One of the most important developments in modern European history was a dramatic increase in population during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The population of Europe had been slowly rising for centuries, but severe checks, caused by poor diet and nutrition, epidemic disease, primitive medical care, warfare, and repressive government, had limited that growth. Great Britain offers a vivid illustration. After William the Conqueror won control of England in 1066, he ordered a survey of his new realm; the resultant Domesday Survey (1086) determined that England had a population of 3.5 million. A good estimate of England in 1750 is a population of 6.5 million, which meant an increase of three million people in seven hundred years, an average growth rate of less than 1 percent per decade.

In contrast to that history of slow population growth, what happened during the late 18th century and the 19th century must be called a population explosion. A continent inhabited by perhaps 110 million people in 1700 became a continent of 423 million people in 1900. This near quadrupling of Europe meant a growth rate of nearly 10 percent per decade, compared with the historic pattern of less than 1 percent. Britain, where the European population explosion began, provides the best illustration of this growth. Beginning in 1750, the British Isles experienced three consecutive decades of 6 percent population growth, followed by stunning decennial increases of 9 percent, 11 percent, 14 percent, and 18 percent. The astonishing population boom meant that a country that had grown by three million people over seven hundred years then grew by eleven million people in one hundred years.

The British population explosion continued into the 19th century and became a widespread (although not universal) European phenomenon. During the 18th century, population growth in most of the major states of Europe was approximately 35 percent to 40 percent--36 percent in the Austrian Empire, 37 percent across the Germanic states of central Europe, 39 percent in the Italian states, and 40 percent in Spain. France, the most populous and most powerful state of Western Europe, experienced a slightly faster rate of growth (55 percent) but did not approach the remarkable 82 percent growth in Britain. In the 19th century, the rate of growth in Austria, Italy, and Spain increased to 70-85 percent, but the British rate of growth had soared to more than 150 percent, causing the population density to surpass one hundred inhabitants per square mile in large portions of Europe. Only Germany and Russia-- where population growth was more than 200 percent--kept up with Britain. France, which pioneered modern birth control practices, did not experience such a dramatic population explosion, and the nineteenth-century growth rate there (45 percent) was lower than that of the 18th century (55 percent).

The beginning of this population explosion so shocked one English economist, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, that he wrote the most famous book about population ever published, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), warning about the dangers of this trend. Malthus argued that unchecked population growth tended to increase at a geometric rate (one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two), while the means of subsistence to support those people increased only at an arithmetic rate (one, two, three, four, five, six). The contrast between these two rates, known as the Malthusian principle, prompted the pessimistic conclusion that, without some preventive restraints on population increase, the future of humankind would be a story of catastrophic checks on population.

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