Population Crises and Population Cycles

In the hydraulic societies, with their huge population densities, we have seen that the effects of the crises were cumulative, causing a growing load of stress culture and the decline of civilisation. In North-Western Europe, with its low population densities (until the 19th century), it was the effects of the relief periods and renaissances that accumulated, causing continuous progress even during the crises and eventually the technological breakthrough. Figure 1 does indeed show that the rate of technological progress stepped up during relief periods and slowed down during crises, including that of the 20th century, which is living on the capital of the previous relief period (Table 1). But Figure 1 also shows that progress acquired a momentum that carried it through even the crisis periods, and in this region alone we can study this continuous progress, the fruit of low population density.

The renaissances (see Table 3 of the sixth paper in the series) were marked by higher real wages and general standard of living (see Figure 3 of the first paper), greater social mobility, greater freedom, splendid cultural achievements, and improved amenities of life - for instance, the splendid medieval system of public baths and lavatories which was repeatedly broken down during crises, with obvious repercussions on health. The simple sequence of Table 3 of the sixth paper (and Figure 1 of this) is misleading, because population cycles were staggered in different parts of the region. In the mid-14th century, the Kingdom of Bohemia (modern Czech Republic) was enjoying a renaissance, with a flourishing university, a Holy Roman Emperor, high real wages, and improved peasant rights; hence it scarcely suffered at all from the first visit of the Black Death, which was reducing the population of the rest of North-Western Europe by about one-third. Over-population, with all its consequences, developed in Bohemia later in the century, causing much higher mortality than elsewhere when the Black Death returned in about 1380, and eventually a terrible civil war (1419-37) when the rest of the region was beginning to enjoy the Early Modern Renaissance. This began in the Low Countries, Southern Germany, and especially Northern Italy. France, the most seriously overpopulated country in the region, had suffered so severely in the Medieval crisis that her renaissance was delayed, and it was soon interrupted by the religious wars (1559-93). The English renaissance was interrupted by a short sharp crisis, with a serious epidemic, in the 1550s, which so reduced the population it ushered in the glorious Elizabethan flowering. Finally, at the height of the Early Modern crisis elsewhere, the Dutch had a renaissance of ancient Northern Mediterranean type, based on their temporary supremacy in world trade. But through all these vicissitudes, technological progress continued throughout the region.

In the Roman Empire, the only important labour-saving devices were the animal-powered Gallic reaping machine, used and probably invented in North-Western Europe, and the vertical water-mill, also used mainly there, and in any case on a tiny scale - a few dozens altogether. In early medieval North-Western Europe, water-mills were legion: 5624 were recorded in England in 1086, and at the same time France may have had 20,000. ‘This hydraulic energy was equivalent to that which could be deployed by one-quarter of the adult population of the kingdom’ (Debeir et al., 1991). Some time before 1137, the English invented the rotating vertical wind-mill: there were at least 56 in England by 1200, and in the next century they diffused all over North-Western Europe. Tidal mills appeared in the 12th century, steam bellows in the 13th. The mills were used for grinding corn, forging iron, tanning, fulling, making paper, sawing, brewing, polishing armour, and crushing anything from olives to ore. Many of these uses depended on the invention of the cam, which the Chinese had used only for hulling rice, and the Northern Mediterranean peoples only for making toys. The mechanisation of fulling has been called as important a development as the mechanisation of spinning and weaving in the 18th century. During the medieval crisis, fear of unemployment caused some opposition to fulling mills, but nothing could stop their advance.

Medieval technologists enjoyed great prestige. There was a widespread individualism and thirst for personal glory new in world history. In the Gothic cathedrals, thousands of craftsmen proudly signed their work. In classical Athens, the greatest of all Greek sculptors, Phidias, died in prison, accused of blasphemously sneaking a self-portrait into a religious composition. In medieval France, with complete impunity, the great sculptor Gislebertus carved his name just beneath the feet of Christ in the centre of the West facade of Autun Cathedral.

‘In the 12th and 13th centuries, .... there was born .... a new conscious empirical science’ (Crombie, 1969). Scientists and technologists worked together. Pierre de Maricourt, author of a brilliant study of magnetism, was a near neighbour and probably friend of the versatile technologist Villard de Honnecourt. The development of clockwork was a joint achievement of science and technology. During the population crises, there was some censorship of science, and some scientists suffered seriously (Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Cardano, Harriot and Galileo). But the censorship was nothing like as bad as that in the population crisis of late fifth-century (BC) Athens, or in the Islamic world from the 16th to the 19th centuries, when virtually all scientific activity was banned.

In the 14th century, block printing reached North-Western Europe, ultimately from China. The Chinese had also invented movable type, but this was of little importance until combined with the alphabetic scripts of Europe. But between 1439 and 1450 Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg reinvented movable type for printing books, and mechanised printing by devising the press. This supreme invention gave science the momentum to advance spectacularly right through the Early Modern population crisis, and ensured that when the Long Renaissance began science and technology were more closely integrated than ever: Newton’s discoveries about light and colour were reported to the Royal Society in 1672, and by 1704 they were being applied, by James Christopher le Blon, to the problem of printing in colour.

Between 1670 and 1750, North-Western Europe enjoyed the priceless gift of a near-stable population. Malthus discovered the reason: the region had achieved (especially during this period) unprecedentedly low birth-rates, thanks to a change in the pattern of marriage (Table 2). The resulting labour shortage in the British textile industry led to explicit demands for labour-saving inventions (e.g. in 1733, 1757, 1764, 1772, 1792, 1800) and even the offer of prizes for them (1760s). The demand was met by a number of new devices (Table 3), and the expanding textile industry launched the industrial revolution (Figure 2, Table 3). Unfortunately, the birth-rates did not keep pace with the lowering death-rates, and populations grew again, producing an incipient crisis - the Napoleonic Wars, unemployment and cheap labour after 1815 slowing down the revolution, and famine in the Hungry (Eighteen-) Forties. A temporary solution like that of the ancient Northern Mediterranean kept the Long Renaissance going until 1914, and made possible the second phase of the revolution (steel and electricity, Table 3): between 1851 and 1931 eighteen million people emigrated from the British Isles, and seventeen from the rest of North-Western Europe, and by the 1870s Britain was importing more than half her wheat. But birth rates continued higher than death rates, and in the appalling population explosion of the 20th century North-Western Europe reached hydraulic population densities (see Figure 1 and Tables 2 and 3 of the sixth paper), and all the precious benefits of low density were thrown away. The sad results we shall consider in a later paper, when we come to the present world population crisis.