Weight o f Numbers

33

unmitigated blessing. It is sometimes beneficial and sometimes the reverse. When a population increases, its relationship to the space it occupies and the wealth at its disposal is altered. It crosses critical thresholds1 and at each one its entire structure is questioned afresh. The matter is never simple and unequivocal. A growing increase in the number of people often ends, and always ended in the past, by exceeding the capacity of the society concerned to feed them. This fact, commonplace before the eighteenth century and still true today in some back ward countries, sets an insuperable limit to further improvement in conditions. For when they are extreme, demographic increases lead to a deterioration in the standard of living; they enlarge the always horrifying total of the underfed, poor and uprooted. A balance between mouths to be fed and the difficulties of feeding them, between manpower and jobs, is re-established by epidemics and famines (the second preceding or accompanying the first). These extremely crude ad justments were the predominant feature of the centuries of the ancien regime. Looking more closely at Western Europe, one finds that there was a pro longed population rise between 1100 and 1350, another between 1450 and 1650, and a third after 1750; the last alone was not followed by a regression. Here we have three broad and comparable periods of biological expansion. The first two, which both fall within the period that interests us, were followed by recessions, one extremely sharp, between 1350 and 1450, the next rather less so, between 1650 and 1750 (better described as a slowdown than as a recession). Nowadays, any population growth in backward countries brings a fall in the standard of living, but fortunately not such a tragic drop in numbers (at least not since 1945). Every recession solves a certain number ofproblems, removes pressures and benefits the survivors. It is pretty drastic, but none the less a remedy. Inherited property became concentrated in a few hands immediately after the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century and the epidemics which followed and aggravated its effects. Only good land continued to be cultivated (less work for greater yield). The standard of living and real earnings of the survivors rose. Thus in Languedoc between 1350 and 1450, the peasant and his patriarchal family were masters of an abandoned countryside. Trees and wild animals overran fields that once had flourished.2 But soon the population again increased and had to win back the land taken over by animals and wild plants, clear the stones from the fields and pull up trees and shrubs. Mans increase itself became a burden and again brought about his poverty. From 1560 or 1580 onwards in France, Spain, Italy and probably the whole Western world, population again became too dense.3 The monotonous story begins afresh and the process goes into reverse. Man only prospered for short intervals and did not realize it until it was already too late. But these long fluctuations can also be found outside Europe. At approxi mately the same times, China and India probably advanced and regressed in the same rhythm as the West, as though all humanity were in the grip of a primordial cosmic destiny that would make the rest of mans history seem, in comparison,