181–190 of 263 posts
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But it should have kept exploding.
Why? There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
> From the dawn of humanity to the eighteenth century, human life was dominated by starvation, poverty, wars, and pandemics. Actually no, human life only started to be dominated by this after the shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies.
The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant. I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.
Even in highly religious Islamic countries, education - especially among women - seems to trump religious indoctrination when it comes to producing children.
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> Italia is a largely more catholic country than France [0], yet France has a higher fertility rate France fertility rate are boosted by its Muslim population https://mythdetector.ge/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/inline-im... .
Muslims account for about 6% of the general population in France, so I doubt that explains the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_France
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Why? There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
Not just that, but in cold economic terms there are diminishing on having large families in industrialized societies. A large broad is an asset in agrarian societies but largely a liability in an industrialized one.
But in the short term, it is a lot of sacrifice, especially for the woman who has to give birth and raise all those babies. And of course, it is a lot of work to instill values such that the family stays close, and luck such as being located in a location that is experiencing an economic boom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it should have kept exploding.
Why? There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
The fertility rate in Britain was still higher in the 1880s than it was in France back in 1800. Economically Britain was 20-50 years ahead of France but demographically France was almost a hundred years ahead.
e.g. see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-f... and https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-u...
In my estimation its worth a decline in standard of living to be free of traditional, conservative values.
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The Industrial Revolution was why they were able to colonise the world. Being much, much more productive means you can afford a lot more bullets/cannon/artillery/small arms and you need less of your population as a share growing food. Europeans were better at war than anyone else because Europe was always at war somewhere. It was geographically fragmented enough that any one power becoming hegemonic never happened ag…
This is the traditional view, but opinions have shifted recently. European colonization was driven mostly by the population boom accompanying the industrial revolution. The military advantage was real in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but that was brief compared to the timeline of the traditional explanation of Europe always being at war. For example Ming China was the first gunpowder empire and was militarily com…
However Europe still lagged both economically and population wise behind Asia at the time and industrialization hadn't really started.
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That line of thinking only goes so far, industry also allows one to simply buy resources from foreign locations without the bother of conquest and administration. It’s really a combination of many factors including Europe’s relatively high population that made it both viable and desirable.
And tbh the European demographics expansion between 1500-1800, before industrialization properly spread out from Britain [0], was the Columbian Exchange. Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too. And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asi…
And control of the global trade networks. The same reason why the seemingly insignificant Netherlands (population and area wise) were able to maintain its position as a global superpower throughout most of the 17th century before being replaced by Britain. Of course it's a bit baffling that that happened after England and Holland ceased being rivals because a Dutch army invaded Britain, overthrew it's government and put their Stadholder on the English Throne..
> In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France? It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
So this is why Europeans were able to colonize the entire world roughly in the 1700s.
But it's important to state that it wasn't Europeans, but western Europeans who colonized. Here in Romania we never colonized anyone but were colonized by western Europeans and Asians: Austrians, Russians, Turks, &c.