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The History of Human Populations Volume I
Forms of Growth and Decline
(Click to Enlarge)
P.M.G. Harris
Book Code: C7131
ISBN: 0-275-97131-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-97131-1
464 pages, figures, tables
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 7/30/2001
List Price: $125.00 (UK Sterling Price: £70.00)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • Graduate students and faculty.
    —Choice     April 2002
Description: From classic demographic theory to the best contemporary thinking, this book will fruitfully replace previous ways of looking at population expansion and contraction. The 50 years of scholarship that covers 2 1/2 millennia, peoples in all parts of the world, and aggregates from hamlets to the global level, this volume shows that populations grow or decline according to six related patterns. Looking at the path taken by unrestricted population growth, the effects of limited resources, demographic disaster, population explosion, and the implications of stable population theory and demographic transition for numerical trends, Harris reinterprets and insightfully interconnects all of these via six related growth curves, opening the way for a better understanding of how populations expand through changes in births, deaths, and migrations and how they interact with their economic, social, and physical environments. All six trend types, the book shows, are shaped by forces internal to the dynamics of populations themselves. Most frequently, they increase in a constantly proportionally slowing curve as a specific stimulus is spent through expansion. With shocks like war or epidemics, they contract according to an upside down version of this curve. The only two curves until recent times, these are still the most common in local populations. With modern economic and social change, some populations--mostly larger ones--follow one of four newer growth patterns, either increasing at a steady rate, growing in a gradually slowing pattern between this constancy and the rapidly decelerating basic growth curve, exploding in an accelerating fashion, or in a few ominous cases, decreasing in an accelerating decline. Where these curves occur depends on the distinctive ways populations interact with economic changes. Harris's findings have profound implications for understanding economic and social change. These implications will be discussed in the following volume.
Table of Contents:
  • Introductions
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • New Viewpoints on an Old Topic: What Form Does Population Growth Take--and Why?
  • Patterning the Parts as Well as the Whole across Four Centuries of American Demographic Increase
  • Common Forms of Growth for All New Settlements? Evidence from Other Northern European Colonizations
  • Other Striking But General G-Based Trends: "Demographic Disaster" and "Population Explosion" in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania
  • The Growth and Decline of Old World Peoples: Insights from Europe, Where the Debate Began
  • How Regional Changes of Population in Europe Underlay National Ones--from Andalusia to the Amur, from Trondheim to the Tisza
  • Sketching Population History in Asia and Africa: Outlines of the Often Obscure
  • The Growth of Cities and the Spread of Urbanization
  • The Local Generality of the Simplest G-Shaped Trends: Cross-Cultural Examples Over Time
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix
  • Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 00-061110
LCC Class: HB851
Dewey Class: 304
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