The Transformation of the World (29 page)

(3) There was
very high growth
in Europe (Britain and European Russia after 1860), as well as in parts of Africa (especially Algeria after 1870) and Asia (Java, Philippines, post-1870 Japan), and
fairly high growth
, though never at English levels, in Germany and the Netherlands. The demographic vicissitudes of humanity—this must be our chief conclusion—did not correspond to a simple East-West opposition, still less to the macrogeography of the continents. Dynamic Europe versus the stagnating rest? At least in terms of population history, things are not quite so simple.

2 Population Disasters and the Demographic Transition

The population disasters of the nineteenth century were not confined to one area of the world, but they did spare Europe more than other continents. Ireland was
the
disaster of the century in Europe, the only instance of negative growth. The Great Famine of 1846–52, following a period of rapid population increase that had begun in 1780, canceled the old demographic pattern. Triggered by a fungus that wiped out the potato crop, the famine caused the death of at least a million people—an eighth of the population of Ireland.
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Emigration, already under way, turned into a flood. Between 1847 and 1854, 200,000 people a year left the island; the total population plummeted from 8.2 million in 1841 to 4.5 million in 1901, with the raising of the age of marriage, promoted by the clergy and landowners, as another important factor. The Irish economy recovered in the second half of the century, thanks in no small part to emigration. While real wages rose for agricultural laborers, Ireland—like Italy and southern China—benefited from overseas remittances.
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In many respects, therefore, the consequences of the tragedy were overcome within a few decades.

In Europe, after the end of the Napoleonic era, wars and civil wars were a less important source of population loss than they had been in the eighteenth century or would be again in the twentieth. The major excesses of collective violence took place in other parts of the world:

▪
 revolutionary civil wars, as in China between 1850 and 1876 or Mexico between 1910 and 1920;

▪
 wars of secession, as in the United States, where the Civil War of 1861–65 alone cost the lives of 620,000 soldiers, or in South Africa at the turn of the century;
²⁶

▪
 colonial wars of conquest, as in 1825 and 1830 in Java (probably more than 200,000 killed),
²⁷
after 1830 in Algeria and later in many other parts of Africa, and all century long in the wars of repression and extermination that white settlers and their government bodies waged against the indigenous peoples of the Americas; and finally,

▪
 the only Great Power conflict that took place outside Europe—the momentous Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5.

Meanwhile peace reigned in Europe. No war was fought there between 1815 and the beginning of the Crimean War in 1853, and the latter, like the Wars of German Unification, trailed in violence behind many conflicts outside Europe, not to speak of the great wars of the early modern period or those that lay ahead in the twentieth century. Of the ten deadliest wars between great powers since 1500, not a single one occurred between 1815 and 1914. There was no parallel to the War of the Spanish Succession (1710–14), which is thought to have left 1.2 million dead on numerous fields of battle, nor a fortiori to the wars between 1792 and 1815, which probably led to 2.5 million deaths among the armies alone.
²⁸
All told, in proportion to the total population of Europe, there were seven times more war-related deaths in the eighteenth century than in the nineteenth.
²⁹

Microbe Shocks and Violent Excesses

Outside Europe it was still possible in the nineteenth century for “microbe shocks” to take whole populations to the brink of extinction. In 1881, after a series of diseases were introduced into Tahiti, the population fell to a low point of 6,000, less than a tenth of the total at the time of Bougainville's and Cook's famous visits to the island in the 1760s. For similar reasons, the number of Kanaks in French New Caledonia fell by 70 percent in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Fiji, in the year 1875 alone, more than a quarter of the population of 200,000–250,000 died as a result of a flu epidemic.
³⁰
Several indigenous peoples in North America were wiped out by smallpox, cholera, or tuberculosis; most of the global pandemics of the nineteenth century also reached the native peoples in the New World. After the beginning of the Gold Rush, it was not so much disease as a frontal assault on their entire way of life that reduced the population of indigenous Californian peoples from about 100,000–250,000 in 1848 to 25,000–35,000 in 1860. Behind these figures lurk terror and mass murder up to the point of genocide.
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Between 1803 and 1876 the native population of Tasmania fell from approximately 2,000 to zero. Before 1850, when the lawless years gradually came to an end, hunts for Aborigines were a regular occurrence in Australia; the killing of them went unpunished, and since resistance was not uncommon some whites also died in skirmishes and ambushes. Probably every tenth “unnatural” death among the Aborigines resulted directly from an act of violence. Outbreaks of smallpox (one was recorded as early as 1789, a few months after the arrival of the first Europeans), together with cultural stress and a general worsening of the material conditions of life, were responsible for a dramatic decline in the indigenous population.
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It is likely that just before 1788 some 1.1 million Aborigines were living in all parts of Australia; by 1860 there were no more than 340,000.
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It is hard to put a serious figure on the total loss of life claimed by European imperial expansion.
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Nevertheless, an attempt must be made to give some estimate of these human costs of colonization, which also include losses on the Western side, mainly among the military proletariat sent to fight in the tropics. The Genevan historian Bouda Etemad concludes that between 1750 and 1913 as
many as 280,000 to 300,000 European and (in the Philippines) North American soldiers died in overseas colonial wars, either in battle or as a result of disease; India and Algeria were the two deadliest theaters for European troops.
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Indigenous troops in the service of the colonial powers suffered a further 120,000 casualties, while Etemad calculates that the number of Asian and African warriors who died resisting the whites was between 800,000 and one million. All other losses among non-Europeans are difficult to quantify. Etemad includes the atypically high mortality in India between 1860 and 1921 among the consequences of the
choc colonial
, and he follows estimates of 28 million for the total casualties of famine and a new “ecology of disease” due to external factors. The high mortality in India is not primarily explained by colonial bloodletting and other misdeeds on the part of the British. The unusually severe famines of the 1860s to the 1890s, according to Etemad, accounted for only 5 percent of additional deaths during the period. More important were the concomitants of modernization (railroad construction, creation of large irrigation systems, increased mobility, urbanization under poor hygienic conditions), which afforded new opportunities for the spread of malaria and other indigenous, nonimported diseases. Only the focus on India and on a wide range of
indirect
effects justifies Etemad's high figure of 50–60 million for non-European deaths as a result of colonial conquest.
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In contrast to the post-1492 Americas, early modern Ceylon (Sri Lanka), or the aforementioned cases in Oceania and Australia, a “microbe shock” resulting from imported diseases did not play a large role in the nineteenth-century European conquests in Africa and Asia. In fact the shock operated there in reverse, since Europeans had no immunity from many endemic diseases. But colonization did lead everywhere to political, social, and biological destabilization. The often bloody wars of conquest and the ensuing “pacification” campaigns against resistance movements went hand in hand with disturbances to local production, drove large numbers of people from their ancestral homes, and opened new doors to diseases endemic in the area. European invasions therefore almost inevitably resulted in population loss, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where they were concentrated during the period from 1882 to 1896. In a second phase, beginning in Africa after the turn of the century, the end of major fighting and the first results of a colonial health-care policy meant that conditions were generally favorable to population growth.

The scale of the invasion crisis varied greatly. The worst conditions prevailed in the Congo Free State, which was assigned to King Leopold II of Belgium as a kind of private colony at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Here an extremely brutal colonial regime, showing no concern for the natives and treating them as mere objects of exploitation, may have halved the total population between 1876 and 1920—although there is no reliable basis for the figure of ten million murdered Congolese that is today bandied around in the media.
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In Algeria, brutally “pacified” over three decades, the indigenous population is thought to have declined by 0.8 percent a year between 1830 and 1856, and
those who remained were threatened with drought, disease, and locusts in the especially harsh years from 1866 to 1870. A demographic recovery began after 1870 and continued without interruption.
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Other especially grim and bloody theaters of war were Sudan, Ivory Coast, and East Africa. Where local resistance held its ground, the fighting could drag on for years. Thus, as many as 20,000 British soldiers waged a brutal war in Uganda between 1893 and 1899, and despite their possession of machine guns it was no easy triumph. Scorchedearth tactics were used to deprive civilians of their livelihood, especially the all-important livestock.
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In South West Africa (today's Namibia), the local German “defense force” and a special marine corps sent out from Germany crushed the resistance of the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1907, using methods of extreme cruelty. The war of extermination continued against noncombatants and prisoners-of-war after the Africans had laid down their arms, either by driving them into the desert or by forcing them to work under conditions that led to an early death. Although reliable figures are lacking, the numbers killed must have been in the tens of thousands. “Genocide” is the appropriate term for what happened. However, the war of extermination in South West Africa was not one of many such episodes; the unbridled nature of the German actions and the scale of their impact make it an extreme case. It was not in “the logic of colonialism” to murder the colonial subjects. They could be and were used for labor.
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Demographic Transition

Did population trends follow a single pattern that eventually asserted itself everywhere in the world? The science of demography offers the theoretical model of a “demographic transition”
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—that is, a transformation process leading from a “premodern” to a “modern” system of reproductive behavior. The starting point is a situation of high and closely matched rates of birth and death: many people are born, and most of them die early. In the “post-transformation” equilibrium situation, birth rates and death rates are also close to each other but are lower than before; life expectancy is high. The model postulates a multiphase transition between these opening and concluding equilibria. Birth rates and death rates move in opposite directions. At first mortality declines, without an immediate corresponding shift in fertility; more people are born, but they also live longer. There is a rapid increase in population. This model is not plucked out of thin air: it comes from observation of England, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries and has been tried out on other cases. Historically it means that a series of national societies realized at various points in time that families were growing larger, fewer children were dying, and existential horizons were lengthening as life expectancy increased. These experiences must have been similar
in principle
, but the causes would have been bundled together differently in each individual case. Fertility and mortality do not fit together mechanically; the factors determining them are in some degree independent of each other.

In particular, the transformation process that began with the decline in deathrates lasted for different lengths of time: 200 years in England (1740–1940), 160 years in Denmark (1780-1940), 90 years in the Netherlands (1850–1940), 70 years in Germany (1870–1940), and 40 years in Japan (1920–60).
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So, only in a few European countries and overseas neo-Europes did the process begin before 1900. In the United States it got going in 1790 and lasted until the end of a “long” demographic nineteenth century. But it was a peculiarity of the United States that fertility continually declined during this period, even before mortality fell. The US pattern is therefore similar to that of the European special case, France.
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Globally, the “Victorian” nineteenth century either still exhibited a premodern demographic structure or was caught up in the process of demographic transition. If we look for the turning point when fertility adjusted to declining mortality, we find surprising confirmation of an epochal shift in the fin de siècle. With the exception of France, this turning point shows up in the statistics only in or after the 1870s.
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By the eve of the First World War, most European societies had adapted to the idea of individual family planning. The reasons for this are complex and controversial. Suffice it to say that the process was a fundamental one in the history of human experience: a “passage from disorder to order and from waste to economy.”
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