Demographics and the Course of Peoples
History can often be explained by population sizes
I recently began a series on the medieval geopolitics of Asia over at The Diplomat, the Historical Great Powers of Asia. In my second piece, focused on East Asia, I described the demographics of some world regions around the year 1000 CE: China had 80 million people (Japan had around 7 million), “South Asia had 85.2 million people…Europe contained 56.4 million,” and Inner Asia had 5 million. The world population around this time is estimated to have been around 300 million. The more one thinks about historical demographics, the more evident the correlation between many historical trends and population becomes.
First of all, consider that throughout most of history, the vast majority of people have lived in three regions: China (and neighboring East Asian societies), India, and Europe, with a smaller but somewhat dense population in the habitable areas of the Middle East. In more recent times, Southeast Asia, West Africa, eastern South America, Mexico, and the eastern United States have also acquired concentrations of people, but the overwhelming majority of humans lived in China, India, and Europe until 50 years ago, and these are still amongst the most densely populated parts of the world. Which civilizations influenced other world cultures are largely a function of this fact. It is well-known that India and China are home to large populations, along with other nearby countries — all of which share an agricultural emphasis on rice — such as Bangladesh, Japan, and Indonesia.
Rice-growing societies tend to have high populations, especially when there are no negative inputs, but their populations may not be as stable as wheat-growing societies in western Eurasia. Urban life in wheat-growing western Eurasia seems to have been more stable and consistent over time: there are many important, large cities in Europe and the Middle East that have been inhabited for millennia, whereas many of the big cities of Asia are newer. Many historically large cities in China and India were tied to a specific kingdom or dynasty and blossomed and disappeared in tandem with the fortunes of those states; when these fell, urban centers moved to a new location to reflect the change in power.
It is less well-known that Europe, sundered into many countries, is also a high population zone, but today, Europe, with 750 million people, is still more populated than West Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East.
Contrary to the popular notion of medieval Europe being a backwater, it was generally more populated and richer, per capita, than the Middle East, and even India and China. Azar Gat, writing in War in Human Civilization, notes:
“…the world’s most advanced historical civilizations emerged along the crescent-shaped belt that spanned eastern, southern, and western Eurasia, stretching almost continuously all the way from Japan to Europe. Along this belt temperatures were sufficiently high and water abundant enough to produce densely populated agricultural societies that, in AD 1500, comprised an estimated 70 per cent of the world’s population. The fact that the belt lay on the continental rim bordering oceans and inner seas was a crucial factor. It both contributed to the favourable climatic conditions and facilitated long-range bulk transportation, which in pre-industrial societies was mainly confined to water…the revived-upstart European civilization, as it emerged from around the year 1000 AD, was not the small, backward, and remote appendix to a huge Eurasian landmass that it is sometimes portrayed to have been. Most of Asia in fact consisted of arid and semi-arid steppe. Thus in both size and population, Europe (excluding Russia) was on average larger than south-west Asia [the Middle East], only marginally smaller than India, and about half as large as China. Endowed with a more temperate climate and more even rainfall patterns, her population was more evenly spread and apparently enjoyed greater wealth per capita from as early as 1400 AD, especially in animal stock.”
Another very striking this about populations in premodern times was how small they often were. Europe may have had around 55 million people in 1000 CE, but the nearby Middle East had far fewer people. Iraq had around two million, Egypt, five million, Anatolia, seven million, and Iran 4.5 million. A few centuries earlier, Arabia, at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, may have had two million people. The Crusader states, in the modern Levant, may have had around 600,000 people. The Middle East, in short, may have had 20 million individuals at most in around 1000-1200 CE. This may well explain why Europe became the more powerful civilization over time, and even in ancient times, there were more Greeks and Romans than Persians. More people mean more production and military mobilization. The Middle East had a greater proportion of the world population in 1 CE, especially compared to the rice-growing regions of East and Southeast Asia outside of China; by 1500 CE, the populations of rice-growing regions of eastern Eurasia really began to take off, perhaps due to increased technological or organizational capability, whereas it is known that much of the Middle East was ravaged by nomads and went from an agrarian to a pastoral economy. Today, with a population of around 500 million, the Middle East-North Africa region has somewhat rebounded.
It was hard to control a global caliphate from a base of two million people in Iraq, particularly more populous regions such as Egypt, let alone expand the Abbasid empire. This also explains the course of the modern world in the 20th century. In 1900, there were 200 million Muslims in the world, around 12 percent of the world’s population, and almost half of them lived in British India or the Dutch East Indies. There were more Hindus in the world, and there were more speakers of Japanese than Arabic, although this is is no longer true. Places with many people were places that were able to influence world cultures and leverage the benefits of an industrialized population. South Korea has one of the top ten GDPs in the world today, which is a function partially of its location and population size, but for most of history, Korea was geopolitically irrelevant.
Needless to say, a large population is not always a guarantee of a state’s or culture’s ability to survive or dominate others. In fact, the converse was often true. Smaller groups — though not as lopsidedly smaller as once thought (i.e. a million Mongols were 1/80th the population of China a thousand years ago, whereas the ratio today is 1/400) — emanating from less-populated areas, such as the Arabian Peninsula, the Mongolian steppes, and the Germanic lands often ruled over larger farming populations. A well-trained and well-fed army of mobile warriors could literally overpower and rule over societies of grain-fed, overtaxed, disarmed peasants, who are notoriously hard to mobilize, arm, and supply for long periods of time, and who perform poorly against armies that have lived their entire lives on horseback. Until the advent of gunpowder, the technological differences between various societies were not overwhelming, though this shouldn’t discount the role of technology (for example, chariots) in military conquests. All this conforms with the 14th century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun’s theory of asabiyyah whereby tribal groups with greater social cohesion and solidarity often take over their “laxer” sedentary neighbors.
I was particularly surprised to learn about premodern Southeast Asian demographics, an area that is relatively populous today. This region had a population comparable to Inner Asia, which goes to show that agriculture was not always an inherently superior strategy of acquiring food for a population. According to some sources, Southeast Asia in 1500 had around 6 million people. Other scholars have written about similarly low populations in tropical Brazil and Africa, which goes to show how hard it is to eke out a living in densely forested and disease-ridden biomes. In his great work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, anthropologist James C. Scott has written about the great difficulty that many states have had in acquiring and retaining manpower, given that premodern agriculture offered a precarious and undesirable (tax-burdened) existence. He deserves to be quoted at some length:
“In its crudest version, the formula goes something like this: Political and military supremacy requires superior access to concentrated manpower close at hand. Concentrated manpower, in turn, is feasible only in a setting of compact, sedentary agriculture, and such agro-ecological concentrations are possible, before the twentieth century in Southeast Asia, only with irrigated rice. These relationships are, however, not deterministic. Padi fields are easier to create and maintain in river valleys and well-watered plateaus. But they can and have been created, through prodigious feats of terracing, in steep mountainous areas where we might least expect them, such as among the Hani along the upper reaches of the Red River in Vietnam, among the Ifugao in northern Luzon, and in Bali. Similarly, there are ecological settings suitable for padi fields where they have not been developed. Nor, as we have seen, is the link between padi fields and states invariable. States are easier to create around a wet-rice core, but there are wet-rice cores without states and, occasionally, states without wet-rice cores. Irrigated rice, then, is best understood politically as the most convenient and typical means of concentrating population and foodstuffs. Without a substantial wet-rice core, such concentration would have had to be achieved by other means—by slavery, for example, or by tolls on trade routes, or by plunder.
The need to concentrate population and, at the same time, the difficulty of doing so was inscribed in the demographic given that Southeast Asia’s land mass was only one-seventh as populated as was that of China in 1600. As a consequence, in Southeast Asia control over people conferred control over land, while in China control over land increasingly conferred control over people. The abundance of arable land in Southeast Asia favored shifting cultivation, a pattern of farming that often yielded higher returns for less labor and produced a substantial surplus for the families practicing it. What constituted an advantage for the cultivators, however, was profoundly prejudicial to the ambitions of would-be state-makers. Shifting cultivation requires far more land than irrigated rice and therefore disperses population; where it prevails, it appears to ‘impose an upper limit of population density of about 20–30 per square kilometer.’
Once again, concentration is the key. It matters little how wealthy a kingdom is if its potential surplus of manpower and grain is dispersed across a landscape that makes its collection difficult and costly…Conditions in a flourishing wet-rice heartland, then, were favorable to the development of what might be called the premodern state’s ideal subjects. That ideal is represented by densely packed cultivators of permanent grain fields who produce a considerable annual surplus. Having put considerable labor into their padi fields, over generations, perhaps, they are reluctant to pack up and leave. They and their rice fields are, above all, fixed in space, legible, taxable, conscriptable, and close at hand…The successful premodern Southeast Asian state strove constantly to assemble the population it needed and to hold it in place. Demography was not on its side. Natural disasters, epidemics, crop failures, war, not to mention an ever-beckoning frontier, constantly threatened a tenuous state. A Chinese manual on governance, from more than a millennium earlier, when China’s demography, too, was unfavorable to state-making, put the danger starkly: ‘If the multitudes scatter and cannot be retained, the city-state will become a mound of ruins.’ Archeologists working in Southeast Asia find no shortage of such mounds.”
While states definitely benefited from large populations of settled peasants, life wasn’t all that great for these peasants, and these people often sort to escape state control, whether in Southeast Asia as mentioned above, or in places like Russia, where peasants would run away from the land to become Cossacks. Some revisionist historians have even suggested that much of the Roman population was indifferent to the fall of the Roman Empire, because it actually led to the betterment of their local conditions — lower taxes, more local production and economic activity, less exploitation by a distant imperial center. While learning and elite culture were certainly more sophisticated in advanced sedentary societies, the life of an average Mongol tribesman may well have been better than that of an average Chinese peasant.
A comparison of the populations of the later Ottoman and Safavid Persian empires with other non-Middle Eastern empires around 1600 CE underlines the relationship between population sizes and the course of civilizations as technology and shifting trade patterns gave densely settled, populated societies an edge. The Ottoman Empire, which included most of the Arab world, including Egypt, the Balkans, and Anatolia is estimated to have had around 20-30 million people. The Safavid Empire of Iran had around 8-10 million people. Much of the Middle East’s population was nomadic — and may have become even more so over time from the days of Sumer onward — and was hard for the state to pin down and control. At the dawn of the 20th century, half of Iran’s population of 10 million was said to be nomadic.
The Mughal Empire, which ruled northern and central India at this time had a whooping 150 million people (and there were more people in peninsular India outside of the Mughal Empire). The Ming Dynasty of China had a similar number of people, perhaps somewhere in the ballpark of 160-200 million people, and Japan contained 12 million (which would grow over the next two centuries to 30 million, giving Japan more people than the Ottoman Empire). Spanish Mexico, the most populated region in the Americas is reported to have hit a nadir of around 1.5 million people around this time. Information on Africa is hard to find, but the estimate for the entire continent around this time is between 50 and 100 million people. Meanwhile, Europe had nearly 80 million people in 1500 CE, about half that of India and China, but well ahead of other regions of the world. France had 20 million people, and modern-day Germany, 16 million.
These are all examples of the role that relative population balances between different regions play in how these civilizations evolved, and their power and cultural differential in relation to each other. A final thought, one that I will elaborate on in future posts: James C. Scott alludes to the precariousness of agrarian civilization and hits upon the process by which languages, religious, and cultures are replaced. Sometimes, cultures are replaced. Sometimes, this is because of direct colonization or the overwhelming demographics of the replacing population. Sometimes, the culture of the smaller, invading population, or the “less advanced” population is assimilated into the population of the conquered, but there are also times when the smaller population is able to impose its culture or even replace the dominant population in a region. This requires further explanation, and a study of individual circumstances: for example, Arabic did not replace Persian when the Arabs conquered the Sassanid Empire in the 7th century CE, but Turkish replaced Greek after the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia in the 11th century CE.
According to Christopher Ehret, an American scholar of African historical linguistics, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies. Before the past few decades, most people were illiterate, and there were no radios or computers: ideas, languages, and religion could only spread through literal, physical oral communication. If one arrives in a society with a new religion, and converts 10 people out of a 100, that’s a lot more of a base to build on than converting 10 people out of a 1,000 people, which is probably why Islam spread faster in Indonesia than India and why the Yamnaya people, who spread the Indo-European languages, were able to do so at a time when Europe had a population of five to seven million spread across the entire continent. Imagine a few thousand horsemen spreading a new language over a population of a few hundred million! The Mongols did not do it in China. Yet, fascinatingly, I recently talked to a linguist who had a model — in the context of India — of how a very small, elite group could effect a large-scale linguistic shift in a society over time. I will discuss this in a forthcoming post on new books and developments on the topic of the origin and spread of Indo-European languages.