The prevalence of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), one of the most common female endocrine disorders, depends on the diagnostic criteria used and the study population (referral or unselected). It is also thought to be influenced by race and ethnicity. This chapter presents the current knowledge on the epidemiological aspects of PCOS and its prevalence based on the different diagnostic criteria – National Institutes of Health (NIH) 1990; European Society of Human Reproduction (ESHRE) and American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) (Rotterdam 2003); and Androgen Excess and PCOS (AE-PCOS) Society 2006 – estimated in the selected and the unselected medically unbiased populations. The evidence-based data regarding the relationship between PCOS and race as well as ethnicity are also discussed. Finally, this chapter presents the key points on the best practices for epidemiologic studies in PCOS as outlined in the current guidelines.

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

We demonstrate that there is little consensus on what representativeness is, either in statistics or in corpus linguistics. Representative is a general term that must be made specific within a particular context in order to evaluate a sample. We introduce ten attested conceptualizations of corpus representativeness: (1) representativeness as “general acclaim for data”; (2) a representative corpus has been collected with the “absence of selective focus”; (3) a representative corpus contains texts that are “typical or ideal cases” of the target domain; (4) a representative corpus is a “miniature of the population”; (5) a representative corpus achieves “coverage of the population’s heterogeneity”; (6) a representative corpus “permits good estimation”; (7) a representative corpus is a corpus that is “good enough for a particular purpose”; (8) a large corpus is more important than a representative corpus; (9) a representative corpus is a “balanced” corpus; (10) a representative corpus is never possible. The term “balance” does not have a single agreed-upon definition in CL, and in fact, is often defined in contradictory ways. A unified and operational definition of corpus representativeness is needed.

This chapter argues that (1) explosive population growth is a major factor in the transition to the Anthropocene and (2) the control of infectious disease was the proximate cause of modern population growth. Thus, the changing patterns of mortality should be integrated into narratives of humanity’s takeover of planet earth. It also argues that human expansion (in both pre-modern and modern times) creates the ecological conditions for the emergence of new infectious diseases, and therefore the evolution of novel threats is likely to remain a dimension of life in the Anthropocene for the planet’s dominant species.

Chapter 3, “The People of Constantinople,” tracks population numbers across the centuries together with the factors that contributed to growth and decline. It also examines the ethnic and demographic make-up of the capital’s population.

Chapter 5 recovers the peculiar significance of the Napoleonic Wars for the formation of nineteenth-century British orthodoxies concerning the government of Ireland’s rural interior. In the decade after 1801, Ireland's rising population and grain production became central to Irish, British and European debates over Irish government. The indispensability of Irish grain to the British war effort proved the glowing potential of a model of Union that rested on an agricultural Ireland supplying the needs of industrial Britain, and provided evidence for the resilience of the British Empire in the face of Napoleon's Continental System. Patriotic Irish objections to Ireland’s agrarian turn found an unlikely echo in the pages of an influential new journal of politics and political economy, The Edinburgh Review. Alongside the agrarian improver and travel writer Edward Wakefield, Robert Malthus advanced the radical claim that only a transformation of Irish land tenure and consumption habits, under the auspices of the Westminster parliament, could bring about the diffusion of British civilisation promised by the proponents of the Union.

What was the canvas on which the Emergency was fought? This introduction and overview sketches in the population, the main players (British, MCP, UMNO, MCA), the importance of locality, the main phases and shape of the conflict and the historiography. In so doing it challenges some myths and sets the scene for later chapters to discuss issues of violence, harm and ‘winning hearts and minds’, and how and why insurgent strategy failed and counterinsurgent strategy ultimately succeeded.

The Yellow River is by its nature not sustainable since it carried the world’s heaviest silt load for a long time. Yet, this silt load (loess plateau) has fallen considerably in recent years, but at the cost of other forms of sustainability, such as streamflow. The reasons for this dramatic decline in runoff are complex. In addition to reducing silt load, terraces and vegetation have led to the marked reduction in runoff. The fall in natural runoff can also be attributed to groundwater and mining extractions, as well as reservoir filling. Population per se is not a major driver of water demand compared to irrigated agriculture and other sectors, notably mining and industry. While China is not a federal system, it is organized in a complex hierarchical system where provinces play an important role and are capable of serving their own interests in negotiating usages and allocations of the river. The chapter analyzes peculiar physical conditions and water management institutions in the Yellow River Basin.

On top of dealing with climate change impacts on rainfall and temperature, and rising populations and development, the Euphrates–Tigris basin also faces conflict and instability. The Syrian Civil War, the presence of many nonstate armed groups, and the lack of coordination between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to manage the water resources can lead to continued political confrontation and economic disintegration. This complicates the existent issue of nexus in the Euphrates–Tigris basin. The conflicting needs of energy, water, and food require more coordination not just between countries but between sectors within the countries. Each sector must be allocated a certain amount of water based on the needs it fulfills for the country. If violence continues and instability in the region is not resolved, these demands may increase and further pressure the basin.

An individual’s network ties are crucial to their well-being and life outcomes, and an emerging literature connects these network effects to the persistence or mitigation of group-based inequality. At the same time, we know very little about how the contexts in which relationships are formed shape individual-level and group-level networks. This leaves our understanding of network-based mechanisms of inequality separate from the contexts in which relationships are formed and operate. This chapter sets forth a model that combines context, ego and global network structure, and inequality arising from network effects into one causal chain. We review evidence on how different characteristics of context – population size and composition, number and kinds of social foci, and organizational practices – contribute to the structure of social networks. We then review research demonstrating how those network features, as well as the overall structure of relationships, contribute to distributions of outcomes in the population. The chapter concludes with applications of the model using examples from student behavior in schools and from evidence about migration. We suggest that network scholars and scholars of inequality build this more expansive perspective into their work in order to better understand mechanisms of inequality.

Chapter 6, “Reproduction and Dystopia,” sets out to show that Aldous Huxley’s well-known satire of a reproductive future in Brave New World – humans engineered in bottles, sorted into different classes – is only a small part of his complex moral attitude toward procreation. Novels like Point Counter Point and Island make clear that it was not only cold reproductive technologies that worried Huxley: he considered any creation of new persons to be an ethical quandary. He was prescient in his concern about the environmental degradation brought on by overpopulation – in 1928 he was already warning of humanity’s “tropism toward fossilized carrion.” Huxley’s work betrays a deep melancholy about the peopling of the earth. In this respect he is a kind of prophet for a dystopian tradition that is still with us. This chapter, in its second half, turns from Huxley to his heirs – contemporary novelists like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq – whose glittering dystopian fantasies cannot conceal a more ordinary despair about the perpetuation of human life.

Chapter 8, “Procreating on Patmos,” focusing on the tensions and contradictions of the novel today, marks the culmination of this study of the novel’s ambivalence toward procreation. The title comes from Emil Cioran, who warned against having children during end times: “one does not procreate on Patmos.” Our Patmos today is the entire planet menaced by global warming. In contemporary fiction it is the climate emergency that is most likely to induce a hostility toward the prospect of having children. This chapter looks at a wide range of current writers consumed by the moral dilemma of procreation – Zadie Smith, Lydia Davis, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Nell Zink, Ian McEwan – while concentrating on this overriding moral-ecological theme, and its importance in the parallel work of environmental philosophers. The contemporary novel suggests that we might focus less on dystopian imaginings of the future cataclysm, and more on the conditions of present-day life, in which we must reach a decision about the role we should play in the peopling of that future world.