Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Environmental damage
Inflation
Population cycle
Social inequality
Epidemics
Malthus
Relief
Unemployment
Famine
Population crisis
Renaissance
Violence
* This paper is condensed from the book of the same title, published by the Galton Institute,
London, 1999, price 5.00, ISBN 0950406651. The book contains much more factual detail,
and an extensive classified bibliography of sources, including those referred to in the paper.
MEDICINE, CONFLICT AND SURVIVAL, VOL. 16, 383-410 (2000)
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
384
1. reduction in fertility
2. development and extension of parental behaviour, and
3. sociability towards and adoption of individuals not closely genetically
related.
These trends have culminated in cultural evolution in the co-operative
societies of higher primates and Cetacea (whales and dolphins), and
ultimately in the achievements of man. Despite their relatively low fertility,
mammalian populations are still liable to outgrow their environmental
resources (animal prey or plant food populations), and are in danger of
irretrievably depleting them. To avert this, there has evolved a behavioural
and physiological response to population crisis. When a mammalian
population becomes dangerously dense, but before it can deplete its
resources, the stimulus of overcrowding leads to a complete reversal or
regression of behaviour. Co-operation and parental behaviour are replaced
by competition, dominance and aggressive violence. The effect of crowding
on aggression in wild rabbits, for instance, is shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1
AGGRESSION IN WILD RABBITS
450
2.6
225
4.2
123
8.8
Source: Ref. 1
385
giving the resources ample time to recover. In some mammal species, crisis
and crisis response recur in a regular fashion, leading to cycles of
population growth and collapse, oscillating about a fixed mean, as shown
for the snowshoe hare in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
POPULATION CYCLES OF THE SNOWSHOE HARE, BASED ON PELTS
RECEIVED BY THE HUDSON BAY COMPANY
J2
100,000-
tio
160,000 j
140,000
120,000-
Q.
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
Date
Source: Ref. 2
386
CHINA
l in millions
an in million
500
400-
300
200
100'
SPAIN
30-
m 600
!
0
a
3b-
25
20
1o. 15
o
D.
5-
^-
10-
/~^y
AS
0
400BC AD1000
Year
1500
2000
2000
Year
Source: Ref. 3
387
FIGURE 3
PRICES, REAL WAGES AND POPULATION, ENGLAND AND WALES, 1350-1850
14
T140
"Population of
England and Wales
(millions)
Price Index
1200
- \
1000
04 1
1350
1 1
1450
1 1
1550
1 1
1650
1 1 h
1750 1850
H
1350
1
1
1450
1
1
1550
1
11650
1750
1850
Source: Ref. 4
TABLE 2
EXPECTATION OF LIFE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Dates (AD)
Before 1276
1276 to 1300
1301 to 1325
1326 to 1345
1346 to 1375
1376 to 1400
1401 to 1425
1426 to 1450
35.3
31.3
29.8
30.2
17.3
20.5
23.8
32.8
Source: Ref. 5.
388
Dates
BC
481-206
BC-AD
206-221
AD
221-618
618-755
754
618-907
755-960
839
907-960
960-1280
1100
1280-1368
1290
1368-1644
1393
1600
1644-1683
1661
1644-1912
1700
1779
1794
1850
1850-1880
1872
1900
1912-1949
1931
1950-1953
Period
Food Production
Water Control
Works*
Crisis 1:
Warring states, Ch'in,
civil war
NW Loess area
developed
1.6
2 Han dynasties
NE Lower Yellow
River developed
6.6
Crisis 2:
3 kingdoms, Tsin, S
& N dynasties, Sui
SE Lower Yangtze
developed: Grand
Canal
7.6
Population
(millions)
Height of T'ang
50
43.9
Crisis 3: Civil war,
later T'ang, 5
dynasties
30
Sung
Early-growing rice
12.3
174.4
100
Crisis 4: Yuan
(Mongol)
175.6
60
Ming
Potatoes, sweet
potatoes, groundnuts, maize
411.2
65
150
603.4
150
275
313
430
Crisis 6: Taiping,
Nien, Moslem revolts
330
430
Crisis 7: Warlords,
civil war, Japanese
invasion
People's Republic
450
580
389
enormous army to build the Great Wall, a Stone Curtain designed to keep
his subjects from straying out of his reach into the Central Asian steppe,
where climate and terrain favoured the development of a nomad herding
culture. In 202 BC the first over-population crisis was over, and the Ch'in
were replaced by the first great Chinese dynasty, the Han, ruling through a
relatively humane and flexible bureaucracy, selected by public
examinations. This system survived through all the Chinese Imperial
dynasties.
As Chinese historians have observed, each major dynasty rose and fell in
a cycle of reduced population pressure, population growth, overpopulation, and population crisis. The great productiveness of Chinese
irrigation agriculture permitted a high population density, even in periods
of relative relief from over-population, so the accumulated effects of the
crisis periods outweighed the constructive effects of the relief periods, and
by the time of the later Ming, Chinese civilisation was in decline. The
population cycles of China since the Ch'in are shown in Table 3.
In every population crisis, China fell apart into its component regions,
and even smaller fractions, ruled by numerous lesser dynasties not shown
in Table 3. Besides famines, epidemics and appalling civil wars, China
suffered during the population crises from incursions of nomad chieftains
from across the Central Asian borders, who often founded later Chinese
dynasties, notably the Yuan (Mongol) and Ch'ing (Manchu). In the
dreadful crisis of the twentieth century, China suffered instead from her
own brutal war-lords, European exploitation and Japanese conquest. In
1949, the People's Republic brought peace to China, but the new
government delayed introducing birth control, and another crisis ensued,
the 'Cultural Revolution', which nearly destroyed Chinese civilisation and
caused massive environmental damage. It remains to be seen whether
China's new birth control policy will reduce the population in time to avert
another crisis, and bring to an end the 'cycles of Cathay'.
North Africa and Western Asia
The dry belt of North Africa and western Asia extends from Morocco to
Central Asia. Throughout its extent rainfall is irregular and often scanty.
There are large areas, notably in flood plains, where the soil can be
enormously fertile, and support a very dense population, provided it is
suitably irrigated and drained. But these settled enclaves are everywhere
bordered by seasonal grasslands merging into arid desert. Instead of a
homogeneous land-mass with grasslands on one border, as in China, the
belt is a mosaic of juxtaposed areas of settlement and more or less nomadic
herding peoples. Hence it was only once, and briefly, politically unified, by
the Arabs in the early eighth century AD.
There is abundant evidence of recurrent population crises in the belt,
with inflation, famine, violence and epidemics. In Babylonia, in the mid-
390
second millennium BC, the price of barley tripled and the economy
relapsed into barter. Towards the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the
skeletal figures of starving peasants appear on a temple bas-relief. During
the ensuing population crisis, an Egyptian writer reported: 'All is ruin.
Blood is everywhere ...'In AD 1060, up to 10,000 people a day were dying
of plague in Cairo.
The resulting massive fluctuations of population are attested by tax
records and by changing density of settlement. Under the Sassanian kings
of Persia (AD 226-637), the tax receipts of Khuzestan reached a figure
twelve times as high as under the Achaemenid dynasty (539-331 BC). By
the tenth century AD, the receipts had fallen to 40% of the Sassanian
figure, and by the fourteenth century to 6%. In the Diyala Basin, the
number of settlements fell by more than 80% between the eighteenth and
thirteenth centuries BC. The population cycles in these two regions are
shown in Table 4 and the cycles for Ancient Egypt in Table 5. In Egypt, the
Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, and the Saite Dynasty, were periods of
relative relief from population pressure, with prosperity and cultural
flowering. In 332 Alexander the Great conquered Egypt after which there
was a relief period under the Macedonian Ptolemy Dynasty, but no more
native kings.
TABLE 4
RELATIVE DENSITY OF SETTLEMENT IN TWO WESTERN ASIAN REGIONS
Region
Diyala Basin
Khuzestan (ancient
Elam)
Location
Rough Dates
BC
AD
3000-2300
2300-1800
1800-1700
1700-700
700-100
100-AD 300
300-650
650-750
750-1000
1000-Present
Settlement Density
Moderate
Low
Moderate
Low
Low
Moderate
High
Moderate
High
Low
Moderate
Moderate
Moderate
Moderate
Low
Moderate
High
Moderate
Moderate
Low
Source: Refs. 7, 8.
391
TABLE 5
THE POPULATION CRISES OFANCIENT EGYPT
Dates BC
Periods
2700-2200
2200-2050
2050-1700
1700-1550
1550-1050
1050-664
664-525
525-332
Old Kingdom
Population Crisis
Middle Kingdom
Population Crisis
New Kingdom
Population Crisis
Saite Dynasty
Population Crisis
Foreign Invaders
Hyksos
Libyans, Ethiopians, Assyrians
Persians
Note: during the third and second millennia BC, absolute dates are in dispute (ours are rounded), but
there is no dispute about the sequence of events.
392
Period or Year
Amount of Grain
(tonnes per year)
Region of Origin
(modern names)
Athens
Mid-4th century BC
40,000
Ukraine, Egypt,
Syria, Sicily, Cyprus
41 Greek Cities
328/7 BC
48,000
Libya
Rome
1st century BC to
1st century AD
300,000
Tunisia, Algeria,
Egypt
Rome
180,000
Tunisia, Algeria,
Egypt
Rome
67,000
Tunisia, Algeria
Constantinople
Mid-6th century AD
240,000
Sources: various.
Egypt
393
TABLE 7
THE WESTWARD DIFFUSIION OF SLAVERY FROM WESTERN ASIA
Centuries BC
7th
6th
4th
Remainder of Greece
2nd
394
FIGURE 4
THE POPULATION OF ATHENS, 500 BC-250 AD
Nurrber of people that could regularly be fed from the territory of the city-state (Attica)
s s s s
CM
i-
t-
s s s s s
i-
T-
CM
CM
conquer Egypt and Western Asia as far as India. On his death, his dry belt
empire broke up into a number of typically hydraulic states, the Hellenistic
monarchies, with bureaucracies staffed by Greeks. The Aegean mainland
and islands lost their monopoly of manufactures, as industry developed
elsewhere, and their populations shrank back to the reduced carrying
capacity of their own lands, with deforestation and exhausted mines.
In the third century BC, the Hellenistic monarchies in the dry belt
enjoyed some relief from population pressure, with scientific advances,
brilliant art, and more humane and less destructive warfare. But Carthage
suffered from severe stress culture, a complex of behavioural aberrations
socially transmitted through the generations, the heritage of chronic
overpopulation in its Phoenician homeland; it was culturally backward,
with a frequency of human sacrifice unparalleled in the Old World. In the
second to first centuries BC, rising populations produced devastating crisis
in the Hellenistic kingdoms. Hence Carthage was conquered in the third
century, and the Hellenistic kingdoms in the second and first centuries, by
the new power of Rome.
The Northern Mediterranean: Rome and After
395
Africa, much of Western Asia, the Aegean, and finally the divided tribes of
half-civilized Gaul and Britain. By 167 BC, Rome had extracted some 80
tonnes of gold from the dry belt, and sums of this order came in annually
when the Empire was established. This enormous wealth in loot and taxes
enabled Rome to develop a brilliant civilization with a wonderful literature
and an impressive legal system. But, perhaps uniquely in history, this
coincided with a grave population crisis in Italy, which set in at once as a
result of very rapid population growth.
There were regular censuses of male Roman citizens of military age
from the fifth century BC, and some censuses of all male citizens from 28
BC to AD 72 (besides occasional censuses in the provinces of the Empire).
From these and other evidence it is probable that the total population of
Italy (including the Po Valley) rose from about four million in 225 BC to
about 12 million in AD 47, partly by growth of the free population and
partly by the import of slaves, who became Roman citizens if freed on
Roman territory. Table 8 illustrates the resulting population crisis lasting
for some three centuries, during which the republic was replaced by a
monarchy. In this unique combination of renaissance and crisis, it was
typical that Cicero, who created the vocabulary of Western civilization, was
twice forced into exile, had his house burned down, and was finally
murdered.
By the late first century AD, the dry belt provinces of the Roman Empire
had recovered from their prolonged crisis, and at first the resulting revenue
increase also benefited Rome itself. Then, from AD 100 to 160, settlement
increased in many parts of the Empire. This suggests that the population of
the Empire rose from about one hundred millions in AD 50 (UNESCO
estimate) to about 120 million (Gibbon's inspired guess) in AD 150. Table
9 illustrates the population crisis that followed. There are no food shortages
mentioned after AD 189 in the scanty historical records for the period, but
they must have been very common, except during and shortly after the
reign of the North African Emperor Septimus Severus (AD 193-211).
Violence in Rome and elsewhere was so common that 26 out of the 37
Emperors of the period were murdered or killed in civil battles, not to
speak of their relatives, their high officials, and the dozens of pretenders.
Besides the barbarian incursions, there was sporadic warfare with the
Parthian, later the Persian, Empire. This period saw a notable decline in
culture and art. In the fourth century AD there was some recovery, but only
at he cost of the Empire becoming largely a hydraulic society, with
distinctions between slaves and free workers disappearing. A final truly
catastrophic crisis in the sixth century AD culminated in the plague
pandemic of AD 542-3, which killed 40% of the Empire's population, and
ended Latin and classical Greek as living languages.
By the late third century AD, the dry belt surplus wealth that had
supported Roman civilization had drifted back to North Africa and Western
Asia, where the surplus was actually produced and where trade with the Far
396
Crisis Incidents
Dates
Food Shortages
Violence in Rome
Slave Revolts
Civil Wars
Social War (Rome against its allies - Latin socii)
Tyranny
Epidemics
TABLE 9
POPULATION CRISES IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE, AD 160-330
Crisis Incidents
Dates (AD)
Food Shortages
Barbarian Incursions
161, 189
167-175, 178-1880, 205-209, 234-237,
245-259, 262-271, 275-279, 286-292, 322
192-197, 217-218, 238, 249, 253, 260-268,
271-274, 280, 284-285, 293-296, 306-324
165-167, 177, 202-211, 235-238, 249-251,
257-260, 303-313, 320-324
180-192, 211-217, 218-222, 235-238
165-180, 189,251-266,271
Civil Wars
Major Persecutions of Christians
General Tyranny
Epidemics
East was concentrated: 'much more than half of the silver and much more
than two thirds of the gold which had circulated in Roman territory ... had
left the Northern Mediterranean world'.12 By then, Italy had lost its
privileges, and the effective capital shifted to Nicomedia in (modern) Turkey
and then to Constantinople. In AD 476 the Western Empire disintegrated
into barbarian kingdoms, and the population shrank back to the low level
permitted by the local surplus. In the East, the Byzantine Empire, now a
totally hydraulic state, went through several vicissitudes and population
cycles before its conquest by the Turks in AD 1453.
Except in Greece, the northern Mediterranean environment was little
damaged in ancient times. But in the late fifteenth century AD, incipient
population crisis brought to power in Spain a gangster group of
transhumant sheep-owners, the Mesta. This Mafia-like organization ruled
Spain for over two centuries, with its Murder Incorporated branch, the
397
1463
1477
1496
1526
1578
1586
1684
In Southern Italy
600,000
2,694,032
1,700,000
3,453,168
3,500,000
4,500,000
5,500,000
398
Region
Date
Population/km2
Hydraulic societies
Egypt
Chekiang Province (pre-industrial)
S. China
1st Century BC
Early 20th C AD
280
214
431 BC
104
1086 AD
1300
1479
1600
1600
1600
1750
1850
1900
1750
1850
1900
1992
1992
1992
11
35
15
50
45
34
43
68
76
31
86
155
104
225
236
United Kingdom
France
Germany
United Kingdom
399
400
Dates (AD)
Population
Crises
400-700
Late Ancient
Renaissances
Food Production
600
18
7th Century
8th Century
3-course rotation
Carolingian
750-850
22
800
9th Century
850-950
Horse-collar, Horse-shoes
Dark Age
19
1000
11th Century
1050-1200
1200
1200-1400
1300
1400
1400-1530
Combinations of above
Medieval
30
Medieval
45
32
Early Modern
15th Century
1500
1530-1670
1600
1670-1914
New Husbandry,
Low Countries
42
Early Modern
50
Long
17th Century
1700
45
18th Century
1750
1790-1850
1800
1851-1931
18501900
19141970
1990
Population
in Millions
46
Incipient
65
Mass
Emigration
HEI Agriculture, Imports
150
Modern
280
300
401
FIGURE 5
SURVIVAL OF CHILDREN IN A POPULATION CRISIS
500
450 --
400 --
350 --
300 --
250 --
200 --
150 --
Number of children
surviving from the age of
one to four years
100 --
50 "-
1647
1648
1649
1650
Dates AD
1651
1652
1653
densities (until the nineteenth century), it was the effects of the relief and
renaissance periods that accumulated, causing continuous progress even
during the crises and eventually the technological breakthrough.
In the Roman Empire, the only important labour-saving devices were
the animal-powered Gallic reaping machine, used and probably invented in
north-western Europe, and the vertical water-mill, also used mainly there,
and in any case on a tiny scale - a few dozens altogether. In early medieval
north-western Europe, water-mills were legion. In 1086, in England, 5624
were recorded, and at the same time France may have had 20,000. 'This
hydraulic energy was equivalent to that which could be deployed by onequarter of the adult population of the kingdom." 9 Some time before 1137,
the English invented the rotating vertical wind-mill: there were at least 56
in England by 1200, and in the next century they diffused all over north-
402
western Europe. Tidal mills appeared in the twelfth century, steam bellows
in the thirteenth. The mills were used for grinding corn, forging iron,
tanning, fulling, making paper, sawing, brewing, polishing armour, and
crushing anything from olives to ore. During the medieval crisis, fear of
unemployment caused some opposition to fulling mills, but nothing could
stop their advance.
Medieval technologists enjoyed great prestige. In the Gothic cathedrals,
thousands of craftsmen proudly signed their work. 'In the 12th and 13 th
centuries ... there was born ... a new conscious empirical science.'20 During
the population crises, there was some censorship of science, but it was
nothing like as bad as that in the population crisis of late fifth century BC
Athens, when virtually all scientific activity was banned.
In the fourteenth century, block printing reached north-western
Europe, ultimately from China. The Chinese had also invented movable
type, but this was of little importance until combined with the alphabetic
scripts of Europe. But between 1439 and 1450 Johann Gutenberg reinvented movable type for printing books, and mechanised printing by
devising the press. This supreme invention gave science the momentum to
advance spectacularly right through the early modern population crisis.
Between 1670 and 1750, north-western Europe enjoyed the priceless
gift of a near-stable population. Malthus discovered the reason: the region
had achieved (especially during this period) unprecedentedly low birth
rates, thanks to a change in the pattern of marriage (Table 13). According
to Malthus:
In the different states of modern Europe, it appears that the positive
checks to population [high death-rates] have prevailed less, and the
preventive checks [low birth-rates] more, than in ancient times, and
in the more uncultivated parts of the world ... In almost all the more
improved countries of modern Europe, the principal check ... is the
prudential restraint on marriage ... the greater number of persons
who remain unmarried, or marry late.
Modern research fully confirms Malthus, as the tables show especially for
north-western Europe ('the more improved countries'). The pattern seems
to have become established in the seventeenth century. In ordinary families
(as opposed to the upper class ones in part B of Table 13), the age of
women at marriage was particularly high during the later seventeenth and
earlier eighteenth centuries, the precious period of almost stable population
in north-western Europe that prepared the way for the industrial
revolution.
The resulting labour shortage in the British textile industry in the
eighteenth century led to explicit demands for labour-saving inventions and
even the offer of prizes for them in the 1760s. The demand was met by a
number of new devices, and the expanding textile industry launched the
industrial revolution (Figure 6). This figure shows the sudden huge
403
1900-01
1946
1930
1952
66
73
80
13
15
19
29
2
8
3
0
2
FIGURE6
THE POPULATION OF NORTHERN EUROPE
360
38
36
34
32
30
320
280
28
26
Net
Imports of *t
Raw
20
Cotton in 18
Millions of 16
Pounds
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
notao
A n
uaies A . U .
Source: Ref. 16
2 4 0
7 /
120
Cotton Imports
Pig Iron
200 Production
in
160 Thousands
of Tons
"
80
/ y
X
40
1705
1715
1725
1735
1745
1755
1765
1775
1785
1795
1805
404
405
Second, there was a massive increase in food yield per land area, made
doubly necessary because population pressure not only increases the
demand for food but the demand for land by housing and motorways over 17,000 hectares of farmland per year are lost in England alone. By the
eighteenth century, as shown in Table 12, north-western Europe had
evolved splendidly sustainable systems of mixed farming. To achieve the
yield increase, these have been replaced by high-energy-input (HEI) crop
agriculture and factory farming of stock. HEI crop agriculture uses huge
amounts of agricultural chemicals - NPK fertilisers (nitrogen, phosphorus,
potassium) and pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides). For lack of
organic manure, the soil deteriorates, and needs more and more mineral
fertilisers, eventually with diminishing returns. The deteriorated soil is
vulnerable to wind or water erosion. Nitrates and phosphorus compounds
pollute lakes and groundwater. Fertilisers cost vast quantities of energy to
produce, and nitrogen fertilisers are made from petroleum, and thus doubly
costly in energy. Pesticides increasingly fail to control harmful organisms
(which acquire resistance), often kill useful organisms, and threaten human
health. Systems of HEI crop agriculture 'are not sustainable, given their
physical, chemical and biological impacts on the soil, their excessive
consumption of non-renewable resources, and their far-reaching sideeffects on the global ecosystem'.24
Meanwhile factory farming involves keeping animals crowded indoors,
and the ultimate lunacy of feeding animal proteins to herbivores. Besides
atrocious suffering for the animals, this results in threats to human health,
for instance from Salmonella and Campylobacter species and bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The animal waste, instead of being
spread over the land as soil-renewing manure, is so concentrated that it
pollutes the water with solids and liquids, and the air with gases.
The Modern World: Universal Crisis and the Malthusian Solution
In the past, population crises and relief periods have been staggered
between regions. Table 14 compares the sequences of crisis and relief
periods in three major regions. For the first four centuries, much of northwestern Europe was within the Roman Empire and shares its vicissitudes.
In the fourth century there was a slight respite from population pressure in
this region, but hardly enough to call it a relief period. Centuries are of
course arbitrary divisions, so that the timing shown in this table is only
rough. However, it brings out clearly the staggering of cycles between the
three regions until the twentieth century. Now every country in the world
is simultaneously in crisis. The population explosion is not confined to
north-western Europe, but has occurred everywhere, producing an
unprecedented rise in the world population to six billion.
This has been made possible by the two increases in food supply we have
already considered. By the 1960s virtually every country was importing
406
FIGURE 7
50
40
30
20
10
0
Date AD 0
200
400
600
grain from Canada and the United States, but by 1973 the enormous stocks
of surplus grain had all been used up, and the Americans began to plough
up their reserve cropland. The populations continued to rise, however,
because HEI crop agriculture was diffused to the poorer countries of the
world, often with massive irrigation projects. But in a world of recurrent
famines, in which at least a billion people must be chronically seriously
under-nourished, world food production per head increased by less than
5% between 1989 and 1996. And this small increase was at the cost of all
the long-term damage done by HEI agriculture and over-irrigation to the
soil and to water. A survey in 1990 by the World Health Organization
suggested that 25 million agricultural workers are acutely poisoned by
pesticides every year.
The world population crisis is having all the usual economic and social
effects. Everywhere there is evidence of inflation, unemployment, gross
inequality and desperate poverty. Amnesty International reports violation
of human rights in virtually every sizeable nation - 152 countries in 1993.
The two World Wars and incessant local, national and civil wars have been
extremely destructive to civilians (including women and children). Against
this background, violent crime has steadily increased. The number of
multiple murders in the United States has risen markedly since the 1950s,
407
408
TABLE 14
THE POPULATION CYCLES OF CHINA, NORTHERN INDIA AND
NORTH WESTERN EUROPE
Century (AD)
China
N India
NW Europe
1st
2nd
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Relief
Relief
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Relief*
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Crisis
Crisis
Relief
Relieff
Crisis
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
9th
10th
11th
12th
13th
14th
15th
16th
17th
18th
19th
20th
Notes:
*Due largely to importation of resources
+Due to emigration of people and importation of resources
Source: Ref 6.
hundreds) there had been one more birth than deaths per hundred per year,
then today 'the world population would form a sphere of living flesh many
thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity ...
many times faster than light'.28 'In real life, as opposed to the wonderland
of mathematics, nothing of the kind can happen.'6 So in real life, when a
population increases even at this apparently modest rate, sooner or later
one of two things must happen - either the birth-rate comes down or the
death-rate goes up (the population crisis response), and the increase is
checked. This was Malthus's greatest discovery, and he had the supreme
genius to realize that unlike animals we can choose which.
The modern methods of birth control provide ample means for
exercising the Malthusian choice - that is, for shunting out the population
crisis, with all its horrors, by reducing the birth-rate instead. Fortunately,
birth control campaigns 'pay for themselves almost at once, and very soon
begin to increase the prosperity of the region'.6 It would therefore be
extremely easy to mount a massive world programme of voluntary birth
control, and how welcome this would be is shown by the fact that
desperately poor women in Calcutta have been known to spend 10% of
their minuscule incomes on contraceptives. We may thus hope to reduce
the world population to the billion or so who could probably live a
409
good life even in our already depleted Earth environment. It may then take
time to eliminate the stress culture resulting from past crises, but we could
make population crises and population cycles a thing of the past, and usher
in a permanent renaissance.
References
1. Russell C, Russell WMS. Overpopulation crisis. Social Biology and Human
Affairs 1984; 49: 23-42.
2. Kormondy EJ. Concepts of Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1969.
3. McEvedy C, Jones R. Atlas of World Population History. Harmonsdworth:
Penguin, 1979.
4. Russell WMS. Population and inflation. Ecologist 1971; 1 (8): 4-8.
5. Russell WMS, Russell C. The history of the human life span. Update 1976; 12:
571-88.
6. Russell C, Russell WMS. Scarcities and societal objectives. In: Polumin N, ed.
Growth without Ecodisasters? London: Macmillan, 1980: 409-28.
7. Jacobson T, Adams RM. Salt and silt in ancient Mesopotamian agriculture. In:
Caldwell JR, ed. New Roads to Yesterday. London: Thames & Hudson, 1966:
466-79.
8. Adams RM. Agriculture and urban life in early south-western Iran. In: Caldwell
JR, ed. New Roads to Yesterday. London: Thames & Hudson, 1966: 436-65.
9. Reifenberg A. The Struggle between the Desert and the Sown: Rise and Fall of
Agriculture in the Levant. Jerusalem: Publication Department, Jewish Agency,
1955.
10. Wittfogel KA. The hydraulic civilisation. In: Thomas WL, ed. Man's Role in
Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956:
152-64.
11. Beloch J. Historiche Beitrge zur Bevlkerungslebre.Vol 1. Die Bevlkerung der
Griechisch-RmischenWelt. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1886.
12. Heichelheim FM. Effects of classical antiquity on the land. In: Thomas WL, ed.
Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1956: 165-82.
13. Klein J. The Mesta: a Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273-1836.
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.
14. Toynbee AJ. Hannibal's Legacy: the Hannibalic War's Effects on Roman Life.
2. Rome and her Neighbours after Hannibal's Exit. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1965.
15. Russell WMS. Man, Nature and History. London: Aldus, 1967.
16. Pacey A. The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of
Technology. London: Allen Lane, 1974.
17. Russell WMS. Population, swidden farming and the tropical environment.
Population and Environment 1988; 10: 77-94.
18. Kamen A. The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550-1660. London:
Sphere, 1976.
19. Debeir J-C, Dleage J-P, Hmery D. In the Servitude of Power: Energy and
Civilisation Through the Ages. (trans. Barzmen J). London: Zed Books, 1991.
20. Crombie AC. Augustine to Galileo. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
21. Hajnal J. European marriage patterns in perspective. In: Glass DV, Eversley
DEC, eds. Population in History. London: Edward Arnold, 1965: 101-43.
22. Hollingsworth TH. A demographic study of the British ducal families.
410