HY 106 Lecture 29: The Beginning of the Population Explosion - ch 19
The Beginning of the Population Explosion
1. Limitations on Population Growth
1. Commonly held ideas about population that are wrong included the idea
that people married young and had large families and societies were so
ignorant that they could do nothing to control the numbers and that
population was always growing too fast
2. Until 1700, the total population of Europe grew slowly much of the time
following an irregular cyclical pattern, which had great influence on social
and economic life
3. The Black Death created a sharp drop in population and prices after
1350 and also created a labor shortage throughout Europe—increased
standard of living
4. The second great surge of population growth outstripped the growth of
agricultural production after 1500 where food prices rose more rapidly
than wages resulting in a decline in the living standards for the majority
of people throughout Europe
5. Population slowed and stopped in seventeenth-century Europe and
birthrate and death rate were about balanced and population grew about
0.5 to 1 percent in a normal year
6. In periods, increases in deaths occurred periodically in the seventeenth
century on a local scale— famine, epidemic disease, and war caused
demographic crisis
1. Famine, the result of poor farming methods and periodic crop
failures accompanied by disease killed (bubonic plague, dysentery,
and smallpox)
2. The indirect effects were more harmful than the organized killings—
war spread disease—armies passed venereal disease throughout
the countryside
2. The New Pattern of the Eighteenth Century
1. Population growth was especially dramatic after about 1750—caused by
fewer deaths
2. Fewer deaths occurred due to the disappearance of the bubonic plague
in part because of stricter measures of quarantine in Mediterranean ports
and along Austrian border
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