Page 188 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

population 1489

The entrance to a block of Chinese
apartments in June 2004. These modern
constructions are rapidly replacing the
more traditional hutongs (courtyards).
Due to population crunch, multi-story
apartment complexes are increasingly
necessary to house China’s population.

islands, including, not least, the population of the United
States of America.
All the local ups and downs of population generated
among agrarian societies and civilizations disguise but
nevertheless conform to a long-term trend of increasing
human numbers. Technological improvements in food
production and enlarged transport capabilities for dis-
tributing food and other commodities among consumers
made that possible. Beginning about 1000 CE, precari-
ous but more and more pervasive market relations sus-
tained specialized producers, whose superior efficiency
enlarged wealth and increased differentiation of lifestyles,
century after century This process crossed a critical
threshold after about 1750, when population surged as
never before and urban industrial production based on
inanimate forms of energy—mostly running water and
coal to begin with—inaugurated the urban industrialized
age in which we now live. century, especially potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize,
also much enlarged food supplies in many parts of
Urban Industrialism China, Africa, and Europe. Warmer and drier weather
since 1750 improved North European crop yields, but may have had
One of the unsolved puzzles of world history is that pop- an opposite effect in Mediterranean and Southwest Asian
ulation growth set in at an accelerated rate in all the lands. Finally, intensified transport and communication
densely populated parts of the earth sometime about perhaps spread infections as widely as social and climatic
1750. By that date the initial die-offs in Mexico and Peru conditions allowed, so that lethal epidemics coming
were over, and Amerindian populations in those lands from afar became fewer, while endemic infections, affect-
started to increase, slowly at first and then more rapidly. ing mainly children, became more pervasive. If so, adults
Chinese, Indian, European and (less certainly) Muslim of childbearing age perhaps died less often, so that
populations also started to grow more rapidly than increasing mortality among infants could be compen-
before. Demographers do not agree as to why this hap- sated for by higher birth rates and enlarged family sizes.
pened; and most of them have been content to focus Although there is no consensus about how to explain
their researches on one or another local population and the worldwide spurt in population growth that set in
have not considered the phenomenon as a whole. about 1750 and began to reverse itself after 1950, it re-
Unique local circumstances certainly played important mains a central phenomenon of human history during
roles. The spread of smallpox vaccination, for example, those two centuries. Since it affected agrarian societies
diminished the impact of that infection among some as much as industrializing ones, it was not directly
European nations and may have been significant in Cen- dependent on the rise of modern industry, though inti-
tral Asia and among Muslin merchants generally. The mately intertwined with the propagation of that novel
spread of American food crops during the eighteenth style of life.