The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World

According to Morland, 19th-century Europeans managed to project power, exert influence and claim territory as a consequence of mushrooming domestic populations whose excess these countries could afford to send all over the globe. The Human Tide shies from this risky inference, but it’s worth asking: if Europe’s sending its extra population abroad projected power, exerted influence and claimed territory, isn’t mass migration from developing nations to the West not currently doing the same thing? For at the same time the West has now reached ‘the second transition’ — below-replacement fertility — many developing countries, modernized much later, continue to grow, and on a scale that makes the population of burgeoning 19th-century Britain look like a poorly attended cocktail party.

Source: spectator.us