POPULATION GROWTH

The estimates of European population in the eighteenth century are subject to a very wide margin of error; direct censuses were few and imperfect, and most of the figures are derived from enumerations of households, which, besides being incomplete, can be translated into total population only by making necessarily arbitrary assumptions about the size of households. While such estimates give a reasonably reliable indication of the approximate size of a country's population, they are a poor guide to the rates of growth within a country, since they reflect changes in administrative efficiency, and their general effect is probably to exaggerate the speed with which population was increasing. There can, nevertheless, be little doubt that population was growing in most parts of Europe in the eighteenth century and that, for Europe as a whole, it was growing more rapidly after 1760 than before.

It is natural in retrospect to interpret this increase of population as the first stage of the sustained and cumulative increase which has marked the last two hundred years, and to seek an explanation in the operation of new influences, such as higher standards of living or improvements in medicine and public health. It should be observed, however, that the population growth in the second half of the century was rapid only in certain parts of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, in Russia, England and Wales and Ireland, and in parts of Germany. Even in these countries the rate of growth in the later eighteenth century was probably not more than 1 per cent per annum except in Russia, certain Prussian provinces, Finland and Ireland.