Humans didn’t become settlers on purpose. When, around 12,000 years ago, they began to develop into settled agriculturists, it probably wasn’t because they thought it was better - not least because, in many ways, it wasn’t. Settled humans were smaller, so likely more malnourished or at least less fit than their hunter-gatherer forebears. Yet this way of living persisted. Humans stuck with it, and there are scarcely any hunter-gatherer societies left now.
It is easy to suppose they did so because they wanted a different life or foresaw it would deliver a more advanced society. However, that seems quite unlikely - prediction would have been almost impossible. Most likely, in fact, is that early settlers did so by chance because hunting and gathering became less favourable. Once settled, however, populations rose very rapidly. Settled humans produced many more offspring. Anthropological evidence from both Europe and the Americas bears this out.
The growth appears to have been fuelled not just by the fact that more people could be fed but by women’s fertility increasing. It isn’t obvious why, but it is at least possible that breastfeeding went on for shorter periods, with children being weaned onto animal milk; women, possibly leading more sedentary lives, may have regained the levels of body fat necessary for fertility more quickly; or, of course, the developing patriarchy might have meant women’s reproductive capacity was deliberately exploited.
With increased populations, natural selection against hunter-gatherer societies began; soon, hunter-gatherers would be outnumbered. And, of course, they would run up against settled communities when seeking hunting and gathering grounds, seeing shrinking habitats, much as wild animals run up against mankind today. A kind of social extinction began.
Humanity was engaged, at this point, in a kind of Ponzi scheme. To work the land, more people were needed; to feed the people, more land was needed. And so on, until the agricultural revolution, when machinery freed up people to produce other things. And from that arose the industrial revolution and the technological revolution that enables you to read this blog.
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It is hard to believe, but humanity and its associated domesticated animals and livestock are now about 94% of the mass of mammals on Earth; only 6% of the mammalian biomass is wild.
Human population growth has been almost continuous. In 10000 BCE, just as humans first became settlers, there were around 4 million of us worldwide. By the time of Augustus Caesar, we were around 190 million; we hit a billion around 1800, and the rate of increase since has been exponential. The human population has more or less doubled during my lifetime.
Records before Roman times are slender, but archaeological and anthropological evidence of population growth exists. Astonishing as it may seem, over the last 12,000 years, there seems to have been only one occasion when the world's population fell: The Black Death in the 1400s. There was a sizeable drop - our population fell by about a quarter, more in Europe and most of all in cities. It took around a century to recover.
What is the upshot of this, and why does it matter for feminists? Why am I writing about this? First, this population increase in itself has fuelled economic growth, which has strengthened the position of men in the patriarchy: wealth belonged to the men who could protect it, and the exploitation of women’s bodies enabled all of it. Secondly, there is every sign that the population is going to stop growing and begin to fall soon, and that has important consequences for patriarchy and, therefore, the position of women in the world.
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Because it has only happened once before, we have very little hard evidence of the effects of a fall in population on a world scale. Popular views of the impact of The Black Death tend to be shaped by European experiences and what happened when the disease was at its height. Most people know, for instance, that in England, the labour shortage and the death of many landowners saw the end of serfdom and wholesale redistribution of capital.
This sounds, to many, quite an optimistic picture. What is less well known is that even after the plague had passed, there were famines, spiralling inflation of food prices, a breakdown of law and order and, of course, those who suffered the most were the least well off. Less cause for optimism.
Predictions of population growth in current times vary. Still, all models seem to agree that we are, presently, close to the peak working-age population and that the population will peak in the latter half of the 21st century. This is down to improved longevity and reduced birth rates, both in the Global South and more markedly in the Westernised world. Populations will probably continue to increase long after this time in the Global South while falling more rapidly in the West. Of course, climate change is also likely to affect those areas with still-rising populations the most.
There is no good model for the impact of this on economic growth, but we do have models that show that it is population growth that drives economic growth and land price growth; there is at least the possibility that as populations fall, inflation pressure will fall and assets including land may fall in value. The outcome will be different to that in the Black Death, partly because food production is now less labour intensive and, more obviously, because the fall will be less rapid. There is, at least, the possibility that the Ponzi scheme of the patriarchy - drive population growth to produce wealth to drive population growth - will fail. There is scope for feminist thought in that, isn’t there?
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There is one final area to touch on. Populations are already beginning to fall in some Western countries if immigration is stripped out. This fear of falling population among (predominantly) white groups has certainly caught the attention of some of the most hardline patriarchs of all: the Christian right. It is surely no accident that there is a resurgent anti-abortion movement. Falling birth rates have caught the attention of some right-of-centre ‘feminists’, too. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, men are eyeing up surrogacy. Watch this space.