Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil

Author:Vaclav Smil [SPi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780262195935
Publisher: The MIT Press

Figure IV.1

Population density of ancient Rome compared with that of selected large modern cities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Plotted mostly from data at Demographia Web site. Area of Rome (within the Aurelian walls) was 15 km2.

Regardless of the actual urban, slave, and recruitment shares, unless the Romans followed a trajectory unmatched by any other preindustrial society, we must assume that the annual growth of the Roman population was slow, on the order of 0.1% (that was also the French rate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and most likely no more than 0.2%, although at least for Egypt the available data allow a possible annual growth rate as high as 0.5%. The first growth rate would double the population in 350 years, the other in 140 years. In contrast, natural growth (excluding immigration) of the U.S. population was as high as 1.5% during the peak years of the baby boom generation (1946-1964), its average was 0.6% during the first half decade of the twenty-first century, and it reached 0.89% in 2007, whereas most European populations have either stagnated or declined except for immigration.

But even with very low population numbers and natural growth rates it is possible to argue that parts of the Roman Empire were actually overpopulated; Braudel (1972) thought the Mediterranean circa 1600, with 60-70 million people, definitely was. Excess population gain would have been possible even with very low annual growth rates due to low and very slowly increasing capacity to feed the population. There is some evidence that such a trend might have led to higher food and land prices in the Roman Egypt (Duncan-Jones 1990), but the record is unclear because there are no obvious price trends in the extant record. On the other hand, the record is ambiguous enough that it is possible to argue that there was a long-term population decline (starting in the late second century C.E. and severe in some regions) that was manifested in manpower shortages and recruitment problems (Parkin 1992). Or, even more direly, should we see a protracted population decline as one of the principal reasons for the weakening of the Western Empire and its eventual subjugation by migrants from distant places?

These fundamental uncertainties regarding the long-term dynamics of Roman population are a consequence of a complete lack of direct quantitative information about ancient vital statistics, birth and death rates and total fertility rates, as well as about the course of what was at times undoubtedly heavy immigration. What follows is thus a recounting of the best available information that has been gathered from very limited and fragmentary textual and archaeological evidence or that has been derived from the application of (more or less) suitable models of population dynamics based inevitably on much more recent data from population censuses in some of the poorer regions of the modern world.

As in all traditional societies, very few Roman women remained unmarried, but the best evidence we have indicates that the mean age of marriage was not exceptionally early.

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