Migration and Makeup: A History of Demographic Changes in Europe

**The extended Frey Family, Riga, Latvia. / Courtesy Baltinew, Wikimedia Commons**

The Malthusian model has been very influential.

Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate

By Dr. Sarah Carmichael
Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History
Utrecht University

By Dr. András Vadas
Assistant Professor of Medieval History
Eötvös Loránd University

This is presented in three periods: Early Modern (1500-1800), Modern (1800-1900), and Contemporary (1900-2000).

Demographic Change in Early Modern History (ca. 1500–1800)

Overview

Most scholars agree that the European region saw its population almost double between 1500 and 1750, followed by an even greater surge in population levels as Europe entered the era of the industrial revolution. This post-Black Death period was one of uneven improvements in welfare and the intensification of land use, which fed ever larger numbers of mouths. The wealth from European colonies also encouraged many to work longer hours, so that they could afford small luxuries. But at the end of this period—in the time of British economic theorist and cleric Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)—worries about how resources would keep up with rising population levels became ever more prominent. Disease, malnutrition, and the interplay of the two could easily tip populations over into periods of high mortality. Yet many historians are critical of the assumption made by many present-day journalists that, because average life expectancy in the early modern period was around thirty to thirty-five years of age, no one lived to see old age. In fact, for individuals who made it through their first five years of life, the outlook was quite decent. In general, those who lived into their early twenties could expect to live to their sixties (approximately, with some variation depending on time and place). This chapter sketches early modern developments in fertility and mortality, framed around Malthus’s model, to give the reader a general sense of demographic trends across Europe. First, however, it discusses sources and methodological problems in the study of these facets of early modern society.

Types of Sources and Methodological Problems

The early modern period is the earliest for which there is relatively precise data on demographic behaviour and population change for some parts of Europe. Different political entities and self-governing bodies started to register their inhabitants for several reasons, the two most important being taxation and state control. The period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century also saw the written form take precedence over oral tradition throughout Europe. This led both individuals and administrative bodies to produce more detailed registers than ever before.

The act of registering people is not an early modern invention; some forms of census existed in Ancient Rome as well as in several medieval polities, cities, and ecclesiastical bodies. Conscription and taxation data have their methodological limitations, as these sources were not created to come to an estimate of the complete population or its demographic features. Nonetheless, some of the sources provide data that allow for estimates of population dynamics. The appearance of registers for tax (religious tithe and state tax), household and estate conscriptions, church registers, and canonical visitations appeared in different phases of the early modern period in different parts of Europe, but ultimately most polities created similar records. There is however an almost complete lack of overall population surveys—censuses—until the eighteenth century. It was only at the beginning of the eighteenth century that the first proper censuses were conducted in north-western Europe (Denmark, Iceland, Prussia, and Sweden are pioneers in this respect). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, many Western and Central European polities also began to recognise the importance of conducting surveys of their populations. As a result, by the turn of the nineteenth century there were complete censuses, or at least initiatives to carry them out, in the majority of Europe’s polities.

*Urbarium* scroll from Säckingen Abbey from 1310, written in Middle High German. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

For most of the early modern period, however, scholars rely on partial datasets that were put down in writing for purposes other than surveying complete populations. While some of them, like parish registers, provide data that allows a better understanding of demographic features than many early censuses, these early modern sources all survive in highly scattered forms, even in areas with the best source coverage, such as the Low Countries, England, France, or Italy. Even if parish registers have survived, it is challenging to reconstruct demographic processes or family structures from them. Other sources, such as tithe and other tax records, as well as estate conscriptions (such as land registers, manorial rolls, and urbaria—all forms of recording property ownership) also provide information that in many cases censuses do not. However, these sources present different methodological barriers from church registers. While some of them cover major areas, such as tithe records for particular regions of Europe, or state tax records kept by some polities, they do not concern wider populations, only individuals who had holdings and thus could potentially pay taxes. Women (except widows), elderly people who lived in someone else’s household, servants, apprentices, and children were all outside the scope of such surveys. Finally, as all of these records served tax purposes in one way or another, many people had no interest in being included in these lists. Those who tried to evade taxes therefore remain invisible until, or even after, the introduction of censuses. Therefore, whenever precise population estimates—of different polities, the death tolls of epidemics, famines, military conflicts, and so on—are presented in the context of early modern times, one must be very cautious with the figures.

That said, major advances in data collection have enabled the creation of databases in which individuals are trackable across time and space, allowing scholars to find the same person again in data from a later census. Another big impetus to the field has come through close collaboration with genealogists, using crowd-sourcing techniques and citizen science projects to record information about past populations.

Early Modern Demographic Regime: Was There a Malthusian Equilibrium in Europe?

The Malthusian model has been very influential in historical studies of population and resources. Malthus’s model predicted regular crises, since food production increases at a linear rate whereas population tends to increase exponentially. There is some evidence suggesting that this may hold for the medieval period and for some regions of Europe up until 1800. Malthus was an English minister concerned with what he saw as a recurrent problem: that any increase in food production led to greater population growth, which would subsequently literally eat up any gains in living standards, thus trapping populations at low standards of living and on the edge of subsistence. His analysis identified a series of ‘positive’ (resulting in higher death rates) and ‘preventive’ (resulting in lowered birth rates) checks on population growth. These checks might temporarily disrupt the relationship between food production and population growth, but Malthus was generally pessimistic about the long-term potential of populations to overcome this supposedly natural tendency towards growth. The point at which the population outstrips the growth in food production, leading to scarcity, famine, and disease, is referred to as a ‘Malthusian catastrophe’.

What we know of the early modern period is that some moments were more Malthusian than others. European populations do indeed seem to have grown faster than food production, and living standards were negatively affected. Owing to the demographic crisis caused by the fourteenth-century Black Death, labour was relatively scarce in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period. This scarcity drove up the wages of both men and women and meant that women tended to marry later and have fewer children. However, with large-scale change in farming practices and other market developments, the demand for female labour subsided and so, from around 1600 to 1800, women married slightly younger, populations grew more rapidly, and living standards (as measured by real wages) declined.

Between 1000 and 1824, Spain, Britain, and Poland had steadily growing population levels over the early modern period, with substantial increases emerging in the eighteenth century. The population of Britain really took off in the eighteenth century, reflecting a significant increase in birth rates around this time. Poland also experienced a change in the rate of population growth and, across the board, this trend was one of acceleration. This was a time during which the continent stood at the cusp of significant demographic changes, and it is here that we start to see the first signs of the demographic transition to come.

In studies of the demographic transition, France is a famous outlier. There, birth rates and death rates fell in sync with each other, leading to a far smaller ‘youth bulge’ than one would normally expect to see. This pattern can already be clearly observed over the course of the eighteenth century when French birth rates decline precipitously while those in England and Wales rise. One argument that has been put forward for the very distinct French pattern of demographic development is an early process of secularisation, which lowered expectations around producing large families in service of faith. This brings us to the next section, where fertility is discussed in more detail.

Fertility

**A woman seated on a obstetrical chair giving birth aided by a midwife who works beneath her skirts. / Courtesy Wellcome Collection, Public Domain**

Fertility was high in the pre-modern context. In the absence of modern contraception, childbirth occurred frequently—and, in the absence of modern medicine, many women died giving birth. However, there are indications that early modern Europeans (especially those in the west of the continent) did not bear as many children as they could have. The fact that many women from north-western Europe only married at the age of twenty-five and above already limited fertility. The practice of extending the breastfeeding stage and a preference for greater spacing between children limited the number of children born in wedlock. Fertility stood between 4.5 to seven children per woman for much of the early modern period. Given high levels of infant mortality, this level of childbirth might well have left couples with only two to three adult children, a figure at or just above the replacement level for a population.

However, certainly for the British case, the end of the early modern period is one of increasing fertility; for France, however, the opposite occurred, and women went from having approximately 4.5 children to having 3.5 children between 1650 and 1800. As discussed above, the French case was exceptional. With regard to Britain, data from British parish registers indicates that over the early modern period the average gap between births dropped by eight percent from their highest level of 33.27 months over the period between 1640–1660 to 30.54 months between births by the end of the eighteenth century. This means that—on average—women had three fewer months between pregnancies which, over the course of a lifetime, could significantly increase total fertility. Looking beyond the British and French cases, detailed fertility data for other parts of Europe is hard to come by, and, in the context of high maternal mortality, many women did not reach the end of their child-bearing years.

Mortality

**Jacob Ernst Marcus, ‘Study sheet with three old men and a young woman’ (1807). / Courtesy Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Public Domain**

Death rates in early modern Europe gradually declined across most of the continent from the high Middle Ages (ca. 1000) onward. However, there were numerous exceptional periods tied to weather events or environmental crises, epidemics, and military conflicts, all of which could result in privation, malnutrition, and famine. Extreme weather during the growing season or during the harvest, the passing of an army, or simply a lack of hands to carry out the necessary preparation of the soil, the sowing, or the harvesting, could cause crises of crop production which, in some cases, could endanger the very survival of a certain group. Crises connected to crop failures recurrently happened in the medieval period and during the early modern age, often in a localised manner, with particular regions suffering from high mortality rates while others were spared, according to conditions. War in particular affected regions differently: the late medieval and early modern wars of the Ottomans in the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin, the Wars of Religion in France, and the Thirty Years’ War in German-speaking areas took a tremendous toll in those parts of Europe involved in the conflict, but other areas did not experience these shocks to mortality. In most cases, economic crises only affected particular polities, and in many cases, these led to the rapid economic development of other, competing regions. While famines were recurrent in much of Europe up to the high Middle Ages, they became much more local phenomena by the late Middle Ages. However, they never fully went away, and continued to strike early modern Europe as a result of military campaigns, extreme weather, plant or animal diseases, or the confluence of multiple factors. Most of these famines were still limited to specific parts of Europe, such as the Russian famine of 1600–1603, the Irish Famine of 1740–1741 or the Great Czech Famine of 1770–1771. The kind of European-scale famines that had occurred in the later Middle Ages and the early modern times became less frequent. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was probably the only late medieval example of such a famine occurring on a European scale. It was followed in early modern times by food crises and famines from 1590–1598 and from 1693–1697.

Epidemic diseases were also a significant cause of mortality. Smallpox, influenza, measles, syphilis, malaria, and so-called ‘sweating sickness’ were all present in certain phases of the early modern period, causing serious epidemics in some regions. However, none proved to be as lethal as the plague. The so-called second plague pandemic that began in the mid-fourteenth (or, according to other estimates, the mid-thirteenth) century, and recurred in some areas until as late as the early nineteenth century, was a major factor in mortality throughout early modern Europe. After the wave of Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s, the plague never again caused comparable demographic crises on a Europe-wide scale, but its recurrent spikes did cause regional and local demographic stress. While the plague was long believed to have been a primarily urban phenomenon or one which affected male and female populations differently (further aggravating its demographic impacts), such claims have recently been disproved. While there were obvious differences in the waves of plagues in different parts of Europe—Italy likely suffered more than areas north of the Alps or in Eastern Europe—both urban centres and rural areas, and both male as well as female populations were severely affected for decades.

It is important to note that mortality in general in this period hit children and women hardest. Women died in childbirth or from postpartum bleeding or infections and young children were susceptible to infectious disease.

Conclusion

At the very end of the early modern period, some European countries began to experience demographic transitions. This was a phenomenon whereby a drop in death rates was not immediately followed by a drop in birth rates, leading to a period of rapid population growth followed by a stabilisation at low levels of both birth and death rates. However, the position from which countries started on this process and the speed with which the phenomenon developed varied from region to region. Fertility and mortality were intrinsically tied to developments in standards of living, and many periods of early modern European history are characterised by Malthusian limitations. However, Europeans were also proactive in limiting fertility and started to live longer as incremental advances were made in the science of illness. Moreover, wider societal developments had significant influence on demography with secularisation, colonisation, and proto-industrialisation changing the ways in which populations responded to different situations. This meant that across the continent experiences differed, with some countries experiencing the start of a so-called ‘youth bulge’ from the later seventeenth century onwards, whereas others maintained stable populations with high birth and death rates.

Demographic Change in Modern History (ca. 1800–1900)

By Dr. Károly Halmos
Professor of History
Eötvös Loránd University

By Dr. Gábor Koloh
Assistant Professor of Economic and Social History
Eötvös Loránd University

By Rick J. Mourits
Historical Demographer and Data Engineer
International Institute of Social History (IISH)

By Dr. Jakub Rákosník
Assistant Professor of Modern Social History
Institute of Economic and Social History
Charles University

Overview

The population changes of the nineteenth century have been studied exhaustively by historians and demographers alike. States started to govern populations in a biopolitical sense, meaning that they took responsibility for the wellbeing of their subjects, for which they began gathering statistics on a large and increasingly comprehensive scale. Statistical sources also recorded the large and rapid demographic changes to which Europe was subjected over the course of the nineteenth century. The European population grew rapidly as lives lengthened, birth rates decreased, and labour markets changed dramatically. In general, these trends were very similar across Europe, however, the timing and underlying reasons for these demographic changes differed between countries.

We outline the historical background against which historical population data was gathered and warn against the uncritical study of sources. We explore why scholars use this term to describe rapid population growth and the underlying dynamics of demographic change. After that, we show how transforming labour markets initially had a negative effect on daily living conditions, but were also a driving force behind improvements in the quality of life at the end of the nineteenth century.

New Sources

**Table 1: Overview of the major demographic sources.**

The nineteenth century saw a surge in the amount of information available on population dynamics. Many countries in Europe started to register their inhabitants, so that they could keep track of their citizens. These developments started at rather different times, however, and the quality of the data produced also varied. The censuses, civil registries, and population registers (see Table 1 for a description) that were introduced in the nineteenth century were a vast improvement on earlier administration by churches and cities. Information was now more standardised, subject to controls, and better stored. To this day these systems are still being used to monitor who lives in a country, and have only grown more sophisticated, so that states can register their taxpayers, property owners, students, patients, drivers, welfare recipients, and so on.

European administrative systems were made with specific goals in mind. Before the nineteenth century, the registration of people was often a task performed by churches. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this task was taken up by the centralising state (be it a nation-state or an empire) that wished to register its citizens. The first state-run administrative system in Europe started in 1792 when the civil registry—records of birth, marriages, and deaths—was implemented in France for military conscription and taxation. Other countries followed suit and implemented their own registration systems, of which the census was by far the most common. Over time, the ability of states to register and measure their citizens’ lives grew, resulting in more specialised registers. Besides basic demographic information on the population, militia registers, occupational censuses, housing surveys, nationwide taxation tables, and cause-of-death registrations became available on a nation-wide scale.

State-run registrations were by no means a European invention. Long before nation-states started to form in Europe, there were already established states with civil administrations in China, Japan, and Korea. What made the registration systems in nineteenth-century Europe different was that all inhabitants of a country were registered; not just heads of households or the affluent. One of the main drivers behind the registration of all citizens was the strive to improve societies and make them quantifiable. This was not only a moral pursuit, but also an effort to build strong nations by making the most of society in military and economic terms. The trend fully blossomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the rise of statistics coincided with the concerns of medical professionals and social scholars. Hygienic movements tried to improve living conditions, while economists and other social scholars were very concerned with the state of the population. During this time, the civil administration was increasingly used to address economic and public health issues, rather than military purposes.

The new records were used and accepted by the population, since civil registration gave them rights, formalised family relations, and regulated inheritance claims. But administrative records were not neutral instruments, as they were also used for nation-building and enforcing social structures. Registration indicated that the state recognised the existence of individuals and wanted to improve or regulate their daily lives, yet these documents were shaped by a very specific group of men in terms of affluence and social standing, meaning that recognition followed normative patterns that were dominant at the time. For example, forms of human bondage or slavery in the colonies excluded certain groups of people from registration, enabling structural dehumanisation. There was generally little interest in indexing female occupations after marriage, since married women were not supposed to work in the public sphere, nor was there much attention to the agrarian division of labour from administrations that were mainly interested in processes of industrialisation. From our contemporary perspective we see this lack of registration as a form of marginalisation, since (aspects of) lives remained structurally unknown and out of view. In order to make accurate (re)constructions of the past, it is therefore imperative to understand the historical perspectives and concomitant biases that are ingrained in each form of civil registration.

Demographic Transition

**Thomas Robert Malthus / Courtesy Wellcome Collection, Wikimedia Commons**

In 1798, the British reverend and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) published the first edition of his essay on population. Malthus believed that population growth was close to stationary, as limited food supplies kept populations in check. This mechanism has become known as the Malthusian trap. Ironically, Malthus’s essay signalled the end of an old demographic regime: when Malthus published the different versions of ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’, the relationship between population growth and food scarcity had started to vanish. This process began with the so-called agricultural and commercial revolution of earlier times, but gained speed over the course of the nineteenth century with the massive and ongoing use of fossil fuels leading to increasing returns on human labour.

The world population doubled in size over the course of the nineteenth century. The estimated world population reached the first billion around 1800 and more than one fifth of that figure lived in Europe. Around a century later, immediately after the First World War, the estimated world population was approaching the second billion, with Europe accounting for a quarter of that number. The speed and sheer size of the growth was unprecedented: the previous doubling of the world population had taken roughly three centuries. These numbers are even more impressive if we consider that people living at the end of the nineteenth century were physically better off than their predecessors a hundred years before. Europe had broken free of the Malthusian trap.

Not only did populations grow, but human life courses also started to change. Some demographers use the term ‘demographic transition’ to designate this change. The key to this mechanism would be the transition from a population regime with high fertility and high mortality to a population regime with low fertility and low mortality.

In its most stringent form, the demographic transition model divides the mechanism into four phases:

The first phase is a steady state where birth and mortality rates are high.
In the second phase the mortality rate diminishes while the birth rate remains high, resulting in a growing gap between mortality and fertility rates.
During the third phase the gap between mortality and birth rates decreases—after an initial lag, the birth rate starts diminishing too.
The fourth phase is when both rates get relatively close to each other again and enter a new, steady state of low birth and mortality rates. This is not necessarily the end of demographic change.

The demographic transition model was expected to provide a comprehensive explanation of the changes that took place in Europe in the nineteenth century and also occurred elsewhere in the twentieth century. However, in the last few decades, the determinism of the theory has been heavily criticised by social historians, historical anthropologists, and demographers alike, because the timing, duration, order, and underlying reasons for the different phases of the demographic transition differed between countries. Moreover, the model is very descriptive and does not explain when or why people decided to have fewer children. It might very well be possible that there was not a single demographic transition that spread through Europe, but a myriad of demographic transitions with slightly different causes. Therefore, the demographic transition model can at best be seen as a descriptive mechanism, merely stating that at aggregate levels there is an association between decreases in mortality and fertility.

Decreasing Mortality and Fertility Rates

**Thomas Annan, The Slums of Glasgow (1868–1877). / Courtesy Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Public Domain**

Death was a much more common occurrence in everyday life for those born in 1800. Mortality was especially high for newborns. Infectious diseases and dietary infections due to contaminated food and water often proved fatal for the youngest in society. Children who survived the first year of life were still not out of harm’s way, as infection with diphtheria, measles, and smallpox in the first years of life could be fatal. Infectious diseases also caused high mortality levels among adults. Malnutrition and a lack of knowledge about (preventive) medicine made people susceptible to infection with cholera, diarrhoeal diseases, and tuberculosis. These infectious diseases could be lethal for any weakened adult and added to the wear and tear on the human body.

Yet, over the course of the nineteenth century, the impact of epidemics diminished. With the improvement of hygiene, living conditions, preventive medicine, and public health, infectious diseases began to lose ground at the end of the nineteenth century. The developing understanding of the role of hygiene had an especially significant impact on the trends of infant and child mortality. The timing and pace of this decline in mortality varied by country. In Sweden for example, mortality decreased throughout the nineteenth century, whereas in Switzerland or the Netherlands it took until the second half of the century before mortality rates began to drop.

Decreasing mortality was most noticeable for the youngest in society, and it was the decline in infant and child mortality that generated significant population growth, even in countries where both mortality and fertility declined relatively rapidly. Those who had already survived into adulthood now also had better life prospects. Meanwhile, the economic boom in the second half of the century created a favourable opportunity for agricultural areas in Eastern Europe. Increases in production also brought positive changes in the distribution of food, as steam hauling revolutionised transportation. An improvement in living conditions was brought about by a more balanced diet and increasing knowledge of preventive medicine. However, these improvements in living standards were fragile and progressed in leaps and bounds, amid setbacks related to agricultural crises and outbreaks of infectious disease.

The trend in fertility is more complex than the trend in mortality. Demographic transition theory does not consider regional variations. However, throughout the nineteenth century, the total fertility rate (the average number of children born to women aged between fifteen and forty-nine) varied significantly between different parts of the continent. Central European values, for example, remained below Eastern European values throughout the century, but were higher than those of Western Europe. The decline in fertility in Western European states began as early as the 1870s and 1880s, while in Central Europe the same trend started around 1900. Yet, territorial differences cannot simply be explained by the west-east slope of economic and cultural processes.

On both sides of the divide, we can see much more differentiated processes. The fertility transition started first in anti-traditionalist, revolutionary countries, and was thereafter widely adopted across Europe, reaching traditionalist, religious countries last. In Hungary, for example, the decline in fertility started almost at the same time as in Western Europe—even before the decrease in mortality in Hungary. It was somewhat later than France and the US, the pioneers in the fertility transition, but much earlier than religiously conservative countries like the Netherlands, where fertility decreased rather slowly and remained relatively high well into the twentieth century. The varied timing of fertility decline across Europe is at odds with demographic transition theory, demonstrating that the mechanisms underlying demographic modernisation differed across the continent.

The issue becomes even more complicated when we look at differences within countries. Research has shown conscious and significant birth control in some regions since the end of the eighteenth century. If we stay with the Hungarian example, the one-child system of the Ormánság in South Transdanubia is clearly such a phenomenon. Social stratification and rural-urban differences were probably a more important indicator for the fall of birth rates than the country of origin. In urban contexts, the upper and middle classes usually limited their number of offspring earlier than labouring classes. In the countryside, farmers, farm labourers, and peasants generally continued to have large families and only started decreasing their family size during the twentieth century. In other words, the demographic transition might describe an association between decreasing mortality and fertility, but hides much variation between countries, regions, and individuals.

Industrialisation and Demographic Change

A Watt steam engine, invented by James Watt, who transformed the steam engine from a reciprocating motion that was used for pumping to a rotating motion suited to industrial applications; Watt and others significantly improved the efficiency of the steam engine. / Photo Nicolás Pérez, by Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering of Madrid, Wikimedia Commons

The growth of the population was in its early phase correlated with increasing poverty and pauperism that determined the physical conditions of the people. According to estimations based on military conscriptions, there was a decrease in the average height of recruits during the first half of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon carried by the wave of the Industrial Revolution and which went hand in hand with accelerating population growth. Somehow, matters had to get worse before living conditions for the population started improving. At the time, this was considered to be the heavy price of the Industrial Revolution, which the German philosopher and activist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) famously described in 1845, writing that “[t]he condition of the working-class […] is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day.”

The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century had a similarly stimulative impact on population growth in Europe, as did proto-industrialisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wage work provided resources for an increasing number of households and drew ever-increasing scores of people to the city. Urbanisation meant the relocation of large numbers of people to hygienically unsatisfactory conditions. Cities suffered from overcrowding and pollution, had limited water supplies, and were ideal vectors for infectious diseases. These poor living circumstances negatively affected the health of city-dwellers. Inhabitants of cities were shorter than their counterparts from rural regions or previous generations. This situation has been best documented for England. For example, Engels noted that “diseases of the spine amongst people employed in factories presented themselves very frequently,” to the extent that he had “seldom traversed Manchester without meeting three or four [people] suffering from […] distortions of the spinal columns and legs.” Statistics paint a similar picture: London craftsmen had shrunk from an average height of 170 cm in 1750 to 163 cm in 1840. Similarly, the infant mortality rate rose during the first half of the nineteenth century in British industrial cities, despite its slow decline during the second half of the eighteenth century. This confirms the claims of older historiography that the standards of living stagnated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the long run, however, the growth of per capita income during the nineteenth century undoubtedly had a positive effect on the wellbeing of the population. In one century, the mean income almost tripled. Higher personal income improved the quality of life, as it made better housing, nutrition, and hygiene affordable. The wheels of the demographic transition were set in motion, as households were enabled to reach a desirable standard of living, improving their own survival chances and those of their offspring. Simultaneously, the income of governments and public authorities grew, allowing administrations to provide much-needed improvements in public hygiene by investing in sewerage and water pipes. Industrialisation had introduced new social and health problems, but it also presented the economic means to solve them.

However, the demographic transition cannot be explained by the growth of bustling, industrial cities alone. Slower, longer, less visible, and equally important was the revolution in agriculture that started in the eighteenth century. Rapidly growing populations were fed by agricultural innovations, as crop rotation replaced the medieval open-field and three-field systems, new plants such as potatoes and corn were produced, modern machines like seed drills and threshing machines were invented, and artificial fertilisers made more land fertile. Simultaneously, steamships and railways introduced a transport revolution which enabled Europeans to cheaply import food from overseas, especially in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, there were also rapid medical innovations in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the discovery of bacteria and parasites, and the development of preventive healthcare. Combined with economic growth, these factors allowed for rapid demographic change in the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

The nineteenth century can be characterised as a century of revolutionary demographic change. States started to actively manage their populations, mortality and fertility decreased, and living standards started to improve. The changing role of states, the demographic transition, and improving quality of life were surprisingly similar across Europe. But this transformative process was still ongoing and, despite similar trends between countries, there were many local differences. It took until the twentieth century before mortality and fertility rates reached similar levels again.

Even though twenty to fourty percent of all children died before their fifth birthday at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most intellectuals were afraid of population growth as something that could only lead to hunger and famine. The Industrial Revolution was at an early phase when, in 1798, Malthus wrote:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him.

These are cruel words, but the world at the time was even more cruel. More people started to survive, but they were starving, lacking resources, and pauperised. Few were born well-off and few could easily find their place in the world of the early industrial revolution.

Nevertheless, the world had changed significantly by the dawn of the twentieth century. Demographically, Europe was a forerunner, and its nineteenth century saw an “escape from hunger and premature death,” in the words of Nobel Prize laureate Robert Fogel (1926–2013). Increasingly, people started surviving beyond childhood and the oldest in society grew older as well. As a result, populations grew rapidly, even though fertility also started to decrease. As it became evident that populations had escaped from this Malthusian trap, European states started to value population growth: sizable, healthy populations meant a stronger military and economic presence. The stage was set for a new era, even though the demographic developments were not immediately noticeable for everyone in society.

Demographic Change in Europe in Contemporary History (ca. 1900–2000)

By Dr. Gábor Koloh
Assistant Professor of Economic and Social History
Eötvös Loránd University

By Dr. Jakub Rákosník
Assistant Professor of Modern Social History
Institute of Economic and Social History
Charles University

By Dr. Thomas Schad
Department of History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Overview

The demographic development of Europe in the twentieth century can be grasped by two indicators: firstly, the rate of natural demographic increase and decrease (birth and death rates), which was also shaped by external factors such as wars, plagues, and forced migrations; secondly, in order to explain the more intrinsic dynamics of demographic change in Europe, all the other factors of the changing Human Development Index (HDI) must be taken into account—such as health, knowledge, education, and economic wealth.

The demographic history of Europe in the twentieth century can be broken down into four periods, according to three historical breaks.

The first phase (pre-1914) was characterised by a gradual decline in birth rates that had started to rise, in the vast majority of European countries, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. In less industrialised countries, natality had recently peaked during the 1880s and 1890s (Serbia, Romania), or at the beginning of the twentieth century (Bulgaria). The decline in the birth rate then culminated during the First World War.

The interwar period induced the second phase: after a short wave of post-war compensatory births (births postponed due to war), the decades of the 1920s and especially the 1930s were considered by many contemporaries to be an age of population depression.

The third phase began with the post-1945 baby boom, which was particularly pronounced in most Western European countries (although delayed in West Germany), while behind the emerging ‘Iron Curtain’, it was more moderate. The considerably long period of economic growth after the Second World War and the benefits of the post-war welfare state provided better living conditions for families with children. This also meant that people married earlier.

The fourth period, the so-called ‘second demographic transition’, started in the mid-1960s in the West. Individualist attitudes, career demands, and changes in social attitudes (including the relaxation of traditional gender roles), combined with the availability of effective contraceptives, led to very low fertility. The lands behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ were affected by this process later, but the transformation of the 1990s had significant impacts on Central and Eastern European societies in terms of fertility, and this process continues to be very dynamic.

First Break: The Impact of the First World War

**Refugee transport from Serbia in Leibnitz, Styria, 1914. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons**

While the first, pre-1914 phase can be considered as part of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, with respect to the European demographic trends, events after 1914 set new conditions. In total, the First World War took an estimated seventeen million lives from all over the world. Additionally, it is estimated that the three waves of the Spanish Influenza pandemic killed more than fifty million people between 1918 and 1920, when the world population was estimated to be around 1.9 billion. Population losses were concentrated in the countries involved in the war: in Germany or Hungary, for example, four times as many people died as a result of the war than did from influenza; in Britain it was three times as many; in Italy two times as many. But in other parts of the world, the opposite situation prevailed.

During the war, there was also a sharp decline in birth rates due to family disintegration and war-induced misery. For instance, in the territory of present-day Austria, the number of newborns fell from 250,000 in 1914 to 140,000 in 1918. Moreover, the rate of stillbirths increased slightly during the war, as well as the number of children born out of wedlock (in today’s Czech Republic this accounted for 0.5 percent of all births in 1915, rising to 13.5 percent by 1918). Germany offers another insightful example. A glance at the country’s birth rate reveals a significant decrease: while in 1900, the birth rate was still 35.8 per 1000 inhabitants, it dropped to 27.0 in 1914, when the war started. The war period itself saw further decreases in the birth rate, which dropped as low as 14.3 by the end of the war in 1918.

Although the interwar period saw a general decline of emigration from Europe, immediately after the war, population movements were considerable. In the Carpathian Basin, where the population had previously been in decline, emigration to the American continent continued, primarily to Canada after the introduction of the quota system in the US. But for the masses of people becoming minorities in newly-formed states (predominantly Hungarians), seeking refuge in Hungary became the most favourable option for getting by. In the second half of the interwar period, increasingly extremist right-wing demographic policies, inspired by racist conceptions spreading from Germany especially, put an increasing migratory pressure on the Jewish population of the region. Drawing from the same ideological mainstream of that time, many political elites of the European interwar period started to adopt more ambitious demographic policies. This resulted in the formulation of both various population growth theories, and intrusive, pro-natalist policies with an increasingly militaristic character—primarily but not exclusively in the countries that lost the First World War. Yet still, there was a constant decline in natality.

The Great Depression of the 1930s only intensified an atmosphere of concern over the demographic development of Europe: in 1913, for example, the number of newborns per 1,000 inhabitants was 19.0 in France, 28.2 in Netherlands, 27.2 in Finland, and 27.6 in Germany; by 1935 this had declined to 15.3 in France, 20.2 in the Netherlands, and 19.6 in Finland. That same year in Germany, aggressive, pro-natalist policies increased the birth rate slightly to 18.9, encouraged by the Nazis, who were in their second year of power. In 1939, the first year of the Second World War, the birth rate rose to 20.4, a number that would never be reached again in Germany.

**Propaganda poster of the British Eugenics Society (1930s). / Courtesy Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons**

Population policies became the subject of passionate discussions. At one end of the debate stood the populationists, who were seeking to promote the growth of the birth rate. At the other end were the so-called Neo-Malthusians, who promoted low fertility through contraception in order to improve the living standards of the lower classes. Not only the quantity, but also the quality of the population became an important issue of the time. Eugenics belonged to scientific discourse. Numerous supporters of eugenicist selection could be found among the socialists and liberals as well as among the nationalists. These tendencies culminated in the 1930s in the German National Socialist practice of forced sterilisation. This idea came from the USA, and we can also find it in other European countries of that time, such as Sweden (1934) or Norway (1934).

Second Break: The Second World War and the Post-war Baby Boom

The Second World War is estimated to have cost sixty-five million people’s lives (worldwide), with the highest number of losses in a single state being the Soviet Union’s estimated twenty-seven million victims. As for Germany, the figures of losses vary between 6.5 and seven million people, whereas Poland lost six million, and Yugoslavia 1.7 million lives. These total figures form a larger picture by including all groups of victims. But the demographic landscape across Europe also changed from an ethnic viewpoint: for example, European Jews were almost entirely extinguished or expelled by the Nazis and their collaborationists.

In the years directly following the war, forced migration continued, as the example of Germany shows: between 1945 and 1950, around 6 million people, mostly ethnic Germans, were forced to migrate from other countries in Central and Eastern Europe to post-war Germany, now divided between East and West. There was moreover a significant migration movement from East to West in Germany: an estimated four million people migrated between 1946 and 1961, until the Berlin Wall and the closure of the inter-German border halted large scale migrations, without entirely ending them. Despite population growth throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the rapidly growing German economy needed more manpower. Consequently, West Germany signed a series of bilateral contracts with countries such as Greece, Turkey, or Yugoslavia. This led to an influx of workers (and later their relatives), known as ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Low wages and a lack of currency convertibility did not make the region behind the Iron Curtain an attractive migration destination. Yet labour migration was not completely new, as proven by the example of East Germany, where ‘contract workers’ (Vertragsarbeiter) migrated from Mozambique, Poland, Hungary, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, and other mostly socialist countries.

*Vertragsarbeiter* in Erfurt, 1985. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In those European countries that remained colonial powers by the end of the Second World War, the impact of decolonisation on demographic change cannot be underestimated: following Algeria’s independence from French colonisation, more than 800,000 so-called Pieds-Noirs (settlers of French and European origin) relocated to mainland France and other French territories, accompanied by numerous local collaborationists. On the other hand, France saw significant numbers of immigrants from all its former colonies, who left their homelands for economic or political reasons. In the UK, citizens of the Commonwealth—a political association of fifty-four countries (as of 2022), most of which formerly belonged to the British Empire—had privileged immigration rights as British Subjects until 1962. The process of decolonisation had an equally important impact on smaller colonial powers, such as Portugal or Netherlands, where the influx of these newcomers increased the population by five to ten percent. By 1970, Western Europe in particular had definitively transformed from an emigrant continent into an immigrant one.

The word ‘boomer’ or ‘baby-boomer’ is derived from developments after the Second World War, when birth rates rose and the economy flourished. The ‘baby boom’ that arose in the United States or in Canada was milder in Europe, however. Pro-natalist policies and the related ban on abortions, or efforts to reduce them, were soon replaced in Central and Eastern Europe by the complete liberalisation of abortion at the turn of the 1950s and into the 1960s. The only exception was Romania, where the abortion ban introduced in the mid-1960s led to a very short-term increase in fertility. As a result of the social and economic policies of the 1950s and 1960s, forced collectivisation and rapid secularisation took place in all Soviet satellite states (though at very different paces), impacting both the livelihoods and value systems of families. The employment rate of women increased faster than it did in the West. This process not only brought about a tension between childbearing and work, but the intensifying spatial mobility also resulted in a shift away from the immediate family, which meant the loss of help from parents and relatives, in addition to low wages and limited nursery spaces.

Despite some demographic policy measures based on incentives, it was the reduction in mortality rates that became crucial in the population growth of Europe until the mid-twentieth century, driven primarily by the decline in infant mortality. There were important regional differences, and a deterioration of indicators can be traced from the West to the East of Europe. For example, while the average infant mortality in interwar Sweden was fifty-four per 1,000 newborns, the number was 142 in Poland. The post-war period saw a gradual decrease of these indicators, while regional differences persisted. At the beginning of the 1970s, this rate had fallen to eleven in the case of Sweden and to thirty in Poland.

An important indicator of the quality of life is life expectancy, which rose throughout the twentieth century across Europe, albeit unevenly. The average rise in life expectancy was between two and three months per year, due to medical improvements as well as rising living standards. Growth trends were visible in Western as well as in Eastern parts of Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Divergence was evident only in the 1970s and 1980s, when Eastern Bloc life expectancies grew significantly more slowly, stagnated, or even declined, as in the case of the Soviet Union.

The historian Edward Shorter classified the decade of the 1960s as the period of the (second) sexual revolution. Its typical features were a higher degree of sexual permissiveness, women’s sexual autonomy, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. One very important factor with respect to liberation of sexual relations was increased access to contraception throughout the 1960s. When Czechoslovak demographers researched this issue in 1956, they recognised that more than two-thirds of people used a form of coitus interruptus as a method of contraception. Condoms were acceptable only for one fifth of them. In the second half of the 1960s, hormonal contraception became more readily available, at least in the West. The lack of foreign trade and other economic barriers in the countries of the East meant that access to the pill was scarce. The scarcity of effective and comfortable contraception consequently led to higher levels of abortions.

Third Break: 1970s, Start of the Second Demographic Transition

**Remains of the “iron curtain” in Devínska Nová Ves, Bratislava (Slovakia). / Photo by Vladimír Tóth, Wikimedia Commons**

The number of people living in Europe grew without respect to declining fertility. Today, the population is twenty-five percent larger than in 1960. However, this has been the case mainly due to Europe’s positive migration balance. The decline in fertility observed from the mid-1960s has been described by some demographic analyses as the process of the ‘second demographic transition’. Its guiding features include sustained sub-replacement fertility, population ageing, and the plurality of family arrangements other than marriage.

The shift to more individualistic attitudes can also be considered a basis for declining fertility. Marriage, in the meantime, had changed in nature, along with the spread of extramarital births and domestic partnerships. Delayed entry into parenthood has become a typical feature. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, first-time mothers were more than five years older than in 1970. In Western countries, the onset of this transition was longer and more gradual. For the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the process was delayed, but then became much more dynamic during the 1990s. Contrary to the Western experience, the 1970s and 1980s were the years of rising fertility in the East, though increases were very moderate. While the West started to be confronted with the crisis of the welfare state during the economic ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s, communist regimes promoted a sort of family welfare that enabled citizens to marry at a quite young age. The example of Czechoslovakia is instructive in this respect. The country’s very generous pronatalist policy pushed birth rates back up above the replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) in the 1970s. However, this lasted only for a rather short period of time. In 1970, the fertility rate was only at the level of 1.92 children per woman. Four years later, it was at 2.44. After that, however, the sources of growth—massive investments in housing and various forms of child allowance, as well as numerous cohorts of mothers born during the post-war baby boom—were depleted, and fertility fell below the replacement rate from 1980 onwards.

The turn of the 1980s and 1990s profoundly changed the circumstances of everyday life in the East. The three pillars of the social welfare system of Central and Eastern Europe, which guaranteed employment, social protection and stable price levels, ceased to exist. The shock caused by this change triggered a transformational crisis after 1990. Fertility continued to fall. On the other hand, the improvement in mortality rates changed rapidly in Slovenia, Poland and the Czech Republic and somewhat more slowly in Hungary and the Soviet successor states. Health improvements can only be considered stratum-specific due to the affordability of modern treatments, diagnostics, medication, and so on.

At the same time, migratory pressures had increased: the previous restrictions had been lifted, and an east-west migration began towards the states of Europe with a better standard of living. The wave of political refugees that had accompanied the twentieth century was also transformed in several stages during the final decades of the century: 1980s refugees arriving from communist states were replaced in the 1990s by those arriving from the disintegrating Yugoslavia, then, at the turn of the millennium, by those coming from crisis zones outside of Europe.

Conclusion

The delayed start of the first demographic transition outside of Europe and its earlier completion in Europe than anywhere else—in the form of low death rates as well as low birth rates—caused a dynamic decline in the European share of the total human population. In 1900, one quarter of the world population lived in Europe. By 2000, it was less than one eighth.

Population growth outside of Europe, especially in the 1960s, provoked dark predictions of imminent overpopulation. The then-natural increase of population, such as in central America (3.2 per cent) or northern and central Africa as well as south-eastern Asia (2.7 per cent) seemed to pose a threat in terms of resource consumption. Europe at the peak of the demographic transition never grew faster than 1.5 per cent per year, even while its leading countries colonised other continents. The question remains as to how long the demographic transition in the countries of the ‘Global South’ will last. The natural increase of populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America was lower in the 1990s than thirty years earlier. Recent UN estimates anticipate the stabilisation of the world population at around ten billion during the second half of the twenty-first century.

The decline of the birth rate in Europe has been slower in the twenty-first century in comparison to its steep decline during the last three decades of the previous century. The total fertility rate according to Eurostat is also slightly higher today than at the end of the twentieth century (1.43 live births per woman in 2001, and 1.53 in 2019). Although the outlook is less pessimistic now than in the 1990s, the population decrease of Europe caused by the second demographic transition is unlikely to be overcome in the following decades. Immigration became the most important source of European population growth long before the last decades of the twentieth century.

However, the very different patterns of present-day emigration from, and immigration to, European countries also reflect the deep impact of the history of the East-West rift caused by the Cold War. A paradigmatic example for these oftentimes divergent developments inside Europe can even be found inside the formerly divided state of Germany: while the western regions and its capital city Berlin attract immigrants from all over the world, the eastern German town of Eisenhüttenstadt, just eighty kilometres from Berlin at the Polish border, is a centre of emigration and depopulation: its population has halved from a peak of 53,048 in 1988 to only 23,878 in 2019, and parts of the city that once supported this larger population are scheduled to be dismantled.

Demographic Change in Early Modern History (ca. 1500–1800)

Demographic Change in Modern History (ca. 1800–1900)

Demographic Change in Europe in Contemporary History (ca. 1900–2000)

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