The Sum of the People by Andrew Whitby

Author:Andrew Whitby [Whitby, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

That Malthus had even a rough sense of the global population, in the eighteenth century, is surprising. In fact his offhand estimate of “one thousand million” was almost exactly right. This was more a fluke of timing than any particular demographic virtuosity: he simply chose a round number for ease of exposition. That said, in choosing a round billion, Malthus wasn’t making a totally uninformed guess. By the 1790s, he could draw on several sensible, if conflicting, estimates of world population.

Certain facts, or at least impressions, had been understood since antiquity: the high population density of China and India, the emptiness of the Sahara. The great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had filled in this sketch. By about 1600, learned Europeans could possess a broadly accurate picture of the continents, their relative sizes and configuration (with the exception of lightly populated Australia and unpopulated Antarctica).

In 1661 an Italian Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, combined these impressions to calculate that the total population of the world could be as large as one billion. The truth then was probably about half that, according to modern estimates. Riccioli’s biggest error was the two hundred million that he assigned to the Americas. The New World had probably never been as populous as the old, and European contact had reduced it to perhaps twelve million by then. Still, the Italian’s estimate was a remarkable effort: he probably deserves recognition alongside his near-contemporaries Graunt and Petty as a founder of demography. Petty, for his part, offered a rather less satisfying global total, credited only to “learned men,” of three hundred twenty million. Gregory King, another English political arithmetician, made a better estimate of around seven hundred million in 1696, using similar logic to Riccioli (it was probably about six hundred million by then).12

In 1721, the French philosopher Montesquieu set off a debate in Europe’s intellectual circles, claiming that the world’s population had fallen to one-fiftieth its total in Roman times. He was wrong on this point. Moreover, the “world” he considered—Europe and the Mediterranean—was an increasingly archaic and irrelevant concept. By the end of the eighteenth century, the coastlines of the populated continents had been mapped in detail. European traders and colonists were beginning to venture into the most populous parts of the world, including India and China. They brought back to the West a much firmer—if still anecdotal—base of knowledge. In 1775, Johann Peter Süssmilch, a German pastor, produced the definitive eighteenth-century account of world population. It was from Süssmilch that Malthus adopted his total of one billion.13

After Malthus’s Essay, demographic knowledge grew even faster. Modern census taking was spread by Adolphe Quetelet and his international meetings. National headcounts became more frequent and more accurate, and these were quickly used to update global estimates. The 1891 ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica listed twenty successive claims about world population from 1804 onward. The earliest are too low, but they eventually converge on an accurate total: by the 1880s, around 1.4 billion.14

The study of global population had made the transition from informed guesswork to science.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.