Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T15:11:11.129Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Demographic growth in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2009

Massimo Livi-Bacci
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Population and Nutrition
An Essay on European Demographic History
, pp. 1 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×