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| Paris, c. 1810 |
Take-Off
With the flourishing of the Industrial Age in Europe, mortality rates began significantly declining because of a combination of improved agricultural methods and distribution, and of improved health practices, such as water and sewer sanitation and quarantines in time of epidemics. With fertility rates remaining high, those advances yielded the double benefit of decreased mortality for infants and longer life spans.
An accelerated population growth created a 19th-century surge in manpower that led to mass flight from farms to cities providing the workers for greater industrialization. The competition for resources that ensued intensified imperial rivalries, nationalism, and geopolitical instability.
The growth pattern was not uniform, though, throughout the century. Dense urbanization led to a poorer quality of life and the new industries created arduous working conditions, so the rate of population growth leveled out during the middle 1800s. But then, in the last third of the nineteenth century a ‘medical revolution’ that took place thanks to the works of Pasteur, Lister, and other scientists who identified various pathogens, discovered the microbial nature of infectious diseases, and effectively used their discovery in preventive medicine and treatment of infectious diseases. By 1900, the continent had more than doubled in population from 1800.
The Numbers
For the future belligerents of 1914 the 1800–1900 growth patterns most are impressive, although France is a special case discussed below:
- Europe as a whole: 180M to 390M
- Great Britain: 10.5M to 37M
- France: 30M to 40M
- Russia: 37M to 125M
- Italy (Unified 1861, joined war 1915): 19M to 32.5M
- Austria-Hungary: 24M to 46-50M
- Germany (Unified 1871): 23M to 56.4M
Some Notes:
1. Even more remarkably, as the war approached, Europe's population exploded from 390M to 450M by 1914.
2. These figures, for the most part however, underestimate the levels of growth for some countries because they do not include the outflow to the New World. During the same period, the U.S. population grew from 6 million in 1800 to 76 million in 1900 – largely due to migration of Europeans.
3. Most important—This growth was not distributed evenly. Germany’s population grew incredibly fast, rising from 41 million in 1871 to nearly 65 million by 1914, surpassing France's stagnant population of around 40 million. France had suffered a massive loss of men in the Napoleonic Wars, and its post-Revolutionary, secular society was more inclined to adopt birth control methods. This demographic dominance gave Germany a larger pool of conscripts and immense industrial capacity, which deeply alarmed France. Russia's growth was even greater and this alarmed Germany. It's population grew from about 74 million in 1861 to over 160 million by 1913.
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| Vienna, c. 1890 |
The Growing Populations Fueled Both International Competition and Internal Instability
Massive population growth led to rapid urbanization as people moved from farms to factory cities. It allowed nations to fund and man enormous standing armies and new fleets of dreadnoughts. Nations thought they needed overseas empires to secure raw materials and new markets for their rapidly growing populations. They also provided an outlet for the sorts of ambitious, educated young people discussed below.
The recent work of historical complexity researcher Peter Turchin sheds some light on an important by-product of such a population surge. In such a period of growth, the in absolute number of educated, motivated, and ambitious individuals surpasses the limited number of openings in the "elite" class, the small number of individuals, who hold economic and social power. (For example, a government only needs a fixed number of cabinet ministers, no matter what the population.) Those striving, but failing, to join this highest echelon of leadership, "elite-aspirants", can become a great source of instability for a nations. Partly due to this, from 1815 to 1914, Europe was continually rocked by internal revolutions, assassinations, and roiling political discontent. Turchin, for example, points out the over-abundance of underemployed trained lawyers, who became invested in revolutionary politics.
The rivalries, the alliances, diplomatic crises, and "small" wars, that emerged in the early 20th century out of this dynamic of exploding populations were managed by the Great Powers so that general war was avoided. Then in July 1914 a crisis came that could not be resolved, and war came. David Stevenson does an excellent job of sorting the reasons for this in his Roads to the Great War article HERE.
Sources: "Population Demographics, Salt Lake Community College'; The Demographic Transition in the First World War: The Nineteenth Century, Zinka et al in Globalistics and Globalization Studies, 2017
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