Page 190 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

population growth as engine of history 1491

tion.Will rural populations continue to sustain cities by Meyer (Eds.), The earth as transformed by human action (pp. 25–40).
supplying food and migrants on the necessary scale? Or New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wrigley, E. A. (1969). Population and history. London: Weidenfeld &
will rural populations imitate urban life styles and also Nicholson.
begin to wither away? What happens when declining
birth rates require fewer working adults to support larger
numbers of old folks through government-managed pro-
grams? What will deliberate intervention do to sustain
births, privately or publicly? No one knows, but with Population
current rates of population change as rapid and massive
as they are, one can be sure that if and when population Growth as Engine
decline becomes everywhere apparent, the effect will be
as painful and drastic as the unprecedented population of History
growth between 1750 and 1950 was for so many of the
world’s peasants. hen seen over large time scales, population
Wgrowth is one of the most striking features of
William H. McNeill
human history. One hundred thousand years ago, there
See also Diasporas; Disease—Overview; Migrations; may have been just a few tens of thousands of humans
Population Growth as Engine of History; Urbanization on earth.Today, there are more than 6 billion, and they
can be found on all continents on earth (even on Antarc-
tica). No other large animal has multiplied like this
Further Reading (though domesticated species and fellow travelers from
Bogin, B. (2001). The growth of humanity. New York: Wiley. rabbits to sheep, from rats to cockroaches, have multi-
Caldwell, J., & Schindlmayer,T. (2002). Historical population estimates: plied, as it were, in the slipstream of humans). So popu-
Unraveling the consensus. Population and Development Review 28(2),
183–204. lation growth counts as one of the fundamental
Curtin, P. D. (1989). Death by migration: Europe’s encounter with the distinguishing features of human history. Humans have
tropical world in the nineteenth century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. multiplied in this way because they are more innovative
Glass, D. V., & Eversley, D. E. C. (Eds.). (1965). Population in history: than other animals. As a species, humans have shown a
Essays in historical demography. London: Edward Arnold. unique capacity to adapt to their environments in novel
Lourdes Arizpe, M., Stone, P., & Major, D. C. (Eds.). (1994). Population
and environment: Rethinking the debate. Boulder, CO: Westview. ways that allow them to extract more energy and
Lutz,W., Prskawetz, A., & Sanderson,W. C. (Eds.). (2002). Population resources from their surroundings. The source of this
and environment: Methods of analysis. Population and Development
Review,28 (Supplement). capacity for ecological innovation lies within human cul-
Massim, L. B. (2001). A concise history of world population. Malden, MA: ture, in the ability, unique to humans, to share and there-
Blackwell. fore preserve, store, and accumulate learned information
McNeill,W. H. (1984). Human migration in historical perspective. Pop-
ulation and Development Review,10, 1–18 generation by generation. Population increase is a nat-
McNeill, W. H. (1990). Population and politics since 1750. Charlottes- ural consequence of this ability, for the constant sharing
ville: University Press of Virginia.
McNeill, W. H. (1998). The disruption of traditional forms of nurture. and accumulation of knowledge has enabled humans to
Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. find new ways of exploiting their environments, so that,
Quale, G. R. (1988). Families in context: A world history of population. unlike other species, they can move well beyond the en-
New York: Greenwood.
Ts’ui-jung Liu, Lee, J., Reher, D. S., Saito, O., & Feng,W. (Eds.). (2001). vironments in which they first evolved. Over time, hu-
Asian population history. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. mans have learned to transform their environments in
Whitmore, T. M., Turner, B. L., Johnson, D. L., Kates, R. W., &
Gottschang, T. R. (1990). Long-term population change. In W. C. order to exploit them more effectively. As a result of their
Clark, B. L. Turner, R. W. Kates, J. Richards, J. T. Mathews, & W. unique capacity for innovation, humans have managed