Compared with Britain, industrial transformation occurred more slowly in nineteenth-century France and Italy, forcing two early marginalists from the Lausanne school to pay continued attention to family poverty among the agrarian masses. Although Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto wanted to explain and resolve family impoverishment by securing a market whose outcomes correlated with what families deserved, the two economists diverged on the causes of family impoverishment, and on the best ways to respond. Walras’s ‘social economics’ rejected a popular view that family ‘immorality’ was the cause of family impoverishment, instead identifying badly designed government policy as the key factor. Pareto’s studies of population suggested the opposite position. Assuming government corruption and protective policies had been dismantled, Pareto assigned primary responsibility for poverty to egoistical parents, who should have anticipated cyclical economic decline before having children. Describing Malthus’s rejection of contraception as ‘not very scientific’, Pareto studied ‘people as they are’, finding families to be already limiting fertility through delayed sexual union or contraceptive knowledge. This suggested to Pareto that poverty would disappear spontaneously. Neither Walras nor Pareto explained how to manage existing family destitution or unanticipated economic crisis, and they did not problematise the many structural impediments to escaping one’s class.

In Victorian times, the family’s problems were viewed by one influential British economist, Alfred Marshall, through the lens of public consternation with urban family impoverishment. Marshall provided a critical extension of the population studies of late eighteenth-century clergyman, T. Robert Malthus, for whom poverty occurred when family reproduction exceeded the capacity of agricultural production. On the one hand, Marshall argued that Malthus had not recognised how larger populations could be sustained by the productivity gains of industrialisation. On the other hand, Marshall extended Malthus’s criticisms of the Old Poor Laws to the New laws too, which were rejected for encouraging poor families to have more children than they could adequately sustain. Marshall also followed Malthus by rejecting calls by Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, and others for working-class access to contraceptive knowledge and birth-control techniques. Describing and evaluating class-based behaviour in factory families, artisanal families, and families of the higher class, Marshall identified the effects on labour productivity and living standards of patterns of family formation, fertility, mortality, household–market labour division, educational investment, and aged care provision. However, his policies supported gendered divides, overlooking how male breadwinning did not convert into an adequate family income, and rejecting activist demands for women’s rights.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.

The World Health Organization developed a framework for family and community nursing that identified a role for community health nurses, identifying the needs of their communities and addressing them. Primary health care shifted the focus from a disease model treating illness to a preventative model that focused on population and social health, community development, health promotion, illness prevention and early intervention, including community nurses as part of this movement.

What drove the transformation of Britain’s population, economy and environment so that by 1819 it was arguably the most rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society in the world?

Later Roman Britain saw a series of significant changes in the pattern of settlement which indicate a transfer in the emphasis of activity from the cores of the civitates to their peripheries. Whilst these changes affected urban settlements and industrial production, a series of alterations can also be observed in the rural settlement pattern. In the Principate, we saw rural Romanization characterized by the development of villas, and this pattern was shown to be deeply rooted in the existing settlement system. In the later Roman period a series of developments can be observed which reflect a radical deviation from that established in the early Empire. We see an increase in the number of villas, together with alterations in their character, the emergence of nucleated settlements (which may be described loosely as villages) and finally a diversification of production involving innovation in agricultural methods. Taken together with the changes already described in chapters 6 and 7, we may characterize these as representing a flowering of the countryside and the culmination of Roman Britain’s achievements. To be understood, they must be examined within the context of the structural alterations we have already described.

“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” is by far the longest of Hume’s essays. Although it does not always receive the attention it merits, it is a very important text not only in relation to Hume’s political thought as a whole but also for a full understanding of the intellectual history of the long eighteenth century as it partook in a set of wide-ranging conversations about the causes of demographic growth in which T. R. Malthus, amongst others, became engaged. This chapter first revisits Montesquieu’s position on the issue of the relative populousness of ancient and modern nations to show not only the true nature of the Frenchman’s views and that of the dispute between him and Hume but also the extent to which Hume’s reading of Montesquieu provided the basis for the Scot’s reflections on republics, liberty, the status of women and slavery in that essay and elsewhere. It underscores the centrality of demography to political debates of the period.

Models for the growth of interacting bacteria, structured populations, game theory and pattern formation.

This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

Chapter 1 explores the link between the research process and theory and the role of statistics in scientific discovery. Discrete and continuous variables, the building blocks of methodology, take center stage, with clear and elaborate examples and their applicability to scales of measurement and measures of central tendency. Understanding statistics allows us to become better consumers of science and make better judgments and decisions about claims and facts allegedly supported by statistical results.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.