Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress(I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference:
Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had cost it too dearly, and that it had been living off capital for nearly a century. France alone knew just how weak it had become in comparison with Germany, though nobody else, especially not America, was prepared to believe it ...
Though France's allies insisted that its fears were exaggerated, French leaders knew better. In 1880, the French had represented 15.7 percent of Europe's population. By 1900, that figure had declined to 9.7 percent. In 1920, France had a population of 41 million and Germany a population of 65 million, causing the French statesman Briand to answer critics of his conciliatory policy toward Germany with the argument that he was conducting the foreign policy of France's birthrate.
Blanc quotes Braudel’s unfinished Identity of France: “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?”
In general, an easy mistake to make when thinking about history is to assume that relative population stays the same over time. Today, the UK and France both have just under 70 million people. But in 1800, Great Britain had only 10 million people, barely twice the number of people in Ireland, while France’s slightly extended borders contained 27 million, much more even than Russia’s 21 million (though the Russian Empire added up to 40 million with its Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic, and other possessions). This was crucial for the French Empire’s wars under Napoleon against the rest of Europe. During the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), England and its Irish and Welsh possessions together had fewer than 3 million people while France had about 15 million, making the English performance impressive despite eventual defeat.
But the importance of historical population ratios is most apparent in colonial history. Today, Europe has 750 million people while Africa has 1.5 billion. Russia is the largest European country at 145 million, followed by Germany (85 million), and then after the UK and France the next two are Italy (60 million) and Spain (50 million). Meanwhile Nigeria allegedly has 220 million people, Ethiopia 110 million, Egypt 105 million—and South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan all have more than 50 million people.
In 1916, the population ratio between the UK and her Indian Empire was 1 to 7, whereas it’s 1 to 28 today.
The Belgian Congo had 10 million people, not even twice as many as Belgium, while today its population is 9 times larger.
When Ethiopia defeated Italian invaders at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, they were actually fighting against a numerically superior country; Italy had over 30 million people while Ethiopia had about 9 million. Today Ethiopia has about double Italy’s population and continues to grow (TFR of 4) while Italy faces further decline and has the second-oldest population in the world after Japan, with a median age of 48.
The other aspect is age. Russia in 1917 had half of population younger than 18, while modern Russia has median age of 39, with all implications about political stability and conservatism.
Yeah I was reading the other day about the Treaty of Versailles and surround periods and saw a quote from a German minister about how an overseas empire would be good merely as an outlet for young men to find something productive to do. A totally different social and political environment when you have a young and growing population than an aging and shrinking population. And Russia is still relatively young: Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Austria all have median ages of 45 or higher.
In 1914, Germany had a population of 67 million, about 70% of the US's population of 98 million. In 1939, Germany's population was still over half of the US's. Today Germany has about 25% as many people.
The Soviet Union had a higher population than the US throughout the Cold War. Russia, which only contains about half of the population of the former Soviet Union, has about 42% of the US population today.
Neat post! The Europe-Africa ratio is especially striking, and will change my mental model of colonization a fair bit.
Also of interest for thinking about colonization / imperialism is the size of Japan's population in that last map compared to the Southeast Asian territories it conquered during WWII.
Indeed Japan in general seems to have grown in population slower than just about any other major country I look at -- a measly ~70% increase from 70m to 125m over 125 years. ("Russian Empire" then was bigger than Russia today, but Wikipedia has Russia proper at 70m then vs 144m today.)
The implied super-rapid relative population growth rates in Africa & parts of Asia in the 1900s also help me understand why people got freaked out about global overpopulation in the late 1900s, and why that pop growth needed innovations like Golden Rice to sustain it.
Regarding the Russians and East Slavs more broadly, Anatoly Karlin has some napkin math that at the very least shows the huge toll that the world wars had on their populations, which barely grow or s:
(8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.
(8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between 1913/14 and 1945/46 was about as follows:
Russia – 91M/97M
Ukraine – 35M/34M
Belarus – 7.5M/7.7M
Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.
That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.
(8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.
Russia is the largest European country at 145 million, followed by Germany (85 million), Italy (60 million), and Spain (50 million).
...except for the UK and France, which are each around 70M as stated above. (Not sure if this is meant to be implicit, but it tripped me up when I read this sentence.)
Population is highly relevant to war between neighbors, particularly conscript war. But is it relevant to colonization? Over the past half century the relative population of Congo to Belgium increased by a factor of 5. A factor of 5 makes a difference in a single battle, but on the scale of a colonization project where a handful of people take over a large territory, it is nothing. At most it would require scaling down ambition by a factor of 5. Wikipedia claims that the colonial population increased by 2 orders of magnitude from 1900 to 1960, while native population did not change. The factor of 100 with no obvious cause is the big story and the factor of 5 historically irrelevant. Belgium did not lose control because the colony became too large to control, for the population grew only after independence. Perhaps it gave up because the colonial population was 1% of the metropolitan population, a real expense, but that was the result of how it governed the colony, not a necessary consequence of relative populations.
The past really was different. The ability of a thousand Belgians to control the whole of the Congo is shocking. Social technologies change much faster than populations.
Would I be incorrect in reading into the post that, at least looked at through the lens of geopolitical status and power, one might not view the post WWII international order than promoted a lot of investment in the developing countries economic and health was planting the seeds of the West's vision of the modern world order?
Or do you see the current state of things as occurring independently of relative population changes?
2
Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference:
Blanc quotes Braudel’s unfinished Identity of France: “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?”
In general, an easy mistake to make when thinking about history is to assume that relative population stays the same over time. Today, the UK and France both have just under 70 million people. But in 1800, Great Britain had only 10 million people, barely twice the number of people in Ireland, while France’s slightly extended borders contained 27 million, much more even than Russia’s 21 million (though the Russian Empire added up to 40 million with its Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic, and other possessions). This was crucial for the French Empire’s wars under Napoleon against the rest of Europe. During the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), England and its Irish and Welsh possessions together had fewer than 3 million people while France had about 15 million, making the English performance impressive despite eventual defeat.
But the importance of historical population ratios is most apparent in colonial history. Today, Europe has 750 million people while Africa has 1.5 billion. Russia is the largest European country at 145 million, followed by Germany (85 million), and then after the UK and France the next two are Italy (60 million) and Spain (50 million). Meanwhile Nigeria allegedly has 220 million people, Ethiopia 110 million, Egypt 105 million—and South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan all have more than 50 million people.
But in 1900, Europe had triple Africa’s population; the Russian Empire alone had more people than all of Africa. This demographic advantage enabled European expansion and control: