23-28) has preserved the results of a census taken in Galicia (the north-west corner) at the beginning of the Christian era: his figures are equivalent to a density of 10 per km2. For the medieval period there are records of various hearth taxes — the earliest a Catalonian one of 1281-5 — but these pose a lot of problems: how many people lived in a house, how many houses were excluded, how does one area compare with another? The first documents that even pretend to be complete are much later — a Portuguese tax roll of 1527-8, two Castilian ones of 1541 and 1591-4, and one for Navarre of 1553 — and even they are full of difficulties. Not till 1717 were all the Spanish kingdoms assessed in the same way at the same time.
The first direct counts in Spain date from the late 18th century — specifically 1768, 1787 and 1797: it is generally considered that they left out about 10% of the population. The first absolutely reliable figures were not obtained till the census of 1857. Since then there have been censuses in 1860,1877,1887,1897 and every ten years from 1900 on. The Portuguese series is: 1801, 1821, 1835, 1841, 1854, 1858, 1861, 1864, 1878, 1890, and then decennially.

Bibliography

* Russell, who endorses * Beloch's figure of 6m for the early Roman period, carries his survey through to medieval times with a complete sequence of estimates: as usual he dips a bit lower in the Dark Ages than we do. * Braudel has a useful discussion of the different 16th-century estimates: he finally comes to the conclusion that Spain had a population of about 8m and Portugal one of about 1m at the time. By contrast Mols in his contribution to * Cipolla favours 11.3m for Iberia as a whole at the same date. For the 17th century see the * Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. 4; for the 18th century M. Livi Bacci in Population Studies 22 (1) 1968 (summary in * Glass and Revelle).
General works that pay particular attention to the demographic factor are J. Vicens Vives' An Economic History of Spain (1969) and A. H. R. de Oliveira Marques' History of Portugal (1972). For migration figures see * Reinhard and * Kosinski.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

South Central Africa,Zambia,Rhodesia,Malawi

South-Central Africa 1.26m km2
Zambia 0.75m km 2
Rhodesia 0.39m km 2
Malawi 0.12m km 2

The aborigines of south-central Africa, the Bushmen, never numbered more than 75,000 and it was only with the arrival of the first Bantu in the 3rd century AD that the total for the area rose to the 100,000 mark. Even then population growth remained astonishingly slow: there could hardly have been more than 0.5m people in AD 1000 or 1 m in AD 1500 because there were only 2m in 1900. This is a remarkably poor performance for an agricultural people in a virgin and not inhospitable land.

In the 1890s the British established a protectorate over the whole of south- central Africa. They divided it into three colonial units which they called Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland and which are now known as Zambia, Rhodesia and Malawi. Malawi, the southernmost segment of the Rift Valley, had the high population density that has long characterized this strip of territory: though its area is less than 10% of the whole it contained well over a third of the area's population in 1900. The remaining two thirds of the 2m total was spread fairly evenly across Rhodesia and Zambia. As Zambia is by far the larger of the two this meant that it had 0. 75m people to Rhodesia's 0.5m.

During the 20th century the population of the area has grown rapidly, indeed its rate of growth has steadily accelerated. The increase is slowest in Malawi, which has the most limited resources so much so that at any one time 0.25m of its adult males are working in the mines of Zambia and South Africa. Even so, Malawi's population has quadrupled in the last fifty years to reach 5m today. Rhodesia, from being the least populous, has become, at 6.m, the most populous. It is also unique in that sufficient British settled there in the colonial period to create a white settler problem. By 1965 there were 0.23m of them, enough to seize control of the country and so far hang on to it. However, their chances of continuing to do so for much longer must be rated as slim: they constitute less than 5% of the population and even this low percentage is declining.

Trouble in Rhodesia has made difficulties for Zambia: conversely the resolution of the Rhodesian problem would ease Zambia's political and economic situation. With more resources than most African states specifically the mines of the copper belt and with not too many people currently only 4.9m this is an African country with better prospects than most.

Primary Sources and Bibliography
The various estimates and counts made by the British colonial authorities during the period 1901-56 are given in Table 1 of the introduction to the report on the 1956 census of all three territories (published in Salisbury, Rhodesia, in 1960). Since then there have been censuses in Zambia in 1963 and 1969, in Rhodesia in 1962 and 1969 and in Malawi in 1966.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Russia-in-Europe 4.77m km'

Russia is proverbially vast. European Russia alone is as big as all the other countries in Europe put together and though it has never contained anything like half Europe's population the scale is such that even very low population densities add up to imposing totals. The mesolithic population can hardly have been less than 50,000, the overall population in the 3rd millennium (the middle of the neolithic period) less than 0.5m, while the figure for the close of the Bronze Age (when perhaps half the country had become acquainted with the idea if not the practice of agriculture) will have been over the 1 m mark.

Not much above this point growth slowed down. Development continued much as before in the middle third of the country, but the arrival of the Scyths and their flocks in the south (in the 8th century B c) meant that this area — the steppe zone — now became fixed in the low-density pattern associated with pastoralism. The result was the threefold division that was to characterize Russia for the next 2,000 years: nomads on the steppe (first the Scyths, then the Huns, then the Turks and Mongols), peasants in the central third (the cradle of the Russian race), nothing up in the north ( bar a few Finns). Inevitably the Russians who tilled the soil came to outnumber the steppe peoples who merely used it for grazing their animals. By AD 900, when the Varangians created the first Rus state, the Russians (at 2.5m) constituted two thirds of the population of the whole area, while the nomads ( who did not have exclusive possession of the south) amounted to less than a sixth.

Numerical advantages are not in themselves conclusive. In the medieval era, when cavalrymen were worth many times their number of foot soldiers, the nomads always gave at least as good as they got. The Mongols, who in the early 13th century became the overlords of the whole Eurasian steppe, did much, much better than this. In 1237-40 their armies swept across central and southern Russia massacring everyone who did not immediately surrender, and many of those who did. Kiev, the traditional capital of the Rus state, was erased from the political map and the whole tract of land associated with it went out of cultivation. As a result the peasant population of Russia which had multiplied up to about 7.5m just before the storm broke dropped back below 7m.

The 14th century brought another setback in the shape of the Black Death. Because of the low population density the plague did not have the same impact as elsewhere in Europe, but the pest and the Mongols together added up to much the same final effect: they kept the population below the 13th-century maximum — 10m for the whole country - until the late 15th century. But with the 16th century the whole picture changed. The first musket shots announced the end of the nomad's military advantage, the peasants moved back on to the steppe and the resurgent Rus state, now synonymous with Moscow, started to advance its southern frontier in methodical fashion. By 1600 only the Tartars of the Crimea lay outside Moscow's control and though they lasted as a political entity until 1783 the south had become a predominantly agricultural area well before the end of the 18th century. The population figure of 36m in 1800 — 80% greater than the 20m of a century earlier — reflects the first results of this. The main effect came in the next century, when the south made the major contribution to an overall population growth that was truly explosive.

Russia's population increase in the 19th century was so big — near enough 200% — that it transformed the Russian countryside from a condition of under- population to one of overpopulation. Emigration to Siberia (5m in the period 1870-1914) and the New World (3m in the same period) siphoned off some of the surplus peasantry but it was the towns that had to take most of the over- flow. As a result Russia finally acquired (mostly in the decades on either side of 1900 when the annual increment reached 2m) the demographic component needed to make a modern state, an urban proletariat. This was the sector from which the Soviets emerged and from which V. I. Lenin, against all expectations, was able to create the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

The Bolshevik Revolution occurred it he middle of a period of war and disaster that temporarily brought the Russian population juggernaut to a halt. Even so the total effect of 2m war dead, 14m other 'excess deaths' (mostly due to mal- nutrition and disease in the later stages of the Civil War), 2m emigrants and a 10m birth deficit was only to put the 1925 population back to the 1910 level. Stalin and the Second World War between them were to do about double this amount of damage. The military death roll reached a staggering 10m (many of them must have been originally prisoners of war who did not survive their captivity or, at least, did not return from it), other 'excess deaths' totaled 15m and the birth deficit has been calculated at 20m. This time the population of European Russia was cut back to its 1905 figure.

The post-war recovery has been more than complete. The present population of 160m is the largest ever, and though the rate of increase is now slackening it should reach 190m by the end of the century. The great majority are Russians by race but there are some considerable minorities: notably 10m Turks of one sort or another (mostly Tartars), 5m Lithuanians and Latvians, 3m Estonians and Finns, 2m Jews, 1 m Poles and 1 m Germans. Among the Russians themselves one should perhaps distinguish between Great Russians ( more than 60%), Ukrainians (30%) and Belorussians (less than 10%)

Russian and Soviet Empires

The first Russian state, the principality of Kiev, contained about three quarters of the population of the area. It soon split into several separate principalities which at their high point, just before the Mongol conquest of the mid 13th century, had a total population of some 7.5m. In the late 15th century the Princes of Moscow managed to create a new political grouping. The population of the area they controlled roughly speaking the northern half of the country grew from 7m in 1500

to 14m in 1700. The rise was almost entirely due to natural increase, the only new territories added to the realm being sparsely inhabited lands in the south-east.

The decline of Poland in the 17th and 18th centuries gave the Tsars the opportun- ity to advance westward and add some better-populated provinces to their empire. By 1800 they controlled an area equivalent in population to the present-day territory of the USSR in Europe. By 1815 they controlled an even larger area and a popula- tion in European Russia alone of 44m. This number tripled over the next 100 years, reaching 65m in 1850, 107m in 1900 and 133m on the eve of the First World War. The Asian part of the Empire grew even faster: from 3m in 1815 to 5m in 1850, 26m in 1900 and 37m in 1914.

The USSR in its inter-war form started off with a population of 135m (95m in Europe). This had increased to 171m (11m in Europe) by 1939, when the annexa- tion of the Baltic States and half Poland boosted the total to 194m. On the eve of the German invasion in 1941 the figure was near enough 200m.

Primary Sources

The first tax records sufficient to provide an indication of the population of the Russian state date from 1678/9: firm figures begin with Peter the Great's enumeration of taxable male subjects in 1722. Repeat enumerations — hence the term 'revisions' — were carried out in 1762, 1796, 1815, 1835 and 1859. The first and only full census of the old Russian Empire was carried out in 1897: the Soviet authorities have taken censuses in 1926, 1939, 1959 and 1970.
Calculating population figures for present-day European Russia from the 'revisions' and the pre-Second World War censuses involves — besides subtracting the population of the Asian parts of Russia from the global figures — adding and subtracting populations on the western frontier so as to bring this line into the post-1945 position. The adjustments needed are large, but so is the Russian population, and the errors inherent in the process are not such as to affect the overall picture significantly,.

Bibliography

The population of Kievan Russia is discussed in * Russell (p. 100) and that of 16th- century Muscovy in Carsten Goehrk's Die Wüstungen in der Moskauer Rus (1968; see particularly p. 258). For the 17th century see Borish Pushkarev's calculations as quoted in Volume 5 of George Vernadsky's History of Russia (1969), p. 745; for the period from Peter the Great to the first Soviet census Frank Lorimer's The Population of the Soviet Union (1946). The results of the two most recent censuses are well set out in Paul E. Lydolph, Geography of the USSR (2nd edn, 1970).

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

East Africa 1.72m km'
Uganda 0.21m km2
Kenya 0.57m km2
Tanzania 0.89m km2
Rwanda and Burundi 0.05m km2

Bibliography

Acknowledgement

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Spain 0.50m km'
(including the Balearic Isles but excluding the Canaries)

The palaeolithic artists who produced the later Spanish cave paintings came from a population that is unlikely to have exceeded 5,000. Numbers grew to 50,000 with the improvement in climate during the mesolithic period (8th millennium BC) and then to some 0.5m with the introduction of farming (4th millennium BC). By the beginning of the Bronze Age (2000 BC) the total was 1 m, by its end ( 1000 BC) 2m,and by the time the Romans established control over the area in the last century BC it was 4m.

The Roman Empire had a couple of good centuries during which Spain's population multiplied up to 5m, then, in the 3rd century AD, it got into a bad economic scene. As a result population figures began to slip back everywhere, Spain included. In the early 5th century, when Rome was sacked and the Empire fell apart, the downward trend accelerated. The Barbarian invasions were not directly responsible the number of Germans who settled in Spain for example was probably greater than the number of natives they despatched but the classical Mediterranean economy was now on its last legs and could nu longer support anything like the numbers it had in the past. Conversely if there is any significance to the fact that the arrival of the Arabs on Spain's doorstep at the beginning of the 8th century coincides with the first signs of recovery in the peninsula, it lies not in the number of Arabs, which must have been tiny (30, 000 at most), but in the vigour of their culture. They revitalized both the agriculture and the urban life of the south.
Though the Arabs did not conquer all Spain they had things pretty much their way till the early 11th century: two thirds of the country was under Moslem rule by then and Moslems numbered 0. 8m, or a fifth of the total population. In the later 11th century the Christians of the north recovered, in the 12th as the country's population rose past the 5m mark they reestablished themselves as the dominant element politically. This local change in the balance of power is an aspect of an important European event, the shift in the demographic centre of gravity from the Mediterranean littoral to the Atlantic (see Fig. 1.10, p. 28). As far as Spain is concerned the 13th century was the one that clinched it. The last important battle of the reconquista, the Christian victory at Los Navos de Tolosa, was fought in 1212 and in the population boom that followed (and which increased total numbers from 5. 5m to 7.5m) the Moslem component was excluded. By 1300 Spain was definitely part of Christendom again.

The medieval boom came to a sticky end in the Black Death, which cut the number of Spaniards back to 5.5m. In the early modern period this loss was recovered, while accidents of inheritance in Europe and of discovery on the high seas turned Spain into a world power. By the middle of the 16th century the 7.5m inhabitants of the Spanish kingdoms were the mainstay of the Hapsburg Empire, which controlled more than 20 of Europe's 90 millions and 9m of the 12m natives in the New World. The Hapsburgs were proud of the fact that they used their power in the cause of Catholic uniformity. In doing so they were certainly in accord with Spanish sentiment which had applauded the expulsion of the country's 150,000 Jews in 1492 and was to be equally approving when the last 250,000 Moslems received the same treatment in 1609-14. But the policy was wrong. The Protestants of the north of Europe had cut loose from the old ways of doing things and were getting richer all the time: if Spain couldn't beat them (which she couldn't) she ought to have joined them. But the choice was made for Catholicism and a Mediterranean orientation. Consequently the country was so badly hit by the economic crisis of the early 17th century during which the population dropped back to 7.5m again that by the time it had recovered it was hopelessly behind. At the beginning of the 18th century, without so much as a by-your-leave, Spain's allies and enemies took over her empire and divided it up among themselves Spain's population increased during the 18th and 19th centuries but did so relatively slowly: numbers were only 11.5m in 1800 and 18.5m in 1900. The increments, which are equivalent to 44% and 61% respectively, compare unfavourably with the 50% and 116% achieved by Europe as a whole. In the 20th century the Spanish rate of growth has accelerated: the gain of 84% in the first three quarters comfortably exceeds the European average of 63%. In political terms this could be seen as a success for Spain's leaders, who kept the country out of both world wars: however the Civil War of 1936-9 cost over 0.5m lives, proportionately as big a loss as that suffered by the United Kingdom in the First and Second World Wars put together. Probably the best way of looking at the increase is as a catching-up operation by a community that, in terms of social evolution, had fallen unnecessarily far behind its neighbours Emigration from Spain has a long history but its net effect is difficult to quantify. Probably only 100,000 people left the country to settle in the New World (mostly Mexico) in the 16th century. However, what with shipwreck, disease and death in battle we can guess that the net loss must have been at least twice this. By the end of the 18th century the cumulative total must be reckoned at more than 1 m and we know that a further 2m left in the 19th century (most of them for Argentina, Cuba or Brazil). In this century the outflow to the New World has been about m while a further m have gone to Europe and North Africa. How many of this last group will return home in the long run remains to be seen.

"This text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978. Between 1975 and 2010, population data is from the UN. Population projections are simple mathematical extensions from the base year 2010 and include no estimates of changes in fertility, immigration or mortality rates.

Demographic and resource history are quickly advancing fields of science and Canadians for a Sustainable Society welcome updated data and commentary to publish on this site. Please email us your comments and suggestions as well as new data streams which might give a better understanding of the interaction among human numbers, consumption levels, resources, climate and the environment."

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Sri Lanka 0.066m km2
The island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) has a peculiar history. The original inhabitants, a few thousand mesolithic Vedda, were overwhelmed by iron-using, rice- growing immigrants from India in the course of the last five centuries BC. Butthese immigrants were not, as might be expected, Tamils or any other of the Dravidian-speaking people who inhabit south India, they were the Aryans from somewhere in the north of the subcontinent. Moreover these Aryans, the ancestors of the modern Sinhalese, first of all created an irrigating agriculture of impressive size and elaboration, then, after a thousand years of development, suddenly abandoned it. They moved from the northern half of the island (the Dry Zone) to the south (the Wet Zone), leaving the extreme north to be recolonized by Tamils and their original capital Anuradhapura an empty ruin.

This dramatic change took place in the second half of the 12th century. There was a certain amount of warfare going on between the Sinhalese and the Tamils at the time, but then there nearly always was: as a reason for the abandoning of the Dry Zone it is quite unbelievable. Something made the previous mode of cultivation impossible (malaria? irrigation tanks are ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes), or unpopular (a devolutionary change in Sinhalese society making large-scale enterprises impossible to sustain?), or simply obsolete (the development of better methods of clearing the forest in the Wet Zone?). Interestingly enough the Khmers of Indo-China 1,500 miles away to the north-east began to abandon their exactly similar system of tank irrigation about the same time (see Asia Area 8c).

The Dry Zone phase of Sinhalese history had seen the population grow slowly to 1 m. There is no reason to believe that there was any significant fall in numbers at its end for there was now a compensating development of the Wet Zone. There was also the movement of Tamils into the extreme north. Nevertheless, if the population didn't fall, it didn't grow much, passing the 1.5m level only in the course of the 18th century. This was the period when the island was divided between the Sinhalese Kingdom of Kandy and the Dutch who controlled the littoral.

The British took over from the Dutch in 1795. During the next quarter century they extended their rule over the interior as well as the coast and they finally left only in 1948. Their contributions to the demography of the island were two: they brought in a new lot of Tamils to work on the tea plantations they established and they released a demographic up- swing that has recently outpaced the island's economy and agriculture. The new Tamils (Indian Tamils') are even more unpopular with the Sinhalese than the 'Ceylon Tamils', and some have been compulsorily repatriated. However, Tamils of one sort or another make up one fifth of the island's population. This now totals 14m, having more than tripled since the beginning of the century. It is likely to be well over 20m by the year 2000.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Scandinavia 1.15m km2

Denmark 0.04m km 2
Sweden 0.45m km' (0.03m km2arable)
Norway 0.32m km2 (0.01m km2 arable)
Finland 0.34m km2 (0.03m km2 arable)

The Ice Age lasted longer in Scandinavia than in any other part of Europe, the peninsula emerging from the ice only in the course of the 9th millennium BC. A few thousand reindeer hunters moved in then. Behind them, in the next millennium, came a rather more numerous population of mesolithic food- gatherers, and finally, around 5000 B C, the first farmers. Denmark, the only sizable area immediately suitable for agriculture, straight away became the demographic heavyweight among the Scandinavian countries. If there were 150,000 people in the area by the time the local Iron Age began in 500 BC, two thirds of them will have lived in Denmark: comparable figures for 200 BC would be 400,000 and 50%.

Since then two themes have characterized Scandinavian population history, the colonization of the north and a tendency to overspill. The two are presumably related: in fair weather the land-hungry will have looked north, in foul overseas. Whether or not the relationshipis as simple as this — or indeed whether it exists at all — should become clear as more islearnt about Europe's climate in the last 3,000 years. One bit of evidence that is to hand is that most of the emigration movements seem to have started from the northern, more temperature-sensitive half of the population zone.

The first clear case of overspill is the migration by some of the Goths of Sweden to Germany in the last century BC. Other Scandinavian clans followed during the next 200 years and the movement probably came to an end only when the fall of Rome — an event in which the continental Goths played a prominent part — relieved population pressure throughout the Teutonic world.

Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Switzerland 0.04m km2

Switzerland, which vanished entirely under the Alpine ice cap during the last Ice Age, remained an unpromising environment even when the glaciers retreated to the mountain tops. A few family-sized bands will have penetrated the country at the end of the upper palaeolithic and a few hundred people found a living by the lakes in the mesolithic, but significant population of the country began only with the introduction of agriculture in the 5th millennium B c. By the year 4000 we can think in terms of a population of 15,000 and a growth rate sufficient to double the population every millennium. When Caesar entered the country the Celtic Swiss, the Helvetii, numbered 250,000.

All over the Roman Empire there was a progressive drop in population in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. Switzerland ( Raetia),amuch-raided frontier province, suffered a very severe drop and when the Empire finally fell in the early 5th century the land was nearly empty. At this point the Alemani moved in, making the eastern two thirds of the country German-speaking. As the inhabitants of the western fifth and of the southern slopes of the Alps continued to speak the late Latin languages which were to evolve into French and Italian respectively, Switzerland has been a multi-lingual area ever since. The ratio between German, French and Italian speakers, roughly 70 : 20 : 5 ( plus another 5 for the rest), has proved remarkably stable.

Population in medieval times followed the general European trend. There was a period of increase, cut back in the 14th century by the Black Death, the loss being recovered in the course of the 15th century. The 16th century was marked by the introduction of another social division, this time in the sphere of religion. Roughly 60% of the Swiss were to end up on the side of the Reformed faith, another proportion that has stayed much the same through the centuries.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, Switzerland was, by the standards of the era, overpopulated. The cantonal governments tackled the resultant unemployment and balance of payment problems by arranging to provide mercenary armies for anyone willing to pay for them. The solution was certainly Malthusian, for it has been calculated that between 1400 and 1815 a million young Swiss died in other people's wars, a loss that was ten times greater than the loss by orthodox emigration. Fortunately, from the mid 18th century on, the country was industrializing sufficiently rapidly to render the ex- port of live Swiss by either method unnecessary: indeed by the late 19th century immigrants were as numerous as emigrants. As a result, the proportion of aliens resident in Switzerland reached 15% in 1914, and though the figure dropped to 5% during the inter-war slump it has since risen again to 15% and more. The present-day prosperity of
Switzerland has been at least partly won force (mostly Italian) sandwiched be-by an underprivileged immigrant labour between the Swiss and their machines.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Apart from Julius Caesar's exaggerated account of the Helvetii (368,000 before he defeated them, 110,000 afterwards), data useful for the estimation of Switzerland's population begin to appear only in the 14th century. The first official estimate, a survey of parish registers, was made in 1798, the first actual enumeration in 1836-8 and the first in the present series of decennial censuses in 1850.
All the data bearing on the size of the medieval population have been worked up by Wilhelm Bickel, whose figures from 1300 on are quoted in Kurt B. Mayer's The Population of Switzerland (1952), a book which also covers the rest of the demographic history of the country.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

East Africa 1.72m km'
Uganda 0.21m km2
Kenya 0.57m km2
Tanzania 0.89m km2
Rwanda and Burundi 0.05m km2

Bibliography

Acknowledgement

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Thailand 0.51m km2
Though little is known of the prehistory of Thailand — an important lacuna, for in this part of the world prehistory lasted till well on in the Christian era - the general pattern must have consisted of the slow transformation of an ancient hunting and fishing community into a food-producing one several orders of magnitude larger. Reasonable guesses at the sort of figures involved would be 25, 000 in 5000 BC, 0.2m in 1000 BC and 0.5m in AD 1. By the 10th century AD, when the mists clinging to the early history of the country begin to clear, we can think in terms of a round million.

The Thai made up only half the population of Thailand at this time: the Mon were equally important, indeed preponderant in the south. This north— south polarity which is a recurrent theme in South-East Asian history has always been resolved in favour of the northerners, in this case the Thai. Their progress down the Menam valley, the axis of the country, is marked politically by the successive transfers of capital from Sukhotai (founded in the 13th century) to Ayuthia (in the next century) and Bangkok (in 1769).

In the early modern period Thai multiplication was far from spectacular: it took from 1500 to 1800 for total numbers to rise from 2m to 3m. The change to the modern pattern began in the 19th century, during which the augmentation was over 100%. The story is a familiar one, with wider contacts initiating a general economic and demographic advance: the unusual features are the preservation of political independence and the speed with which the agricultural base s expanded. Rice production consistently out-paced population growth, so that the country had become a major exporter of rice by the end of the century. The resulting prosperity attracted a stream of Chinese immigrants.

Since 1950 the Thai growth rate has been above 3% per annum: Thailand's 42m people could well have become 80m by the century's end. The Chinese minority, now just over 10%, has so far kept its identity in an otherwise homogeneous population.

The nearest thing to primary data before the 20th century are the estimates given by European travellers. Thai muster rolls, long since vanished, may lie behind the earliest of these — a figure of 1.9m adult males in 1688 — but if they do they are small loss for the figure is absurdly inflated and the rolls must have been assembled to impress rather than inform. Some of the 19th-century figures on the other hand are quite convincing: for instance Crawfurd's 1830 estimate of 2.73m (for a smaller area than the present) and Ingram's of 5m or 6m in 1850 (see * Fisher).
The census series starts in 1910/11 and continues to the present with increasing accuracy. Adjustments to the published figures are considered (though not very clearly) by Ajit Das Gupta and others in Sankya, Series B, 27 (1965).

Thailand's demographic history from the 17th century on has been summarized by three writers: G. W. Skinner in Chinese Society in Thailand (1957); L. Sternstein in Pacific Viewpoint 6 (May 1965); and R. Thomlinson in Thailand's Population (1971). Although they use very much the same sources, their conclusions, particularly on the pre- 19th-century trends, are not always congruent.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Turkey-in-Asia 0.75m sq. km

Anatolia is one of the more welcoming of the countries of the Near East and its population has always been considerable. From 40,000 in the Mesolithic (6th early neolithichal- colithicnim(6th millennium B C), 1.5m by the chalcolithic (2500 BC) and 3m during the course of the full Bronze Age.
At this time the later 2nd millennium BC- the ethnic and political situation was straightforward: in most of Anatolia the people were of Hittite stock and subjects of the Hittite Empire; the exception was the eastern quarter, where the people were Transcaucasians (the group to which the present-day Georgians belong) and independent.

This relatively simple picture did not survive the upheavals that marked the
beginning of the Iron Age (c.1100 B C): two new peoples arrived from Europe,
the Phrygians, who crossed the Bosporus and moved on to the central plateau, and the Greeks, who crossed the Aegean and colonized the Aegean and Black Sea coasts. By 500 BC there were perhaps 0.25m Greeks on the seaboard, 3m Phrygians and neo-Hittites (Lydians, Carians etc.) in the interior and 0.75m
Armenians (relatives of the Phrygians) and Transcaucasians in the eastern
mountains — all pursuing very different life styles.

The Persians imposed a superficial hegemony on all these peoples: it was
inherited first by the Macedonians, then by the Romans. It was only in Roman
times that the Anatolians were truly (Anatolia) 0.75m km pacified and homogenized. By AD 200, when the area had reaped the full benefits of the imperial peace, some 6m Anatolians acknowledged the rule of Rome and the cultural heritage of Greece. A million more dwelling in the Armenian highlands looked alternately to Rome and Persepolis as the political pendulum swung between these great powers.

Seven million was to prove the upper limit in a series of population swings occupying the next fifteen centuries. The lower limit was around 5m. The first dip came during the phase of late classical decline; then, following the Byzantine recovery of the 9th and 10th centuries, there was a second, far more dramatic collapse. In the early 1040s the first Turks had appeared on the eastern frontier: by 1060 the Armenians were migrating to the western Taurus under the pressure of Turkish raids and in 1071 the disastrous overthrow of the Byzantine army at Manzikert — the work of the Turkish sultan Alp Arslan - opened the Anatolian plateau to an inrush of Turkish tribes. Within a few decades the demography of Anatolia was entirely recast: the plateau had become the domain of the Turks, the Taurus the refuge of the Armenian nobility, while only the west remained to the Greek-speaking peasantry who had seen the Empire through so many crises in the past.

The arrival of the Turks meant a drop in the overall population of the country because the nomadic and pastoral way of life typical of the Turks at this time cannot support as high a density of population as agriculture. But as the Turkish conquest moved to completion under the leadership of the Ottomans, the Turks began to discover the advantages of farming. By the mid 14th century the shift to settled agriculture was unmistakable and the population was once again approaching 7m. For the third and last time it was cut back again, this time by the Black Death; then in the late 16th century the 7m ceiling was finally breached.

The achievement was to prove something of an anticlimax. Stagnation both
economic and intellectual now overtook the Ottoman Empire, even as its armies and frontiers were still advancing. The 17th, 18th and 19th centuries produced only a sluggish growth and the population had barely reached 13m by 1900.

During the 19th century various cures were suggested for the 'sick man of
Europe': the necessary physic was finally administered by Enver Pasha and Kemal Ataturk during and immediately after the First World War. Enver was a
startlingly bad general and a sizable proportion of Turkey's 0.5m war dead
are attributable to his cheerful ideas on strategy. He also had ideas on minorities.

During 1915 a near complete massacre of the million-strong Armenian community was carried out on his orders, a chilling foretaste of what a
20th-century dictator could do. Kemal, the opposite of Enver in every way,
created victory out of defeat and his expulsion of most of the 2m Greeks and 0.25m Bulgars who lived in European and Asiatic Turkey prior to the First World War was as humanely conducted as such affairs can be. Between them the two leaders created present-day Turkey; the nation which was for so long a typical example of the polyglot oriental despotism is now ethnically and
religiously homogeneous and intermittently democratic.

During the remainder of the 20th century the Turks have known peace and
achieved a high rate of multiplication. Between 1950 and 1975 the population of Anatolia nearly doubled: it is now 36m and is likely to be approaching 60m by the year 2000.

The Ottoman Empire
The nucleus of the Ottoman Empire — the western half of Anatolia and the southeastern half of the Balkans — was put together by the first four sultans in the course of the 14th century. By 1402 it had a population of over 6m and the status of a major power. In that year a shattering defeat at the hands of Timur the Lame reduced the Anatolian half of the Empire to chaos.

Recovery of the position and territory lost in this single battle — ironically enough named after the present Turkish capital, Ankara — took the best efforts of the next Ottoman generation: it was not until the second half of the 15th century that the advance began again. By 1500 the Empire had acquired new provinces in both Europe and Asia, and its total population was approaching 10m; in the next half-century there was an explosion of military activity, with Hungary, the Fertile Crescent and Egypt all succumbing to Turkish arms.

At its late 16th-century maximum the Empire included most of North Africa (where 8.5m people were under Ottoman rule), much of the Near East (12m) and nearly the whole of the Balkans (7.5m): the grand total of 28m was to be exceeded only at the end of the 19th century, when the rise in the rate of population increase characteristic of modern times added numbers faster than the loss of territory subtracted them. For the history of the Ottoman Empire after 1600 is one of continuous decline.

At first this was a matter of internal shrinkage, an aspect of the general Mediterranean crisis of the 17th century. Then, one after another, important provinces started to escape central control — notably the Maghreb by 1700, Egypt in 1800 and much of the Balkans in the course of the 19th century. Finally, in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, Turkey-in-Europe was reduced to its present meagre dimensions. The Empire entered the First World War, the catastrophe that was to end in its complete dismemberment, with a population of only 24m.

Primary Sources
The only firm piece of information on the population of Anatolia in the pre-Moslem era is contained in an inscription of Pompey's in which he claims that the area he conquered contained 12,183,000 people (recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, book 7 para 97). Pompey conquered TranscaucasiaSyria and Palestine as well as Anatolia, which makes it unlikely Anatolia was responsible for more than 7 or 8 out of the 12: the
real population may well have been a million or so less than this because Pompey is very possibly referring to an even wider area — including places like the Crimea, which he never conquered but which sent a formal submission — and because victorious generals tend to round off their totals upwards.

The first statistically useful information to survive is in the Ottoman archives. Starting in the 15th century the Ottomans carried out intermittent recensions enumerations of adult males. Two of these surveys have been worked up by modern historians so far: the earlier is the recension of 1575 which yields a figure for total population of about 8m; the other is the return for 1831 which suggests a total population of about 10m.
Doubtless others will be published in time.

The first Turkish census of modern times was taken in 1927: since 1937 there have been regular quinquennial censuses.

Bibliography
* Beloch postulated a population of 13m for Roman Anatolia, a figure which implies that the area of modern Turkey-in-Asia contained 16m or more: this is just not on. * Russell suggests a more believable 6-8m for the period AD 600-1500. The Ottoman recension of 1575 is discussed in M. A. Cook's Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia (1972): the recension of 1831 in Issawi's contribution to Studies in the Economic History of the
Middle East (ed. M. A. Cook, 1970, p. 397). Cook

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

East Africa 1.72m km'
Uganda 0.21m km2
Kenya 0.57m km2
Tanzania 0.89m km2
Rwanda and Burundi 0.05m km2

Bibliography

Acknowledgement

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Continental US 9.4m km'
including Alaska (1.52m km2) but excluding Hawaii (0.02m km2)

North America was not an important sector of the Amerindian world. Though it constituted half the continental land mass it contained only 1m people, 7% of the 1492 population of the Americas, figures which, if Canada is excluded, improve only marginally to 0.8m and 6% in a quarter of the total area. Culturally, too, the North American Indian was a backwoodsman: the savage splendors of Mexico and Peru had few counterparts in the simple hunting, fishing and semi-agricultural communities that were scattered across the present USA.

This very backwardness protected the North American Indian from exploitation in the first century of the post-Columbian era. A few disastrous attempts at exploration convinced the Spaniards that there was little to be gained from attempting to expand their Empire in this direction. As the 16th century opened, the total white population of the area was limited to a few hundred bored Spanish soldiers garrisoning the forts of Florida and the outpost established in New Mexico.

Over the next half century the situation was transformed. In 1607 English settlers founded Jamestown and the colony of Virginia. In 1620 — by which time the population of Virginia had reached 2,400 — ninety-nine 'pilgrims' landed from the Mayflower and established the first of the New England colonies. By 1650 Virginia (with neighbouring Maryland) contained more than 20,000 people, New England 30,000. By 1700 the entire Atlantic seaboard from Maine to South Carolina had become British North America, a land of some 0.28m people.

The population in 1700 represented a transatlantic migration by some 0.1m, of whom 80% were British, 10% unwilling Africans. In the next century there was, at least as far as the white population was concerned, relatively less migration and a great deal more multiplication. Natural increase reached annual rates of 3%, sufficient to take the white total to 1 m by 1750, 2m by 1775 and 4.3m by 1800. (Black slaves increased these figures by 0.2m, 0.5m and 1 m respectively.) It was not for nothing that Malthus used the Americans as proof of the irrational reproductive capacity of human beings left to their own devices.

It was Ireland and not America that proved Malthus right, and it was the flight of the Irish from demographic disaster, at first merely threatening but then all too actual, that began to make the United States a land of immigrants again. Since natural increase began to fall from the early 19th century this immigration played an increasingly important part in sustaining the growth rate during the period up to the outbreak of the First World War. The Irish began arriving in America in significant numbers in 1820; after the famine of 1845 the movement became a stampede. Figures reached the 0.2-0.4m range in every one of the next five years.

Meanwhile one form of immigration had been definitely stopped, the landing of slaves. But though the prohibition of 1808 was effective as far as slave imports were concerned (there were no significant additions to the cumulative total of 0.4m after that date) slavery itself remained a legal and highly important institution in the southern states. By 1860 the Negro population of America amounted to 4.5m (90% of them slaves) and the southern states' determination to protect and when possible promote their ' peculiar institution' was imperiling the union. The nation, now 30m strong, faced its first major crisis.

The Civil War, which was fought with a population balance two to one in favour of the North, killed some 0.62m Americans (mostly by disease) and resolved the slavery question. It also marked a demographic turning point. Immigration, massive though it was, could no longer entirely counteract a fall in the native birth rate and overall growth dropped to 2.5% a year or less. Yet the absolute figures for immigration continued to be amazing. As the Irish flood dwindled it was replaced by new overflows from the equally poor lands of eastern Europe. Up to 1890, four out of five American immigrants came from north-west Europe; between 1890 and 1920 this fell to one in four, while two in three now came from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires or the Mediterranean lands. It was an extraordinarily various mixture of Europeans that pushed the annual figures to their all-time high of 1.285m in 1907.

The great days of immigration came to an end in the 1920s indeed by the end of that decade more people were leaving America than were entering it. The expansion of the economy slowed down and hostility grew to an influx which, if it was white, was hardly WASP. In 1921 Congress limited immigration to a maximum of a third of a million a year, and three years later cut the figure again, to a sixth of a million. By that date two Americans out of every five were either foreign-born or had an immigrant parent, the net total of immigrants in the previous hundred years had reached 35m and these immigrants and their descendants accounted for half the total growth of the United States during the period.

It was not migration alone that changed the face of America in the century after 1825. A great drive westward reduced the East Coast population from 97% of the total in 1790 to 41% in 1910. This change, which was largely the work of white native-born Americans (the migrants went to the cities, the blacks stayed in the south), laid the basis for the present picture of population distribution. Considered state by state (see table) it is an extraordinarily even one, with the top three places now held by representatives of the three main population concentrations, California for the west, New York for the east and Texas for the south.

Though the heroic age of American demography came to an end with the First World War, migrations both external and internal have continued to play an important part in reshaping American society. The blacks have moved from the south to the cities of the north; their numbers have risen impressively from 9m in 1900 to 15m in 1950 and 25m today. External migrants have come from Puerto Rico and Mexico, producing communities with current populations of 1.75m and 7m respectively. The overall growth rate has received disproportionate support from these minority groups but even so has been falling steadily. It is now well below 1% per annum. This causes no distress, in fact 'zero population growth' is being actively promoted as a desirable goal. Education has certainly changed attitudes, though personal concerns are probably responsible for more of the fall than global worries: babies are now viewed as expensive consumer durables on impulse. And there's nothing wrong to be budgeted for rather than bought with that.

Primary Sources and Bibliography

The estimate of 1m Amerindians north of the Rio Grande - which breaks down into 0. 2m in Canada, 0.05m in Alaska and 0.75 m in the rest of the continental USA - goes back at least as far as J. Mooney (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80, 7 (1928)
; it seems to be generally accepted, though the California school of revisionists has issued a trial balloon in favour of 20m (sic). The present population of 0.6m represents a recovery from the all-time low of 0.5m reached in 1925.

For the colonial period the records are comparatively speaking excellent and fix the population of the individual colonies within narrow limits. The first federal census was held in 1790 and there have been regular and reliable censuses through the US territory every ten years since then. The adjustments needed to compensate for boundary changes are, as the table shows, surprisingly small. The Bureau of the Census pours out information; for instance Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (1960). Other basic sources are: W. S. Thompson and P. K. Whelpton, Population Trends in the United States (1933); C. and 1. B. Tauber, The Changing Population of the United States (1958); D. J. Bogue, The Population of the United States (1959); H. T. Eldridge and D. S. Thomas, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870- 1950; III (1964). On migration there is E. P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children: 1850-1950 (1956).

A great deal of all this information has been well summarized in two places: J. Potter, The Growth of Population in America, 1700-1860', in * Glass and Eversley, and the chapter on population in L. E. Davis et al., American Economic Growth ( 1972).

POPULATION OF THE CONTINENTAL USA
(in millions, to the nearest ten thousand, except for rounding of the totals)

1700 1775 1800 1850 1900 1950 1975
Connecticut 0.02 0.20 0.25 0.37 0.91 2.01 3.10
Delaware 0.04 0.06 0.09 0.19 0.32 0.58
Georgia 0.03 0.16 0.91 2.22 3.45 4.93
1700 1775 1800 1850 1900 1950 1975
Tennessee (1796) 0.11 1.00 2.02 3.29 4.19
Ohio (1803) 1.98 4.16 7.95 10.76
Louisiana (1812) 0.52 1.38 2.68 3.79
Indiana (1816) 0.99 2.52 3.93 5.31
Mississippi (1817) 0.61 1.55 2.18 2.35
Illinois (1818) 0.85 4.82 8.71 11.15
Alabama (1819) 0.77 1.83 3.06 3.61
Maine (1820) 0.58 0.69 0.91 1.06
Missouri (1821) 0.68 3.11 3.96 4.76
Arkansas (1836) 0.21 1.31 1.91 2.12
Michigan (1837) 0.40 2.41 6.37 9.16
Florida (1845) 0.09 0.53 2.77 8.36
Texas (1845) 0.21 3.05 7.71 12.24
Iowa (1846) 0.19 2.23 2.62 2.87
Wisconsin (1848) 0.31 2.07 3.44 4.60
California (1850) 0.09 1.49 10.59 21.19
Minnesota (1856) 1.75 2.98 3.93
Oregon (1856) 0.41 1.52 2.29
Kansas (1861) 1.47 1.91 2.27
West Virginia (1863) 0.96 2.01 1.80
Nevada (1864) 0.04 0.16 0.59
Nebraska (1867) 1.07 1.33 1.55
Colorado (1876) 0.54 1.33 2.53
North Dakota (1889) 0.32 0.62 0.64
South Dakota (1889) 0.40 0.65 0.68
Montana (1889) 0.24 0.59 0.75
Washington (1889) 0.52 2.38 3.54
Idaho (1890) 0.16 0.59 0.82
Wyoming (1890) 0.09 0.29 0.37
Utah (1896) 0.28 0.69 1.21
Oklahoma (1907) 2.23 2.71
New Mexico (1912) 0.68 1.15
Arizona (1912) 0.75 2.22
Alaska (1959) 0.35
District of Columbia 0.01 0.05 0.28 0.80 0.72
Territories (whites only) 0.06 0.09 1.11
TOTAL POPULATION OF THE
13 COLONIES / USA OF THE
TIME 0.28 2.50 5.30 23.30 76.00 150.00 210.00
Whites in areas later annexed to the USA
0.02
0.05
0.06
Indians 0.70 0.65 0.60 0.30
Alaska 0.05 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.06 0.13
TOTAL POPULATION
WITHIN THE CONTINENTAL
USA, PRESENT BOUNDARY 1.00 3.25 6.00 23.50 76.00 150.00 210.00

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay 3.71 km2

Argentina 2.78m km 2
Chile 0.76m km2
Uruguay 0.18m km 2

Primary Sources and Bibliography

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Colombia, Venezuela and the Guyanas 2.52m km'
Colombia 1.14m km2
Venezuela 0.91m km2
The Guyanas 0.47m km2

The cultural gradient of this area in pre-Spanish times was from west to east, western Colombia being on the fringe of the Andean zone that eventually produced the Inca Empire. It is in this western section that the area's first experiment in agriculture took place (c. 5000 BC) and here that the first farming villages appeared (during the course of the 2nd millennium B C). When the Europeans arrived the level of this peasantry was, by Amerindian standards, relatively sophisticated. By contrast the east was sparsely populated with simple food-gatherers. This explains why Colombia had always contained two thirds of the overall population and specifically 1 m of the 1.5m living in the area in AD 1500.

The Spanish conquest brought its usual and awful consequences, compounded in this part of Latin America by forced labour in the mines. By 1650 the native population had fallen by a third. In terms of pure-blooded Amerindians it has continued to fall ever since, until today they represent only a per cent or two of the total population. However, from the 17th century the growth of the Mestizo population has compensated for this de- cline and secured the continuance of a strong non-European element in the population. The total never fell far, for besides the Mestizo we have to count the white (mainly Spanish) settlers and their black slaves, each group numbering some 0.m by the later 17th century.

During the 18th century the white population grew rapidly largely by natural increase so that by the time independence was gained in the early 19th century it accounted for about a quarter of the total. The black and Mulatto populations, a scattered and miscellaneous group of runaways and slaves in various degrees of freedom, contributed another eighth. The rest were Mestizos or Amerindians.

Since independence the populations of the two successor states, Colombia and Venezuela, have continued to develop mainly by natural increase. The only major exceptions to this generalization are two brief outbursts of migration from Europe (and Colombia) to Venezuela, the first immediately before the Second World War and the second immediately after. These added nearly 0.5m people — mainly Iberians and Italians — to the Venezuelan population and helped the white element maintain its traditional one fifth share of the whole..

East of the two big states are three little ones, the Guyanas, respectively British, Dutch and French in colonial days and now known as Guyana, Surinam and (this one still undecolonized as yet) French Guiana. Their populations remained trifling until the introduction of a plantation economy in the 19th century. This was dependent on Asian indentured labour in the Dutch case brought from both India and Indonesia, in the British case from India, with 0.24m imported between 1838 and the end of the system in 1917. The result in both Guyana and Surinam is racial heterogeneity of an almost unique complexity. Guyana's 0. 8m population is 50% Asian Indian, 30% black, 5% Amerindian, 2% white and 1% Chinese, with the rest mixed. Surinam's 0.4m is 40% black, 40% Asian Indian, 16% Indonesian, 2% Chinese, 1% white and 1% Amerindian. French Guiana contains only 60,000 people altogether.
Primary Sources and Bibliography

The primary sources are the usual ones for Latin America: vague estimates in the 16th century, taxation documents in the 17th and 18th, then counts and censuses. Census years are: Colombia 1778, 1782, 1803, 1810, 1825, 1835, 1843, 1851, 1864, 1870, 1905, 1912, 1918, 1928, 1938, 1951, 1964, 1974;Venezuela 1787, 1838, 1844/7, 1854, 1857,1873, 1881, 1891, 1920, 1926, 1936, 1941, 1950, 1961, 1971; Guyana 1841/4, decennially 1851-1931 (except 1901), 1946, 1960, 1970; Surinam 1964.
* Sanchez-Albornoz has a summary of work done on the aboriginal population of Colombia. As usual we follow * Rosenblat for pre-Conquest figures, which are close to those in J. H. Steward, Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 5 (1949). Post- Conquest figures are based on * Sanchez-Albornoz, * Rosenblat and * Barbón Castro. See also F. Brito Figueroa, Historia economica y social de Venezuela (1966), T. L. Smith on Colombia in Journal of Inter-American Studies 8, 2 (1966), and J. L. de Lannoy and G. Perez Estructuras demograficas y sociales de Colombia (1961). For Guyana see D. Nath1974; Venezuela Indians in Guyana (1970), and for Surinam H. E. Lamur, The Demographic Evolution of Surinam 1920-1970 (1973).

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Vietnam 0.33m km2

At first the south predominated and direct or indirect Khmer rule spread over southern Thailand, southern Laos and south and central Vietnam. The grandiose ruins of Angkor means 'City of testimonial to the magnificence of this Khmer Empire at its peak: the name —it means 'City of Water'—is a reminder of the Khmer's development of an irrigating agrhw centre of Indo-China firmly in their zone. Of the 2.5m Indo-Chinese alive in AD 1200, the majority lived in the Khmer sphere of influence

After 1200 the balance tipped the other way: the Viets got stronger, the Khmers got relatively weaker. The Khmer's poor performance is symbolized by the decline of Angkor, which was eventually abandoned to the jungle at the back of it seems to lie an agricultural failure the exact nature of which is obscure, but for which the Dry Zone Sinhalese civilization affords interesting parallels (see Asia Area 7b). By the early modern period European travellers were mentioning the Khmer Kingdom only in passing, as a Thai or Viet satellite: by the mid 19th century its 2m inhabitants had become for all practical purposes subjects of the Vietnamese emperor. The Vietnamese Empire in fact contained all the area's 9m people except for the 1 m in the Laotian principalities, which were then an adjunct of Thailand.

At this point the French intervened. Their piecemeal annexation of the area (1862-93) brought Indo-China into being as a political unit. The rate of increase now became substantial, so that by the middle of the 20th century, when the colonial era was drawing to its bloody close, the number of Indo- Chinese had risen to 33.5m. And growth continued throughout the subsequent American—Vietnamese conflict, a remarkable tribute to mankind's ability to make love and war simultaneously. The special factor here was the spread of people and rice-growing into potentially fertile but previously under-utilized areas, a move that may well have been given added impetus by the destruction of the majority of towns and villages in the war zone. Today there are some 55m Indo-Chinese, of whom 44m live in Vietnam. 8m in the Khmer Republic and 3.25m in Laos.

Primary data start with a French count in Cochin-China in 1876, followed by a quinquennial series of partial counts and estimates that only really become at all reliable in the inter-war period. The post-independence crop of censuses has been lamentably sparse — North Vietnam in 1960, Cambodia in 1962, and nothing at all as yet from South Vietnam and Laos.

Unless otherwise noted, this text and population data to 1975 was reproduced with permission from the book "Atlas of World Population History" by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones published in 1978.

Recalculating...

Follow Along on Canada's Path to Sustainability

Subscribe to our newsletter

Follow us on social media

How To Use the Website