Re: Population Limited by Territoriality?
PioneerTom (pioneertom@aol.com)
4 Dec 1994 22:45:34 -0500
In article <JMC.94Dec2144044@white.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il>,
jmc@white.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il (McCarthy John) writes...
>
>Some demographers have expressed puzzlement about the fact that
>English population exploded at the time of the industrial revolution
>when no improvement in medicine or public health had yet been created.
There was, howver, a substatial improvement in another limiting factor
in population growth, food. From the early eighteenth century onwards
there were substantial improvements in agricuktural technology. Early
on many of these may have been transmitted from China, like the seed
drill, that dramatically increased the yield from seed and yield/acre.
The greater availability of food would have removed a great barrier to
faster population growth. Oddly enough, nobody seems to have told
Malthus about this by the end of the eighteenth century, well on into the
process.
Tom Billings
pioneertom@aol.com
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