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Some Aspects of Population History*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
I deeply appreciate the honour which the Canadian Political Science Association has done me by inviting me to fill this vacant place in the programme of these meetings. More than most of those present, I profoundly regret the necessity for the invitation which was extended to me. Professor William Burton Hurd, the president of the Canadian Political Science Association for 1949-50, had been one of my close friends for twenty-five years. We had worked together on various research projects and we were colleagues at McMaster University. The severe illness which came upon him more than a year ago, against which he maintained a gallant struggle, but which terminated in his death last February, cut short a career of distinguished research, of brilliant teaching, and of effective university administration at a time when it had reached the height of its power. In terms of the normal span of life we had the right to expect another dozen or fifteen productive years of maturing wisdom and scholarship. The deprivation we have sustained is a serious loss to Canadian thought and life.
I do not know what topic or what aspect of his work Professor Hurd would have chosen for his presidential address this evening, but it is natural that I should turn to a field of study in which we were both deeply interested, but which I have been forced to relinquish for the past twelve years. Our interests in population studies were different but complementary. Professor Hurd was trained and took his first degree in mathematics and, as an adolescent and as a young man, he witnessed the great wave of population movement which during the half-dozen years preceding the First World War poured more than a million migrants through the portal city of Winnipeg. It was natural, therefore, that after serving with distinction in the Canadian army overseas, and after turning to economics during his deferred tenure of a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he should develop a special interest in the statistical analysis of Canadian population trends with particular reference to their growth factors, our absorptive capacity, and the problems of assimilation into a developing Canadian culture.
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- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 1950 , pp. 301 - 313
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1950
Footnotes
*
This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at Kingston, Ontario, June 8, 1950.
References
1 Field was a remarkable man, almost equally at home in the ancient classics, in both oriental and modern art, in music, or in current statistical techniques. He died in 1927, in his mid-forties before he had matured his plans of writing a study of population theory. He left only a small and fragmentary written legacy to succeeding scholars—he preferred conversation to writing. His direct influence was, therefore, somewhat restricted, and his indirect influence anonymous. See Essays on Population by James A. Field (Chicago, 1931)Google Scholar compiled and edited by some of his former students after his death.
2 Ecclesiastes v. 11 and Ecclesiasticus xvi. 1.
3 Politics, vii. 16: 15.
4 More, , Utopia (English reprints edition), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar
5 Hobbes, , Leviathan (Everyman's edition), p. 185.Google Scholar
6 Perhaps the most significant multipliers in this long period were the invention of printing and the development of ocean navigation.
7 It also requires modification in detail in the light of the anthropological data that has accumulated during the past 100 years regarding the multitude of customs and practices prevalent among both primitive and more advanced peoples which are designed to regulate their numbers. Carr-Saunders, , The Population Problem (Oxford, 1922)Google Scholar, provides a detailed and extensive review of this material. Carr-Saunders's main contribution to this aspect of population theory has been to establish the almost universal existence of attempts, however crude and imperfect, to restrict births to a tolerable number.
8 This rather elementary point was succinctly and graphically put by Sir George Knibbs, the versatile Commonwealth statistician of Australia, in his mathematical appendix to the Australian Census of 1911. “If the earth's present population be taken as low even as 1,500,000,000 (which is, of course, an under-estimate), and its land area, excluding the polar areas, be assumed to be 33,000,000,000 acres; and if further it is supposed that by some means it is possible to make the whole of this land area yield an average food equivalent of 22.8 bushels of wheat per acre per annum, the total yield would be 752,400,000,000 bushels. On the average, food consumption per capita is the equivalent of 5.7 bushels of wheat per annum, which means that the total population which could be fed with 5.7 bushels would be 132,000,000,000. At a rate of increase of population of one per cent per annum (i.e. a doubling every 70 years) it would require only 450 years to exhaust the food requirement mentioned. That no possible increase in the earth's productiveness can materially affect the question can also be readily shown. For—to postulate the impossible—let it be supposed that every acre on the earth's entire surface could produce as much as 228 bushels, that is, ten times the above amount: this being done, it would take about 680 years for the population to exhaust the food supply. The fundamental element in Malthus' contention is thus seen to be completely established.” Slightly abridged from SirKnibbs, George, Appendix A, Volume I, Census of Australia (1911) (Melbourne, 1917), p. 455.Google Scholar The 1950 world population, if increased by 1 per cent per annum for 875 years, would reach a point of “standing room only,” that is, 1 person per square yard, or over 3 million per square mile.
9 See Helleiner, K. F., “Population Movement and Agrarian Depression in the Later Middle Ages” (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. XV, no. 3, 08, 1949, pp. 368–77).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 See a particularly interesting series of population maps in Usher, A. P., An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (Boston, 1920).Google Scholar
11 For the average non-Chinese scholar the material appears almost as confusing as it is large; and even for those who have some familiarity with Chinese history and with the idiom of Chinese thought, the subject presents serious difficulties of reconciliation and interpretation. The official dynastic histories of China total well over 3,000 “volumes”; in addition there are many thousands of volumes of annals, and innumerable works by private scholars. Materials on population and related topics are scattered through all these classes of works. There are, however, a great many works devoted primarily to tax rolls, census reports, land distribution, etc. So far as I am aware no European and no modern Chinese scholar has made any systematic examination of all the available material. Among the best summaries of the basic raw materials on population in a European language is Biot, Edouard, “Sur la population de la Chine et ses variations, depuis l'an 2400 avant J.C. jusqu'au XIIIe siècle de nôtre ère” (Journal Asiatique, ser. 3, vol. I, 1836, pp. 369–94, 448–74).Google Scholar In ser. 3, vol. II, 1836, pp. 74-8, he abstracts the principal figures for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and in ser. 3, vol. V, 1838, pp. 305-31, he examines the problem of interpreting various technical terms used in the census records. These articles by Biot are chiefly a summary and examination of the section on population in the celebrated encyclopedia Wen Hsien Tung Kao compiled by Ma Tuan-lin early in the fourteenth century, and expanded by later scholars. Parker, E. H. in “A Note on Some Statistics Relating to China” (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. LXII, 1899, pp. 150 ff.)Google Scholar, prints a table giving the officially recorded population for each year from 1651 to 1860, with a few brief explanations and comments. See also Bielenstein, , “The Census of China during the Period 2-742 A.D.” (Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Bulletin 19, 1947, pp. 125–63)Google Scholar, and Nan-ming, Liu, Contributions à l'étude de la population chinoise (Geneva, 1935).Google Scholar
12 An ancient Chinese chronicler, describing the fifty years, 255-205 B.C., wrote, “Tsin in conquering the other six nations destroyed one-third of the population. In building the Great Wall 400,000 perished; in the mountain campaigns of the southern frontier 500,000 were lost; and in Korea 700,000 perished. For thirty years dead bodies filled the roads. Tsin's successor destroyed 200,000 in the trenches before Sian. Han, who finally conquered Tsin, destroyed several millions more.” Quoted in the Indo-Chinese Gleaner, no. 6, 10, 1818, p. 190.Google Scholar
13 In this, and in the later expansions of their effectively occupied area the Chinese absorbed very little foreign population, but pressed the primitive aboriginal tribes back into the hill country, southward and westward.
14 The importance of water-controls in the maintenance of Chinese agriculture and the expansion of settlement deserves special notice. Especially in rice-growing areas, a controlled water-supply is essential. Chao-ting, Chi in Key Economic Areas in Chinese History (London, 1936)Google Scholar, gives a good account of the significance of public works related to water-control, including an interesting regional-chronological analysis of the undertakings which throws much light on the direction and timing of the expansion of settlement. Chi, Li in The Formation of the Chinese People (Cambridge, 1928)Google Scholar gives a regional-chronological analysis of city wall-building which helps to illumine obscure periods of Chinese population history. See also Shan-yu, Yao, “The Geographical Distribution of Floods and Droughts in Chinese History” (Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. II, 1943, pp. 357–78).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 By way of comparison the population of Egypt which was about 5 million in the Augustan age, was only about 2½ million in 1800, rose to 11 million by 1907, and is now about 20 million. The population of India-Pakistan in 1600 was about 100 million, in 1850 about 200 million, by 1900 it was 280 million, in 1920 305 million, in 1940 385 million, and the estimate for 1950 is 420 million.
16 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a result of this trade, Spanish pieces-of-eight supplanted domestic Chinese coins as the principal currency of these southern provinces. I am indebted to Dr. L. C. Goodrich, Professor of Chinese at Columbia University, New York, for directing my attention to these and other points.
17 It should be noted that ceilings can be lowered as well as raised. In addition to the examples cited in this paper, reference may be made to Mongolia and Turkistan where a major climatic change seems to have set in 800 or 900 years ago and turned what was once a populous pastoral country into a desert.
18 Essays on Population by James A. Field, passim, but especially at pp. 385-99.
19 Except for later “accidental” births which in the United Kingdom are estimated to be about 10 per cent of all births to families who plan their births. Report of the Royal Commission on Population (1949), p. 77.Google Scholar
20 This widespread unpredicted upsurge of births has already produced a 1950 population for the United States equal to the 1960 population as projected by the United States Bureau of Census as recently as 1946. Until quite recently, the trend of births and deaths in the United States indicated a probable population in 2000 of 150 to 175 million. Reasonable projections could now be made for 200 to 240 million. (See Davis, J. S., The Population Upsurge in the United States, Food Research Institute, 1949 Google Scholar, and his article in Foreign Affairs of Apr., 1950.) Projections made for Canada a few years ago indicated 14 to 15 million for 1971. We are almost at 14 million now, and close to 18 million seems like a probable 1971 estimate. The projection of 50 million more Americans, enjoying a still higher standard of living, has interesting implications for Canadian trade, investment, and the balance of payments.