Population Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Europe

In late seventeenth-century Europe, what had been evolution in population followed by stabilization changed to population revolution. Increasing contacts with the Americas brought more sophisticated knowledge of the advantages of new foods, particularly the potato. Originally a cool-weather mountain crop in the Americas, potatoes did well in the Pyrenees, Alps, and Scottish Highlands. They also grew well in the long, damp springtime of the northwest European plain. Whatever hesitancy peasants may have felt about eating potatoes quickly passed when famine threatened; after all, people who in famines desperately consumed grass, weeds, and the bark of trees hardly would have hesitated to eat a potato. By the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century, American foods had become the principal foodstuffs of many rural folk. Various agricultural publicists promoted adoption of these foods, and peasants found that potatoes could allow subsistence on smaller plots of land. Fried potatoes soon began to be sold on the streets of Paris in the 1680s----the original French fries. Governments, eager to promote population growth as a source of military and economic strength, also backed the potato.

Along with new foods, some landowners began to introduce other innovations. The nutritional base for a population revolution combined regional changes with the use of American foods. Dutch and English farmers drained more swamps and so increased cultivable land. Agricultural reformers further promoted the use of crops such as the turnip that return valuable nitrogen to the soil. Improvements in available tools, such as growing use of the scythe instead of the sickle for harvesting, and better methods of raising livestock also spread. All this took shape from the late seventeenth century onward, building on earlier agricultural changes. At the same time, rates of epidemic disease declined, in part because of more effective government controls over the passage of people and animals along traditional plague routes from the Middle East. It was the change in foods that really counted, however.

These developments provided a framework for an unprecedented surge. In virtually every area of Europe, the population increased by 50 to 100 percent in the eighteenth century, with the greatest growth coming after 1750. The Hapsburg Empire grew from 20 million to 27 million people; Spain rose from 5 million to 10 million, and Prussia rose from 3 million to 6 million. Growth would continue throughout the nineteenth century. In Europe as a whole, population rose from 188 million in 1800 to 401 million in 1900. This was an upheaval of truly impressive proportions.

The population explosion resulted from a break in the traditional, if approximate, balance between births and deaths in European society. In England between 1700 and 1750, approximately 32.8 people were born annually for every 1,000 inhabitants, and 31.5 people died. Similarly, in Lombardy in the eighteenth century, 39 people were born and 37 people died for every 1,000 inhabitants. Clearly, a major alteration had to occur in either the birth or the mortality rate before the expansion of population could begin. In fact, both rates changed: families began to have more children, and a lower percentage of the population died each year. Lower infant death rates meant more people living to produce children of their own, though falling adult death rates also increased the number of older Europeans.

While historians continue to debate the precise balance of causes involved in these dramatic changes, basic outlines are clear. Better food and a reduction in the epidemic-disease cycle allowed more children to live to adulthood, which increased the population directly and also provided more parents for the next generation----a double impact. Rapidly increasing populations provided a new labor force for manufacturing. In the eighteenth century, this mainly involved hundreds of thousands of people, mostly rural, producing thread, cloth, and other products for market sale. This manufacturing expansion helped sustain the growing population, but it could also encourage a higher birth rate. Some people, able to earn money by their late teens, began to produce children earlier; the rate of illegitimate births went up. Others realized that having an extra child or two might help the family economy by providing additional worker-assistants. While death-rate decline was the most important source of Europe's population explosion, various changes on the birth rate side, though quite short-lived, pushed the population up as well.