Until about 2,500 years ago, human societies probably shared a common concern about population: They valued reproduction as a means of replacing people lost through universally high mortality. Ancient Judaism, for example, provided the prescription to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Indeed, reproductive power was often deified, as in ancient Greece, where it was the job of a variety of goddesses to help mortals successfully bring children into the world and raise those children to adulthood. In the fifth century B.C., the writings of the school of Confucius in China discussed the relationship between population and resources (Sauvy 1969), and it was suggested that the government should move people from overpopulated to under populated areas. Nonetheless, the idea of promoting population growth was clear in the doctrine of Confucius (Keyfitz 1973).
Plato, writing in The Laws in 360 B.C., emphasized the importance of population stability rather than growth. Specifically, Plato proposed keeping the ideal community of free citizens at a constant 5,040. Interestingly, Charbit (2002) has suggested that “what inspired Plato in his choice of 5,040 is above all the fact that it is divisible by twelve, a number with a decisive sacred dimension”. Nonetheless, the number of people desired by Plato was still moderately small, because Plato felt that too many people led to anonymity, which would undermine democracy, whereas too few people would prevent an adequate division of labor and would not allow a community to be properly defended. Population size would be controlled by late marriage, infanticide, and migration (Plato 360BC). Plato was an early proponent of the doctrine that quality in humans is more important than quantity.
Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, was especially concerned that the population of a city-state not grows beyond the means of the families to support themselves. In The Politics, written in 340 B.C., he advocated that the number of children be limited by law, and that if a woman became pregnant after already having all the children that the law allowed, an abortion would be appropriate (Stangeland, 1904). This is a reminder of how ubiquitous abortion has been in human society, and echoes of this idea are found today in the one-child policy in China.
In the Roman Empire Julius and Augustus Caesar were marked by clearly pronatalist doctrines—a necessity, given the very high mortality that characterized the Roman era (Frier, 1999). In approximately 50 B.C., Cicero noted that population growth was seen by the leaders of Rome as a necessary means of replacing war casualties and of ensuring enough people to help colonize new lands. Several scholars have speculated that by the second century A.D. the birth rate in Rome may have been declining (Stangeland, 1904; Veyne, 1987).
The middle Ages in Europe, which followed the decline of Rome and its transformation from a pagan to a Christian society, were characterized by a combination of both pronatalist and antinatalist Christian doctrines. Christianity condemned polygamy, divorce, abortion, and infanticide—practices that had kept earlier Roman growth rates lower than they otherwise might have been. But the writings of Paul in the New Testament led the influential Christian leader, mystic, and writer Augustine (A.D. 354–430) to argue that virgins were the highest form of human existence. Human sexuality was a supernaturally good thing but also an important cause of sin (because most people are unable or unwilling to control their desires) (O’Donnell 2001). He believed that abstinence was the best way to deal with sexuality, but the second-best state was marriage, which existed for the purpose of procreation. His Christian philosophy held that the world has a beginning, middle, and an end, the end being eternal life in the city of God. Thus, his doctrine of other world lines held that if all men would abstain from intercourse, then “so much more speedily would the City of God be fulfilled and the end of the world hastened”.
By the fourteenth century, one of the great Arab historians and philosophers, Ibn Khaldun, was in Tunis writing about the benefits of a growing population. In particular, he argued that population growth creates the need for specialization of occupations, which in turn leads to higher incomes, concentrated especially in cities. Ibn Khaldun was not a utopian. His philosophy was that societies evolved and were transformed as part of natural and normal processes. One of these processes was that “procreation is stimulated by high hopes and resulting heightening of animal energies”.
The Renaissance began with the Venetians, who had established trade with Muslims and others as the eastern Mediterranean ceased to be a Crusade war zone in the thirteenth century. In that century, an influential Dominican monk, Thomas Aquinas, argued that marriage and family building were not inferior to celibacy, thus implicitly promoting the idea that population growth is an inherently good thing.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an historically unprecedented trade of food, manufactured goods, people, and disease between the Americas and most of the rest of the world undertaken largely by European merchants, who had the best ships and the deadliest weapons in the world (Cipolla, 1965).
This rise in trade, prompted at least in part by population growth, generated the doctrine of mercantilism among the new nation-states of Europe. Mercantilism maintained that a nation’s wealth was determined by the amount of precious metals it had in its possession, which were acquired by exporting more goods than were imported, with the difference (the profit) being stored in precious metals. The catch here was that a nation had to have things to produce to sell to others, and the idea was that the more workers you had, the more you could produce. Furthermore, if you could populate the new colonies, you would have a ready-made market for your products. Thus population growth was seen as essential to an increase in national revenue, and mercantilist writers sought to encourage it by a number of means, including penalties for non-marriage, encouragements to get married, lessening penalties for illegitimate births, limiting out-migration (except to their own colonies), and promoting immigration of productive laborers. It is important to keep in mind that these doctrines were concerned with the wealth and welfare of a specific country, not all of human society.
Mercantilist doctrines were supported by the emerging demographic analyses of people like John Graunt, William Petty, and Edmund Halley (all English) in the seventeenth century and Johann Peter Süssmilch, an eighteenth-century chaplain in the army of Frederick the Great of Prussia (now Germany). In 1662, John Graunt, analyzed the series of Bills of Mortality in the first known statistical analysis of demographic data. Here he discovered that for every 100 people born in London, only 16 were still alive at age 36 and only 3 at age 66 and he suggesting very high levels of mortality.
In 1693, Edmund Halley became the first scientist to elaborate on the probabilities of death; Halley came across a list of births and deaths kept for the city of Breslau in Silesia (now Poland). From these data, Halley used the life-table technique to determine that the expectation of life in Breslau between 1687 and 1691 was 33.5 years (Dublin et al.1949).
Then, in the eighteenth century, Sussmilch built on the work of Graunt and others and added his own analyses to the observation of the regular patterns of marriage, birth, and death in Prussia and believed that he saw in these the divine hand of God ruling human society. His view was that a larger population was always better than a smaller one, and, in direct contradistinction to Plato, he valued quantity over quality. He believed that indefinite improvements in agriculture and industry would postpone overpopulation so far into the future that it wouldn’t matter.
The issue of population growth was more than idle speculation, because we know with a fair amount of certainty that the population of England doubled during the eighteenth century. More generally, during the period from about 1650 to 1850, Europe as a whole experienced rather dramatic population growth as a result of the disappearance of the plague, the introduction of the potato from the Americas, and evolutionary changes in agricultural practice—probably a response to the Little Ice Age—that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The increasing interest in population encouraged the publication of two important essays on population size, one by David Hume 1752 and the other by Robert Wallace 1761, which were then to influence Malthus.
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POPULATION by John R. Weeks
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