I am grateful to Ansley J. Coale, Daniel Doeppers, Robert Elson, Rhoades Murphey, James Lee, Anthony Reid, and Peter C. Smith for comments on previous drafts of this essay, which was researched and written while I was a Senior Research Fellow in Pacific and Southeast Asian History at the Australian National University. One earlier version of the paper was given at a panel on “Major Issues in Asian Historical Demography” at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies,Philadelphia,22–24 March 1985Google Scholar.

¹ Boomgaard, Peter, “Bevolkingsgroei en welvaart op Java (1800–1942)”, in Indonesie toen en nu, ed. Kamerling, R.N.J. (Amsterdam: Intermediair, 1980), pp. 45–47Google Scholar; Smith, Peter C. and Shui-Meng, Ng, “The Components of Population Growth in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia: Village Data from the Philippines”, Population Studies 36 (07, 1982): 253–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Fisher, C.A., “Some Comments on Population Growth in South-East Asia, with Special Reference to the Period Since 1830”, in The Economic Development of South-East Asia, ed. Cowan, C.D. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), pp. 48–71Google Scholar; Dodge, Nicholas N., “Population Estimates for the Malay Peninsula, with Special Reference to the East Coast States”, Population Studies 34 (11, 1980): 437–75CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; cf. Reid, Anthony, “Low Population Growth and Its Causes in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia”, in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, ed. Owen, Norman G. (Singapore: Oxford University Press, for the Asian Studies Association of Australia, forthcoming), pp. 33–47Google Scholar.

³ Sternstein, Larry, “The Growth of Population of the World's Pre-eminent ‘Primate City’: Bangkok at its Bicentenary”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (03, 1984): 43–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It should be noted, however, that Sternstein prefers a trend line that barely reaches 1 per cent by the end of the century.

⁴ The European and North American cases are well-known. Less familiar may be the example of Brazil, where natural increase (excluding immigration and slave imports) averaged close to 1.25 per cent a year between 1776–1872, rising to around 1.75 per cent between 1871–1900; Merrick, Thomas W. and Graham, Douglas H., Population and Economic Development in Brazil (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 28–39Google Scholar.

⁵ Madras may be an exception; the data indicate an annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent (“probably too high”, according to Kumar) from 1801 to 1851–52, falling to 1.1 per cent in the latter half of the century. See Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 106, 120–21Google Scholar. Africa may actually have lost population during the nineteenth century; see African Historical Demography: Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 29th and 30th April 1977 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre of Asian Studies, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁶ See Nitisastro, Widjojo, Population Trends in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 1–26Google Scholar.

⁷ “Population Growth in Java in the 19th Century”, Population Studies 24 (03, 1974): 71–84 (quotation from p. 83)Google Scholar; see also McDonald, Peter, “An Historical Perspective to Population Growth in Indonesia”, in Indonesia: The Making of a Culture, ed. Fox, J.J. (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), pp. 81–94Google Scholar; cf. Sternstein, pp. 54–55.

⁸ “Bevolkingsgroei”, pp. 45–47. These figures overlap in part those provided by Breman, Jan, “Java: bevolkingsgroei en demografische structuur”, Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijksunding Genootschap 80 (1963): 252–303Google Scholar.

⁹ Calculated from de San Antonio, Juan (1738) as translated in Blair, Emma Helen and Robertson, James Alexander, eds., The Philippine Islands: 1493–1898 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1903–1909), 28:160Google Scholar; de Zúñiga, Joaquǐn Martǐnez (1806), Status of the Philippines in 1800, trans. del Carmen, Vicente (Manila: Filipiniana Book Guild, 1973), p. 470Google Scholar; Censo de población de las Islas Filipinas perteneciente al año de 1876, formado por el M.R. Arzobispo de Manila (Manila: Santo Tomas, 1878)Google Scholar; and U.S., Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands … in the Year 1903 (Washington: Government Publishing Office, 1905)Google Scholar. Comparable calculations are presented by Smith, Peter C., “The Turn-of-the-Century Birth Rate”, in A Demographic Path to Modernity, ed. Flieger, Wilhelm and Smith, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1975), p. 87Google Scholar; and by Smith and Ng, p. 241. On the mortality crises see Smith, , “Crisis Mortality in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines: Data from Parish Records”, Journal of Asian Studies 38 (11, 1978): 51–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; May, Glenn A., “150,000 Missing Filipinos: A Demographic Crisis in Batangas, 1887–1903”, Annales de démographie historique, 1985, pp. 215–43Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Geertz, Clifford, “Comments on Benjamin White's ‘Demand for Labor and Population Growth in Colonial Java’”, Human Ecology 1 (03, 1973): 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Ricklefs, M.C., “Some Statistical Evidence on Javanese Social, Economic and Demographic History in the Later Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, Modern Asian Studies 20, 1 (1986): 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, , “Low Population Growth”, pp. 34–35Google Scholar; Boomgaard, , “Bevolkingsgroei”, p. 45Google Scholar.

¹² Cf. the Breman/Boomgaard estimates of 6.3/7.0 million.

¹³ See in particular Smith and Ng on Nagcarlan, Laguna province; cf. Owen, Norman G., Prosperity without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, and Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1984), pp. 115–17Google Scholar; Cruikshank, Bruce, Samar: 1768–1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985), pp. 138–39, 244–57, 274–88Google Scholar; Cullinane, Michael and Smith, Peter C., “The Population of Cebu Province, Philippines, in the Nineteenth Century” (paper prepared for Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs,DeKalb, Illinois,14–15 October 1977)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Wickberg, Edgar, The Chinese in Philippine Life: 1850–1898 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 169–70Google Scholar; Furnivall, J.S., Netherlands India, A Study of Plural Economy (1944; reprinted Amsterdam: B.M. Israel BV, 1976), p. 409Google Scholar. In Malaya and Thailand, by contrast, immigration played an important role in population growth; see Dodge, pp. 437–75; Sternstein, pp. 55–58.

¹⁵ “Philippine History Reconsidered: A Socioeconomic Perspective”, American Historical Review 87 (06, 1982): 595–628CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The southern frontiers of both Burma and Vietnam were also destinations for numerous migrants from the north during this period.

¹⁶ In a Workshop on Java's Population Growth, Australian National University, 15 December 1983; cf. work in progress by Robert Elson (on the social impact of the Cultivation System in Java) for documentation both on migration and on apparently rootless elements in the population in peacetime.

¹⁷ See Nitisastro, pp. 38–39; cf. Robles, Eliodoro G., The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century (Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1969)Google Scholar; Cruikshank, pp. 138–39, 145–68.

¹⁸ Owen, , Prosperity without Progress, pp. 22–23, 192–97Google Scholar; Owen, , “The Principalia in Philippine History: Kabikolan, 1790–1898”, Philippine Studies 22 (1974): 317–24Google Scholar; Cruikshank, pp. 128–44. The term vagamundos in practice was applied to itinerant or migrant labourers as well as to those totally rootless (in colonial eyes); Roth, Dennis Morrow, The Friar Estates of the Philippines (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), pp. 72–76Google Scholar. Like their Javanese equivalents, bujang and rondloopers (or ledigloopers), they seem to be more commonly referred to in the early nineteenth century than later in the century.

¹⁹ Smith and Ng, pp. 243–45; Owen, , Prosperity without Progress, p. 116Google Scholar; Cruikshank, pp. 138–39, 274–77.

²⁰ Boomgaard, presentation at Workshop on Java's Population Growth; Owen, , “Measuring Mortality in the Colonial Philippines”, in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, pp. 94–95Google Scholar. These Bikol averages are roughly in line with those calculated for Nagcarlan in the same period by Smith and Ng, pp. 243–54.

²¹ For the Philippine island province of Cebu, the mean rate of natural increase derived from aggregate analysis of parish registers is even higher, averaging 2.7 per cent a year (birth rate 49 per thousand, death rate 22), a rate that apparently reflects in part the “frontier” age structure of Cebu's west coast; Cullinane and Smith; Smith, personal communication, 5 January 1985. In two late nineteenth-century enumerations (1876 and 1896) the recorded rates of natural increase for the island of Samar reached 2.5 per cent and 2.9 per cent a year, though Cruikshank, p. 286, dismisses these figures as unreliable.

²² Cf. Madigan, Francis, Birth and Death in Cagayan de Oro: Population Dynamics in a Medium-sized Philippine City (Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 1972), pp. 141–42Google Scholar.

²³ Acceleration from the low or even negative growth rates prevailing throughout Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; see Reid, “Low Population Growth”.

²⁴ Smith, , “Turn-of-the-Century Birth Rate”, pp. 84, 88Google Scholar; cf. Sternstein, pp. 54–55.

²⁵ Boomgaard, “Morbidity and Mortality in Java, 1820–1880”, and Gardiner, Peter and Oey, Mayling, “Morbidity and Mortality in Java, 1880–1940”, both in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, pp. 49–50, 70–73Google Scholar; Smith, , “Turn-of-the-Century Birth Rate”, pp. 84–86Google Scholar; parish records, Bikol region, Philippines. Cf. Smith, “Crisis Mortality”, and May on the turn-of-the-century crisis.

²⁶ See Hirsch, August, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, trans, from 2d German ed. by Creighton, Charles (London: New Sydenham Society, 1883–1886), 1:396Google Scholar; Terwiel, B.J., “Asiatic Cholera in Siam”, in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, pp. 52–55Google Scholar; Boomgaard, “Morbidity and Mortality”.

²⁷ Scores of severe crises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Java and the Philippines can easily be identified from the published and archival sources. To assess their demographic significance, however, we would need both an approximation of their magnitude and some idea as to levels of mortality obtaining in the years for which no crisis was recorded. We know from twentieth century developments in India and the Philippines that substantial population growth may be achieved simply by the reduction or elimination of periodic crises; see McAlpin, Michelle B., “Famines, Epidemics and Population Growth: The Case of India”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (Autumn, 1983): 351–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Smith, “Turn-of-the-Century Birth Rate”, pp. 84–86; Flieger, Wilhelm, Abenoja, Macrina K., and Lim, Alice, On the Road to Longevity: 1970 National, Regional and Provincial Mortality Estimates for the Philippines (Cebu City: San Carlos Publications, 1981), pp. 19–23Google Scholar.

²⁸ Owen, , “Toward a History of Health in Southeast Asia”, in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, pp. 11–14Google Scholar; Boomgaard, , “Female Labour and Population Growth in Nineteenth-Century Java”, Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 15, 2 (1981): 2–6Google Scholar. The fertility vs. mortality question has not yet been conclusively resolved even where there is far more evidence and a much longer and deeper scholarly debate; cf. McKeown, Thomas, “Fertility, Mortality and Causes of Death”, Population Studies 32 (11, 1978): 535–42Google ScholarPubMed; Wrigley, E.A., “The Growth of Population in Eighteenth-Century England”, Past and Present 98 (1983): 121–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ McNeill, , Plagues and People (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), pp. 212–15Google Scholar; cf. McKeown, , “Fertility”, pp. 540–42Google Scholar, and The Modern Rise of Population (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 80–90Google Scholar, for visible discomfort over the possibility that the triumph over disease might be “fortuitous”.

³⁰ They also suffer from the disadvantage of carrying with them presuppositions and prejudices that tend to interfere with their use in demographic analysis. Defenders of colonialism and proponents of “development” tend to cite population growth as prima facie proof of the benificent effects of Western intervention in Southeast Asia. Anti-colonialists (especially those who are anti-capitalist as well) tend to emphasize the iniquities of the system they oppose and thus to regard growth as just one more insidious side-effect of general exploitation, leading inevitably to population pressure and thence to further immiseration. To incorporate these grand concepts directly into demographic analysis is always to risk being sidetracked into a broader debate over the merits and demerits of colonialism, capitalism, or “modernization”.

³¹ Death and Disease in Southeast Asia includes a number of papers bearing on this point.

³² Smith, F.B., The People's Health, 1830–1910 (London: Croom Helm, 1979)Google Scholar; McKeown, Modern Rise of Population.

³³ Peper, pp. 79–81; Nitisastro, pp. 40–41; Heiser, Victor, An American Doctor's Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1936), pp. 179–80Google Scholar; Fenner, Frank, “Smallpox in Southeast Asia”, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Boomgaard, “Mortality and Morbidity”, pp. 60–64; Blair and Robertson, 43: 177–87, 49: 179–94, 50: 68; parish burial registers for Libog [Sto. Domingo] and Oas (Albay) and for Libmanan [Camarines Sur).

³⁵ Cf. Abeyasekere, Susan, “Death and Disease in Nineteenth Century Batavia”, in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia, pp. 189–209Google Scholar. The same set of fiscal priorities accounted for the later construction (at local expense) of “hill stations” on the Indian model for the benefit of colonialists' health in the Philippines (Baguio), Java (Buitenzorg), Malaya (Cameron Highlands), and French Indochina (Dalat).

³⁶ Gardiner and Oey. Cf. Heiser, pp. 36–264, on public health in the Philippines in the decade before World War I.

³⁷ Fisher, Reid, “Low Population Growth”; cf. McNeill, pp. 205–206, on the demographic significance of “gunpowder empires” elsewhere.

³⁸ Peper, pp. 81–82; Boomgaard, , “Female Labour”, pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

³⁹ Reid, “Low Population Growth”; cf. Reid, , Europe and Southeast Asia: The Military Balance (Townsville: James Cook University of North Queensland, South East Asian Studies Committee, 1982), pp. 42–43Google Scholar. The major pre-colonial wars are reasonably well documented; for descriptions of the endemicity and destructiveness of some otherwise unrecorded petty local wars, see Francisco Ignacio Alzina, “Historia de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas … 1668” (Transliteration by Victor Baltazar of the Muñoz text, Philippine Studies Program, University of Chicago).

⁴⁰ There might even be variation over time in the relative freedom of the food supply from harmful contaminants; cf. Matossian, Mary Kilbourne, “Mold Poisoning and Population Growth in England and France, 1750–1850”, Journal of Economic History 44 (09, 1984): 669–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Brown, Ian, “Rural Distress in South East Asia During the World Depression of the Early 1930s”, Journal of Asian Studies, forthcomingGoogle Scholar, provides a telling critique of the quality of these twentieth century data — which are far superior to any we have for the nineteenth century.

⁴² McKeown, Modern Rise, emphasizes the fact that improved nutrition greatly enhances resistance to certain infectious diseases; this, rather than relief from actual starvation, he posits as the principal linkage between better food supplies and reduced mortality. See also Rotberg, Robert I. and Rabb, Theodore K., eds., Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Reid, , “Low Population Growth”, pp. 39–41Google Scholar. Reid himself uses twentieth-century census data to try to substantiate his suggestion, but such evidence remains indicative rather than conclusive.

⁴⁴ Among many sources on urbanization and frontier expansion in Southeast Asia see Abeyasekere; Reid, Anthony, “The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (09, 1980): 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Basu, Dilip K., ed., The Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Santa Cruz: University of California, Center for South Pacific Studies, 1979)Google Scholar; McGee, T.G., The Southeast Asian City (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967)Google Scholar; Larkin; Adas, Michael, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ “Labour Expropriation and Fertility: Population Growth in Nineteenth Century Java”, in Culture and Reproduction, ed. Handworker, P. (New York: Academic Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; cf. Boomgaard, , “Female Labour”, pp. 1–31Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ “Demand for Labour and Population Growth in Colonial Java”, Human Ecology 1 (03, 1973): 217–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Such questions do not disappear even when dealing with later periods; demographers are still trying to discover when (or whether) Southeast Asians will be sufficiently convinced that lower mortality means more surviving children to make a difference in their concepts of optimal family size.

⁴⁸ Over the past decade a number of scholars have attempted to “decode” Southeast Asian systems of thought from various historical texts, but few so far have elicited evidence directly pertinent to major demographic questions; see, for example, Reid, Anthony and Marr, David, eds., Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books, for the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1979)Google Scholar; Wyatt, David K. and Woodside, Alexander, eds., Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1982)Google Scholar; Gesick, Lorraine, ed., Centers, Symbols and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983)Google Scholar. Death and Disease in Southeast Asia contains some pioneering essays which explore historical texts for evidence of attitudes toward illness and healing: see in particular the essays of Barbara Lovric, B.J. Terwiel, and David G. Marr.

⁴⁹ Pedrosa, , “Abortion and Infanticide in the Philippines During the Spanish Contact”, Philippiniana Sacra 18 (01–04, 1983): 7–37Google Scholar. There is no suggestion of sex-selective infanticide in the references gathered by Pedrosa, nor any clear indication that these practices once played a significant role in limiting population, as they did in pre-modern Europe and Japan; cf. McKeown, , Modern Rise, pp. 47, 146–47Google Scholar; Mosk, Carl, “Fecundity, Infanticide, and Food Consumption in Japan”, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 15 (07, 1978): 269–89CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁰ Parish records: Bulan (Sorsogon) 1842–47; Gubat (Sorsogon) 1845–47; Guinobatan (Albay) 1834–35, 1868–69; Libog (Albay) 1843–47; Tigaon (Camarines Sur) 1819–80; Virac (Catanduanes) 1846–47, 1864–65.

⁵¹ Alexander, Jennifer and Alexander, Paul, “Labour Demands and the ‘Involution’ of Javanese Agriculture”, Social Analysis 3 (12, 1979): 37Google Scholar, try to substantiate White's “labour demand” theory by reference to such data for Pasuruan, but Robert Elson (personal communication, 21 January 1985) insists that the sources cited are too erratic and imprecise to support this claim. My own research in Philippine records leads me to a similar mistrust of such categories; in Tigaon the number of “houses” jumped from 341 in 1849 to 543 in 1851, primarily through an apparent reclassification of adult children as heads of single-member “houses”.

⁵² Shui-Meng, Ng, “Demographic Change, Marriage and Family Formation: The Case of Nineteenth Century Nagcarlan, The Philippines” (PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1979)Google Scholar; Smith and Ng, pp. 248–52. In Tigaon there is a comparable decline in stated age at female first marriage between 1847–62 and 1863–97 — but this follows an apparently even larger rise in age between 1820–46 and 1847–62!

⁵³ Among scholars currently working on these records we might mention Peter Boomgaard (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam), Robert Elson (Griffith University, Queensland), and Radin Fernando (Australian National University, Canberra).

⁵⁴ Ng, pp. 180–89, “reconstituted” two marriage cohorts from the parish records of Nagcarlan and demonstrated an intriguing (and statistically-significant) correlation between the age at marriage of sons and the age at death of fathers. This linkage was presumably mediated through inheritance patterns — about which the parish records tell us nothing.

⁵⁵ On the use of the parish records see the works of Peter C. Smith, Ng Shui-Meng and Michael Cullinane cited above; see also Cullinane, “The Spanish System of Demographic and Spiritual Accounting” (unpublished paper, 1977); and Owen, “Measuring Mortality”. May casts considerable doubt on the reliability of the Philippine parish records, but his strictures on their accuracy and completeness during the Revolution and Philippine-American War (1896–1902) are not necessarily applicable to the century preceding.

⁵⁶ For Java, extensive residency coverage is available from about 1820–22, but becomes more useful after the Java War (1825–30) and the standardization of annual “Cultivation Reports” in 1837. For the Philippines, though several parishes have registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials dating back to the eighteenth century, I have found that due to duplication of common names (one-third of the women are called “Maria”) nominal linkage in this period presents almost insuperable problems. These are partially resolved when the registers are accompanied by parish censuses (padrones de almas), but such censuses are rare, and generally date only from about 1820 onwards. Only with an 1849 decree which ordered the adoption of regular surnames is nominal linkage relatively straightforward.