Weight o f Numbers

61

Ages and remained on the margins of Europe, with only small areas of territory participating in its life).83 And China, with its seventeen provinces (the eight eenth, Kansu, came under Chinese Turkestan at that time), had a density scarcely over 20 (1578).84 Yet these levels, which seem so low to us, already pointed to obvious overpopulation. Wurttemberg, the most populous area of Germany (44 inhabi tants per square kilometre85 at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was far and away the best place for the recruitment of Landsknechte; France, with a level of 34, was a vast reservoir of emigration and so was Spain, with only 17. However, the wealthy and already industrialized countries of Italy and the Netherlands supported a heavier load of people and kept them in their own lands. For overpopulation is a function both of the number of men and the resources at their disposal. A.P. Usher distinguishes three levels of population in historical demography. He places the population of the pioneer zones (thinking of the United States, he calls them frontier zones) at the bottom of the scale. This is a population at its very beginning, in a space which has not, or hardly, been developed by man. In the second stage (China, India before the eighteenth century, Europe before the twelfth or thirteenth) the population ranges between 15 and 20 people to the square kilometre. Lastly comes the stage of high density, over 20. The latter figure may seem too low. But it is clear that by traditional norms, the densities referred to above in Italy, the Netherlands and France (44, 40, 34) already correspond to demographic tension. Jean Fourastie has calculated that in France under the ancien regime, 1-5 hectares of cultivable land were required to support one man, allowing for crop rotation.86 This is close to Daniel Defoes estimate in 1709: 3 acres of good land or 4 of average land (1-2 to i"6 hectares) .87 Any demographic tension, as we shall see, meant either being forced to choose between kinds of food (essentially between bread and meat); or radically trans forming agriculture; or resorting to emigration. These comments only take us to the threshold of the basic problems of a history of population. Among other things we still need to know the relationship between the urban and rural populations (this relationship is perhaps the basic indicator of growth in earlier history) and also the form the rural groups took, according to the norms of human geography. Near St Petersburg, at the end of the eighteenth century, the sordid farms of the Finnish peasants were scattered over the countryside fairly remote from each other; the houses of the German colonists were clustered together; and by comparison the Russian villages were large concentrations.88 Central Europe north of the Alps had fairly small villages, as in Bavaria. I had the opportunity in Bohemia of looking at several surveys of the former estates of the Rosenbergs and Schwarzenbergs, near the Austrian frontier, a country of artificial lakes filled with carp, pike and perch. The central archives at Warsaw also contain many cadastral maps. I was struck by the very small size of the many villages in central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth