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Home > Activities > Committees >Historical Demography (1997-2001) > Seminar Outline

Seminar on the History of World Population in the Second Millenium

Florence, Italy, June 2001
Organised by the IUSSP Committee on Historical Demography and the Italian Society of Historical Demography (ISHD)

Outline

The second millennium

As the twentieth century is drawing to a close, we are in an unparalleled position to have an overview of the history of population over the entire thousand-year period, which saw a dramatic increase in the number of human beings. Around 1000, the population of the world is estimated to have been below 300 millions; it now stands at 6 billion. The challenge to all population historians is to explain this rise in population and describe the historical implications for our understanding of the last millennium.

An effort to estimate world population can be traced back to the seventeenth century, especially to the work of Gregory King. Almost all the modern attempts, however, were made after 1960 (John Durand 1977, Jean-Noäl Biraben 1979, and Colin McEverdy and Richard Jones 1978). Their estimates differ mainly because they put different population totals for Western Europe, India and China. Thanks to the recent advance of research in historically-minded population studies on various parts of the world, however, we are now in a better position to assess changing population totals over the past centuries, not just for those large regions, but also for other smaller regions. The progress of research in this field has also led us to a better understanding of how past populations changed. This is essentially the issue that Malthus addressed, in terms of both positive and preventive checks. It may still be difficult to account for population changes in these Malthusian terms for all the world regions during the entire second millennium, but for several regions, it is now possible to go back well beyond the start of the so-called modern era.

The first aim of our project

What we want to do is to bring together all the research achievements by specialists on various geographical areas of the world, in the hope that the body of knowledge thus acquired will transcend the conventional chronologies and geographical boundaries of population historians. It is, of course, not quite easy to go beyond 1500, but the progress of historical demography since the 1950s has enriched enormously our knowledge of how population has changed. By utilising nominative lists of population, village registers and genealogies of kin groups over a long period, historical demographers have now estimated mortality, fertility and nuptiality variables for past populations, shedding new light on the interrelationships between the demographic variables. The knowledge thus obtained, in turn, enable us to understand macro-level population movements better. The insight into demographic workings of pre-modern societies is of great help to make the history of population in earlier periods more comprehensible on a regional as well as a global scale.

The second aim: related themes in world history

Over the past thousand years, society, polity and economy also changed. Man's own horizon, geographical as well as intellectual, expanded, and humans' relationships with the physical as well as the micro-biological environment underwent fundamental transformations. The population history of the second millennium, therefore, should be tied with global histories of other aspects of the mankind, not confined by the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. The second aim of our conference, therefore, is to understand how people's demographic behaviour was shaped by those changing forces, and how the changing population size affected the courses of economic, social and institutional histories.

The structure of the conference

The IUSSP's Committee on Historical Demography proposes to hold a conference on the "History of World Population in the Second Millennium". The meeting will be divided into two sections. The first will assess the commissioned papers on the following 12 regions of the world.

North America;
Central America;
South America;
North Africa;
Sub-Saharan Africa;
Western Europe;
Eastern Europe;
Mediterranean;
Middle East and Central Asia;
South and Southeast Asia;
East Asia;
Australia and Micronesia.

Each author will be asked to provide us with a series of population totals over the second millennium, and as far as data permit, to discuss how such changes were brought about. There will be no presentation by the author at the conference. Instead, two invited discussants will discuss the 12 regional papers, and offer arguments and syntheses of their own.

The second part consists of 12 thematic papers. The themes chosen are:

The disappearance of feudalism and the rise of free labour and mobility;
Malthus revisited;
The growth of a global economy;
The epidemiological unification of disease history;
The development of a common world culture;
urbanisation;
Female emancipation;
The demographic transition revisited;
The global impact of climate on human populations;
The global impact of humans on planetary ecology;
The attenuation of kinship and the rise of individualism;
Global political transformation: the disappearance of empires and the rise of nation states.

The authors of this session will be asked to present their papers at the meeting, followed by discussants' comments and discussions.

The contact organisers for this seminar within the Committee are Marco Breschi and Osamu Saito