The weight of sheer numbers in changing history’s course

Once in a while there comes along a book that is a revelatory, one, that suddenly brings into perspective some aspect of the world so critical that one is left awestruck. The Human Tide by Paul Morland, a research fellow at the University of London, is one such book. The book is a major work that must rank with non-fiction classics such as The Rise and Fall of Civilisations, A Brief History of Time and so on. Anyone even slightly interested in the story of humankind's continuing evolution must read it.

The author best explains what his book is all about: “The Human Tide is about the role of population in history. It does not argue that the great trends in population — the rise and fall of birth and death rates, the swelling and shrinking of population size, the surges of migration — determine all of history. Demography, it argues, is part but not all of destiny.”

“To leave demography out, however, is to miss what may be the most explanatory factor in world history of the last two hundred years. For millennia, the same bleak story could be told of steady population progress reversed by plague, famine and war. Since 1800, however, humankind has increasingly managed to take control of its own numbers, and to stunning effect.”

The human tide: How population shaped the modern world By Paul Morland Hachette pp 227; Rs 599.

The book explains the demographic revolution that occurred since 1800; a change that suggests a turning point in the history of mankind. The author explains the spurt in world population with a telling analogy: “Imagine a car trundling slowly forward at more or less the same speed for mile after mile after mile. Imagine it then increasing its speed, gradually for the first few miles, then rapidly, until it achieves tremendous, even frightening, velocity. Then,  after hurtling along a relatively short distance, the brakes are suddenly applied, resulting in rapid deceleration. This is what the world's population growth pattern has been like since 1800.”

To appreciate the extent of the spurt in world population one only has to remember that it “took hundreds of thousands of years for the world's population to reach a billion but only a couple of hundred years more for it to reach today’s seven billion.”

“Rapid population acceleration and deceleration send shockwaves around the world wherever they occur and have shaped history in ways that are rarely appreciated,” the author argues. “Once this immense speeding up and then quite sudden slowing down are apprehended, it is possible to get a sense of the great fairground ride of world population change and our own position, today, of living at a turning point.”

The story of populations turning point starts with the Anglo-Saxon population explosion in the British Isles. In the chapter titled “The Triumph of the Anglo-Saxon”, the author points out that average population growth in England was a mere third to a half of one per cent during the 18th century. Things changed dramatically in the 19th century when population growth in England soared to 1.7 per cent during the period 1811-25.

England's population, despite significant emigration, grew at an average of over 1.33 per cent annually, which meant a doubling of population every 50 years. Nothing similar had occurred at any time in history anywhere in the world.

As Britain's population exploded so did its economy, turning it from a traditional to an industrialised one. “Without its great nineteenth-century population growth, Britain could not have developed either into the workshop of the world early in the century or into the world’s greatest financier in the second half,” the author contends. “Even ignoring the impact of the growing population on increasing the market and enriching the population and simply looking at how sheer growth increased the economy, about half of the economic growth was the result of population increases alone.” This population growth also fuelled the growth and spread of British colonies to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

“What started in Britain went on to storm the entire world and shake it to its foundations in country after country, on continent after continent,” the author writes. “The population explosion first allowed the peoples of Britain and then more widely the people of Europe to dominate the globe, then played a major role in forcing their retreat.” Today, it is the developing world in Asia and Africa that is leading the demographic race.

The book takes us through the demographic journeys of various parts of the world including Europe, Russia, China, Africa and South Asia. It tells us of the marvellous workings of nature that have and continue to give rise to often unexpected changes in humankind’s development. The book suggests that demographics has profoundly influences the military and economic clout of nations as it does equations between and within them.

“Whatever the future holds,” the author concludes, “of one thing we can be sure: that just as in the past, demography and destiny will continue to be entwined.” While there is no telling where it will take us tomorrow, The Human Tide reminds us that whether we like it or not we will all be swept along with it.

The writer is an independent commentator on political and security issues