Over 5000 years, the world population has grown from 10 million to 8 billion. Yet the number of separate tribes and states has shrunk from tens of thousands to a few hundred, despite an increase in the number of states during the 100 years. This book traces these historical macro-trends, contributing a new perspective through multidisciplinary exploration. The present chapter outlines its structure. Population growth was boosted by the population–technology interaction but is now rapidly slowing down, limited by Earth’s ultimate carrying capacity. Hence, today’s centenarians are unique in human history: the world population more than quadrupled during their lifetimes. The number of states has been reduced by empire growth. Empire sizes have increased in three main phases triggered by breakthroughs in message speed: Runner, Rider, and Engineer Empires.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter analyses the demographic dynamics in Iberia between 1500 and 1800, in a regional and European perspective, comparing the pattern of population growth, demographic distribution, urbanization and socio-professional composition of the population of the Iberian Peninsula with that of the rest of Europe in the same period. The first section reconstructs the trajectory of the total population for both Iberian countries in order to set the national trends, and to compare these trends of growth with other European countries. It also focus on population distribution across regions and highlight regional differences. Attention is paid to the prevailing “demographic system in both Iberian kingdoms, and to the available data on emigration especially towards the colonial areas. The second section offers an overview of Iberian urbanization between 1500 and 1800. The analysis of the urban dynamic takes into account not only the percentage of the total population living in urban areas (the urbanization rate), but also the morphology of the urban structure. Finally, the third section shows an overall picture of the socio-professional composition of the population in both countries.

Economic, technological, and demographic changes after World War II created new pressures on species, habitats, and human environments. Concerns about human impacts on the environment mounted. Rachel Carson, Charles Elton, Barry Commoner, and others articulated concerns about pesticides and other harmful substances in air and water, introduced species, escalating extinction rates, and the modification and fragmentation of habitats. Ecologists, economists, and philosophers like Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lynne White, Norman Myers, and Arne Naess attributed these problems to varied causes, including population growth, tragedies of the commons, excessive resource consumption and disparities in consumption, militarism, the misuse of science and technology, externalities, and anthropocentrism. In response to these developments and to increasing awareness of the limitations of utilitarian conservation, a preservationist approach to conservation that seeks to protect species and regardless of their economic value became prominent.

The population of Czarist Russia roughly tripled between 1850 and 1914. Keynes conjectured that this “excessive fecundity” contributed to the revolutions of 1917–18. In Russia as in contemporary India, however, population grew largely because the growing railroad network alleviated local famine. The growth and routing of the railways were determined chiefly by military considerations, hence can be regarded as exogenous. The railroads also allowed the opening of new lands and greater regional and national specialization: Russian grain exports quintupled between 1850 and 1914, foreign investment poured in, and millions of peasants moved temporarily into urban industry during months of slack farmstead demand. Hence a population explosion that would ordinarily have reduced wages and living standards was instead accompanied by rapid economic growth, per capita income almost tripling in the sixty years before 1914. The regions not serviced by railways, however, stagnated or declined; and, controlling for other factors, regional railway access correlates negatively with peasant unrest. Not rapidly growing population, but uneven development, appears most associated with rebellion.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

At the beginning of the sixth century BC, the Aphaia sanctuary on the island of Aegina underwent a radical transformation. What until then had been a local open-air cult place in the woody mountains of the western part of the island, where a female deity had been worshipped as early as the second millennium BC, became an architecturally structured sanctuary that conformed to the novel Doric architectural order. At the same time, a cult image made of ivory was set up in the newly built temple. The goddess, who had previously “shown herself” in the open grove that was associated with her presence, was now represented through a man-made image. In addition, a wall was built around the temple that separated the sacred precinct from the “profane” land outside the sanctuary. Around the same time, the island of Aegina became one of the most important trade centers in the Greek world. The book argues that the transformation of the Aphaia sanctuary on Aegina is typical of the larger area in which the Doric order emerged. This transformation was characterized by economic growth, urbanization, land reclamation, and colonization and prompted the Greeks to rethink their relationship with the gods who inhabited the land.

Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in mid-Qing politics, covering the Yongzheng to Daoguang eras (1722-1850). A spirited attempt by the Yongzheng Emperor to expand formal agricultural tax quotas and rationalize fiscal institutions had some success, but quickly encountered widespread opposition. By the late 1730s, the Qing Court settled into a set of fiscal institutions that would remain largely unchanged for the next 170 years. Formal agricultural tax quotas were, with the exception of the grain tribute, fixed in absolute values of silver, and could no longer be increased.Furthermore, provincial and local land surveying was made illegal by imperial decree, depriving political elites of their primary, and perhaps only, source of reliable macroeconomic information. Soon after - and arguably as a direct result - a “Malthusian” worldview began to gain popularity among political elites, arguing that, because the population was rapidly growing while total agricultural output remained unchanged, the amount of taxable surplus that the state could safely extract before rural incomes fell below subsistence level was actually shrinking. Driven by this deepening sense of insecurity, the Qing Court came to view nearly any proposal to raise agricultural taxes with deep suspicion.By the late eighteenth century, such proposals met with almost automatic rejection, and often carried serious political consequences for their sponsors. Meanwhile, nonagricultural taxes continued their slow upward trend, and became the focal point for fiscal reform efforts in the early nineteenth century.

Changes in local demographics have introduced new challenges for the coexistence of different social groups in the post-recognition phase. These changes are rooted in both exogenous and endogenous factors. On one hand, sustained migration has created new settlements, expanded the agrarian frontier, and pushed indigenous groups to assume a more hostile and protectionist attitude towards non-indigenous settlers. On the other, indigenous groups’ increasing population rates have encouraged an expansionist strategy that involves targeting new territories already occupied by other groups. This chapter considers both exogenously and endogenously driven changes in rural demographics as factors that contribute to the new relevance of social heterogeneity and of distributive measures embedded in recognition reforms. As I illustrated in the previous chapter, land is often at the root of recognition disputes in the context of resource scarcity. In this chapter, I analyse how changes in social heterogeneity can fuel land conflicts as well as conflicts for social provisions (e.g. access to water and electricity), linked to the implementation of recognition reforms. As in the previous chapter, norms around land tenure work as ‘means of redistribution’ embedded in a recognition framework that dramatically influences communities’ access to key resources and is often an object of contention. I discuss these tensions in relation to shifts and shocks in social communities’ demographic composition which result in increased social heterogeneity. Because these conflicts are all related to changes in local demographics, I call this type of recognition conflict demographic conflict. I rely on empirical cases from the inter-Andean regions of Peru to illustrate the challenging coexistence of rural migrants and indigenous communities; and on the case of the Cauca Department in Colombia to analyse how population growth, combined with a situation of widespread and acute violence generated by the civil war, has aggravated resource competition. Based on these empirical cases, I argue that the recognition framework is poorly equipped to account for the more fluid aspects of social communities embedded in migration dynamics and other demographic changes.

In the preface to his seminal Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Ping-ti Ho called his book “basically an essay in economic history” that “is not intended to be a demographic analysis, which must be undertaken by experts differently equipped than I.” Ho’s approach was endorsed by John K. Fairbank in his foreword to the book, because “statistics of the modern or would-be-modern type – census data and government statistical reports designed for the purpose – are unavailable for China in the Ming and Ch’ing periods.”1 For Ho and Fairbank, the research approach Ho took in his work belonged to population history, not historical demography. Whereas population history is a subfield of historical studies, using historical research methods to investigate population patterns in history, historical demography is a subfield of demography, mainly using research methods in modern demographic studies, in particular statistical analysis of data such as marriage, reproduction, death, and family structures, and investigates the relationship between fluctuations in these indicators and their social and environmental settings.

Chapter 5 tells the story of how, with the full support of the state and amidst a new push to further industrialize, fossil fuels powered virtually every aspect of life in Mexico by the 1950s. Transport systems became increasingly energy intensive. Vehicles with internal combustion engines drove down asphalt roads. Cars reshaped Mexico’s culture, class and gender divisions, and the way people experienced the nation’s territory and environments. Mexican cities entered a period of exponential physical and demographic growth, their layouts rapidly reorganized to accommodate increasing numbers of motorized vehicles. Industrial manufacturing and electricity generation used fossil fuels at virtually every stage of production and distribution, while the Mexican food system underwent a Green Revolution featuring fossil-fueled agriculture. Mexico had become a fossil-fueled society.