Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
people to have small families are everywhere, and the gov-
ernment supports a network of family planning clinics
even in the remotest villages. The southern States con-
tinue to report the lowest growth rates, correlating with
higher wealth and higher education levels and literacy
rates of females in these States. The eastern and northern
States, the poorer regions of India, continue to report the
highest growth rates.
Our world map of growth rates is a global overview, a
mere introduction to the complexities of the geography of
population. The example of India demonstrates that what
we see at the scale of a world map does not give us the
complete story of what is happening within each country
or region of the world. Both India and China have over 1
billion people, but as a result of the higher growth rates in
India (1.64) and declining growth rates in China (.5),
demographers predict India will become the most popu-
lated country in the world in 2030.
the kind of shift that Britain experienced, but other places
either have gone through a similar shift or are in the pro-
cess of doing so. The initial low-growth phase, which in
all places endured for most of human history, is marked by
high birth rates and equally high death rates. In this phase,
epidemics and plagues keep the death rates high among all
sectors of the population—in some cases so high that they
exceed birth rates. For Great Britain and the rest of
Europe, death rates exceeded birth rates during the
bubonic plague (the Black Death) of the 1300s, which hit
in waves beginning in Crimea on the Black Sea, diffusing
through trade to Sicily and other Mediterranean islands,
and moving through contagious diffusion and the travel of
rats (which hosted the vector, the fl ea, that spread the
plague) north from the Mediterranean.
Once the plague hit a region, it was likely to return
within a few years time, creating another wave of human suf-
fering. Estimates of plague deaths vary between one-quarter
and one-half of the population, with the highest death rates
recorded in the West (where trade among regions was the
greatest) and the lowest in the East (where cooler climates
and less connected populations delayed diffusion). Across
Europe, many cities and towns were left decimated. Histo-
rians estimate the population of Great Britain fell from
nearly 4 million when the plague began to just over 2 mil-
lion when it ended.
Famines also limited population growth. A famine in
Europe just prior to the plague likely facilitated the diffu-
sion of the disease by weakening the people. Records of
famines in India and China during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries document millions of people perishing. At
other times, destructive wars largely wiped out population
gains. Charts of world population growth show an increase
in the world's population from 250 million people 2000
years ago to 500 million people in 1650 and 1 billion people
in 1820. However, the lines connecting these points in time
should not trend steadily upward. Rather, they turn up
and down frequently, refl ecting the impacts of disease, crop
failures, and wars.
The beginning of the Industrial Revolution ush-
ered in a period of accelerating population growth in
Europe. Before workers could move from farms to facto-
ries, a revolution in agriculture had to occur. The eigh-
teenth century marked the Second Agricultural
Revolution, so named because the fi rst occurred thou-
sands of years earlier (see Chapter 11). During the Sec-
ond Agricultural Revolution, farmers improved seed
selection, practiced new methods of crop rotation, selec-
tively bred livestock to increase production and quality,
employed new technology such as the seed drill,
expanded storage capacities, and consolidated landhold-
ings for greater effi ciencies. With more effi cient farming
methods, the number of people needed in farming
decreased and the food supply increased, thereby sup-
porting a higher population overall.
The Demographic Transition
The high population growth rates now occurring in many
poorer countries are not necessarily permanent. In
Europe, population growth changed several times in the
last three centuries. Demographers used data on baptisms
and funerals from churches in Great Britain to study
changes in birth and death rates of the population. They
expected the rate of
natural increase
of the population—
the difference between the number of births and the num-
ber of deaths—to vary over different periods of time.
Demographers calculated the
crude birth rate
(CBR),
the number of live births per year per thousand people in
the population (Fig. 2.13), and the
crude death rate
(CDR), the number of deaths per year per thousand peo-
ple (Fig. 2.14).
The church data revealed that before the Industrial
Revolution began in Great Britain in the 1750s, the coun-
try experienced high birth rates and high death rates,
with small differences between the two. The result was
low population growth. After industrialization began, the
death rates in Great Britain began to fall as a result of bet-
ter and more stable access to food and improved access to
increasingly effective medicines. With a rapidly falling
death rate and a birth rate that remained high, Britain's
population explosion took place. From the late 1800s
through two world wars in the 1900s, death rates contin-
ued to fall and birth rates began to fall, but stayed higher
than death rates, resulting in continued population
growth but at a slower rate. Finally, in recent history,
both the birth rate and death rate in Great Britain
declined to low levels, resulting in slow or stabilized pop-
ulation growth.
Demographers call the shift in population growth
the
demographic transition
. The transition is typically
modeled as shown in Figure 2.15. The model is based on
