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Summary
Summary
A dazzling new history of the irrepressible demographic changes and mass migrations that have made and unmade nations, continents, and empires
The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played.
The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition -- a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe--shaped the course of world history. Demography -- the study of population -- is the key to unlocking an understanding of the world we live in and how we got here.
Demographic changes explain why the Arab Spring came and went, how China rose so meteorically, and why Britain voted for Brexit and America for Donald Trump. Sweeping from Europe to the Americas, China, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, The Human Tide is a panoramic view of the sheer power of numbers.
Author Notes
Dr. Paul Morland is associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London and a renowned authority on demography. He lives in London with his wife and has three children. A French speaker with dual German and British citizenship, Paul Morland also spends much time at his home in the French Pyrenees.
He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from where he graduated with a first class B.A. (Hons) in PPE. He graduated with Distinction in his Masters in International Relations, also from Oxford University, and was awarded his Ph.D from the University of London. The Human Tide is his first trade book but as well as an academic work on demography, published by Ashgate / Routledge, he has contributed a number of comment pieces on demography to newspapers in the UK and Israel.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
The world is changing, dramatically and in large part because of shifts in population.University of London demographer Morland (Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict, 2014) considers population dynamics as a driving force in historical changenot just at the macro level, but in the lives of individuals. As he notes, only a few generations have passed since 1-in-6 British children died before their first birthdays, whereas "today, just over a century later, only one child in three hundred born in England does not reach the age of one." At the same time, sub-Saharan African nations whose birth rates had once leveled off have grown in population but not in economic opportunity, propelling a wave of migrants northward to a Europe whose Indigenous populations have been steadily shrinkingin Italy, for example, by a projected 20 percent by the end of the century. This reiterates a historical trend in which exploding European populations led to migrations to the Americas and Australia, and even if European and European-descendedand especially Britishpeoples remain politically and economically more powerful than the rest of the world, "they have significantly retreated as an ethnic group within their own states." Other nations have experienced patterns of growth and decline: Japan, for instance, whose population is rapidly falling, and Russia, which had a comparatively huge population in late czarist times but became the first state in the world to legalize abortion in the Soviet eraonly to retract it in 1935, when "Stalin declared man the most precious resource.' " Today, Putin's Russia faces a decline in ethnic Russians. Demography is not necessarily destiny, but the trends Morland identifies are suggestive of broad political changes to come, including the prospect that a grayer world may also mean a greener one: "Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void."Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the intercontinental life of Frank McCoppin a nineteenth-century Irish immigrant who served as a U.S. senator from California Morland finds one small illustration of how a demographic phenomenon that first manifested in the British Isles has remade the globe. Beginning with a population surge accompanied by industrial modernization that swept aside Malthus' dire predictions of scarcity and starvation, this tidal wave of Anglo-Saxons gave British lands unparalleled economic, military, and political vitality. But tidal waves recede: Morland limns the twentieth-century drop in Anglo-Saxon fertility, occasioned by urbanization, female education, and contraception in a new culture of secular individualism. Morland traces nearly the same rise-and-fall demographic pattern in Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Iran, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. However, in sub-Saharan Africa demography's Final Frontier, in Morland's view the population wave is still swelling, with economic and sociopolitical consequences likely to remake the twenty-first-century world. Meanwhile, in Japan, where the demographic tidal wave has completely withdrawn, the population is rapidly aging and shrinking stifling economic initiative and isolating millions of family-less geriatrics. Though Morland hopes that the downward trend in global fertility will make the planet more peaceful and more green, he worries that the social problems in aging Japan may soon spread. An illuminating perspective on the history and likely future of population trends.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Population and History | |
| 1 Introduction | p. 3 |
| 2 The Weight of Numbers | p. 11 |
| Part 2 The Gathering Tide: Among the Europeans | |
| 3 The Triumph of the Anglo-Saxons | p. 41 |
| 4 The German and Russian Challenges | p. 69 |
| 5 The Passing of the 'Great Race' | p. 100 |
| 6 The West since 1945: From Baby-Boom to Mass Immigration | p. 131 |
| 7 Russia and the Eastern Bloc from 1945: The Demography of Cold War Defeat | p. 164 |
| Part 3 The Tide Goes Global: Beyond the Europeans | |
| 5 Japan, China and East Asia: The Ageing of Giants | p. 195 |
| 9 The Middle East and North Africa: The Demography of Instability | p. 224 |
| 10 Nothing New Under the Sun?: Final Frontiers and Future Vistas | p. 255 |
| Appendix I How Life Expectancy is Calculated | p. 283 |
| Appendix II How the Total Fertility Rate is Calculated | p. 289 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 291 |
| Notes | p. 293 |
| Bibliography | p. 313 |
| Index | p. 331 |