Yet, Cook and Borah's writings are less dogmatic than critics would have us think. Borah noted many years ago: "The more the number of agents and agencies entering into the gathering and processing of materials, the wider are the margins of error. For those [estimates of population] of the first century, it seems likely that the most we can hope for is estimates of the order of magnitude.
Their critics--Rosenblat, Sanders, Zambardino and others--might reply that even this range is a wild exaggeration. What I find remarkable in Figure 1 is the correspondence among scenarios of demographic disaster, theirs and their critics--with the exception of Rosenblat. The problem is illustrated by Hugh Thomas's prodigiously researched Conquest of Mexico , which wrestles mightly with the numbers on the native population of Mexico in Thomas, to keep the match fair, stays within conventional historiographical rules and wrestles with all the "inspired guesses" on population size.
He recounts the bitter rivalry between the maximalists, the "California School," and the minimalists such as Rosenblat, Zambardino, Kubler, Sanders, and others. I propose that we abandon the old rules on how best to estimate population size, that we focus our attention instead on the question of the magnitude of population decline. Rosenblat aside, when the issue is the degree of decline, all the authorities on the demographic consequences of conquest are maximalists.
For smaller areas, population estimates require less extrapolation, and the range of uncertainty contracts accordingly. All the researchers on this subject who rely on primary sources--Mendizabal, Kubler, Rosenblat, Gerhard, Gibson, Cook, Borah, Percheron and Sanders--encourage research at the local level.
Thus, Sanders' estimate for the "Central Mexican symbiotic region" is based on a sampling of archaeological excavations and tribute lists sprinkled over an area of "only" twenty thousand square kilometers. Since Sanders does not consider the epidemic of as being demographically significant see , figure 4. Gibson and Kubler also compile figures for a select group of settlements with data at two or three points over the sixteenth-century.
There is agreement that a demographic catastrophe occurred and that epidemic disease was a dominant factor in initiating a die-off, beginning, in Central Mexico, with smallpox in But the role of disease cannot be understood without taking into account massive harsh treatment forced migration, enslavement, abusive labor demands and exhorbitant tribute payments and ecological devastation accompanying Spanish colonization.
Killing associated with war and conquest was clearly a secondary factor, except in isolated cases, such as the devastation of Cholula or the leveling of Tenochtitlan. A fair-minded cross-examination of the broad range of primary sources for the epidemic of leaves little doubt that smallpox swept through the Central Mexican Basin, causing enormous mortality. The epidemic ranked with the deadliest disasters that native annals customarily recorded.
Whether the fraction of smallpox deaths was one-tenth or one-half, we have no way of knowing, but from my reading of the texts discussed here, the true fraction must fall within these extremes, perhaps near the mid-point. The iconoclast's position on pre-contact population size was recently staked out by David Henige: "despite three centuries of sporadic guessing, culminating in fifty years of intensive investigation, it is still not possible to claim that any number, or any range of numbers beyond a certain irreducible minimum, is significantly more likely than any other number or range of numbers.
If we leave aside the controversy over numbers, there emerges a broad agreement in the Spanish and Nahuatl narratives and in the patterns of decline sketched by historians. After almost five centuries of writing on the subject, there is a consensus that a demographic catastrophe occurred in sixteenth-century Mexico and that it began in with the first smallpox epidemic. For narrative-bound historians, there exists a great library of published Spanish and Nahuatl texts on the demographic misfortunes of conquest and early colonization.
Vociferous debates provoked by the maximalists' figures, such as those of Cook and Borah, often obscure the similarities in scenarios of demographic collapse between the maximalists and minimalists, leaving aside Rosenblat.
To reduce historiographical uncertainty further will require much additional, careful sifting of archival and archaeological evidence--tasks which, in recent years, few seem inclined to undertake.
An oidor for more than thirty years, he fought against the widespread practice of enslaving Indians and against the extreme labor and tribute burdens common in that era. On March 1, , he completed a lengthy recommendation on colonization policies suitable for newly conquered regions. As preamble, he reviewed briefly the demographic tragedy of Spanish colonization in Mexico:. He reported a disaster on a scale unimaginable to contemporary Europeans.
If five centuries later this thesis remains beyond the domain of "reasonable probability" for some historians, their number, too, is diminishing as the evidence of demographic catastrophe accumulates. Facts are facts and that is what is happening. Ad hoc political solutions at a national level are failing. Italy has tried to overcome its bleak demographic outlook with initiatives ranging from pension cuts to a baby bonus, but the statistics are not on their side.
The difficulty for mothers to return to the workplace also means women must make considerable sacrifices if they decide to have children. With the fertility rate falling from 2. Last year an estimated 91, Italians emigrated, a sharp increase from the 50, that did so in The youth jobless rate hit In Germany last week there was a rare piece of good news. For decades there have been far more deaths last year , more than births in Germany. Those women who do give birth are bearing relatively few on average 1.
Experts say to keep the population at its current rate, that would need to rise to just over two. Consequences were specific to the time and place of the epidemic. It is now evident that disease can be an important agent of historical change; understanding the historic impact of disease can help us respond more effectively to disease today and in the future. This module examines cultural confrontation with disease in the "age of exploration" when, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to roam the globe, encountering new cultures and extending their political and economic control over vast territories in North, Central, and South America.
Along with their plants, animals, religion, and political structures, the explorers also brought their diseases. In the wake of the voyages of discovery and exploration by Christopher Columbus, the native peoples of the Caribbean Islands and Meso-America first encountered the diseases common to Europe, but unknown in the Western Hemisphere. What were the consequences of this encounter? Drill further into what data there is of legal migration in certain countries and the numbers are stunning.
According to the German statistical agency, in there were , Romanians living in the country, , Croats, , Serbs, , Kosovars and , Bosnians. In Italy, there were officially , Albanians, 1. Typically, that covers women who take care of the elderly abroad, men who go away to work on short-term construction projects and those who go abroad to work in agriculture.
While some who have lived and worked abroad may return home when they retire, few of their children will. They will contribute to the economy and pension funds of Switzerland and elsewhere and, more to the point, as the fertility rates of all western countries are way below 2.
This year most countries in Europe will conduct a census. This will help us to understand how many people actually live in each country — or at least more or less. The country that needs it most though is North Macedonia but here, like in many other countries, its census due to start in April has been postponed due to the pandemic. Officially its population is 2.
When political parties of the majority Macedonian population and minority Albanians tried to inflate their respective numbers at the last census in the entire operation collapsed. Now, thanks to its shrinking birth rate and high rates of unrecorded emigration, he reckons the total population could be as low as 1.
Consider for a moment what it means if your population figure is wrong, let alone wildly so. It means that every other figure you need for planning a modern state from your fertility rate how many schools and teachers will you need in the future? North Macedonia is not the only country with a big data problem.
According to several experts, 3. What is not disputed however is that Bosnians, like everyone else in Southeast Europe, are getting older. But what does this mean? Although these figures are alarming, predicting the future is a risky business.
Projections are made by guessing what the future holds and, in the wake of COVID, it is clear to everyone that the shape of the future can change fast. Bearing that in mind, however, one way to help envisage the future of the Western Balkans and Moldova is by looking at what has happened in other former communist countries and neighbors.
When Poland joined the EU in , followed by Bulgaria and Romania in , one immediate effect was mass emigration. However, EU membership also gradually brought foreign investment and improving standards of living. Today while people still emigrate from all three countries it is no longer the mass emigration of the past and labor shortages mean that wages in all of them have been increasing for years.
Poland, the richest of the three, is now a country of mass immigration. The populations of Bulgaria and Romania continue to shrink however but more thanks to low fertility than emigration. In principle then, if the non-EU states of Southeast Europe continue to grow their economies and to very slowly converge with the EU, there is hope that things can change.
When the pandemic began, hundreds of thousands headed home to the Balkans and Moldova. There is little data on numbers but anecdotally we can tell that many who returned subsequently left again.
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