Quantitative growth

During the first half of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution hit full stride and the Scientific Revolution yielded up the results of its manifold inventions in the technical and medical fields, the population of Western Europe amounted to about 100 million, a large population perhaps three times that estimated to have occupied the same territory in the time of Augustus. It was the culmination of almost two millennia of demographic vicissitudes and the starting point for a new leap forward that (in less than two centuries) would see population triple once again.

The tripling of the population between the beginning of the common era and the eighteenth century was not a gradual process but the result of successive waves of crisis and expansion: crisis in the late Imperial and Justinian age marked by barbaric invasions and the plague; expansion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; followed by another devastating crisis in the mid-fourteenth century brought on by the repeated visitations of the Black Death; strong recovery from mid-fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century; followed by crisis, or stagnation, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, at which point the forces of modern expansion began to gather momentum.

The pattern of European population growth is compared to that of the world in Figure 1 and Table 1. The figures in this table and the curve of the graph should be taken only as a rough guide to the past and not as an accurate measure.