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population

The inhabitants of a given area, but perhaps most importantly, the human inhabitants of the earth (numbering about 6.2 billion in 2002), who by their increasing numbers and corresponding increasing needs can seriously affect the global ecosystem.

Population Growth

History and Evolution

General population increase in the world was negligible until the Industrial Revolution. From the time of the Roman Empire to the colonization of America, the world population grew from about a quarter billion to a half billion persons. By the mid-19th cent., however, it had grown to about one billion, and by 1930 it had risen to 2 billion; the United Nations estimates the world population will peak at 10 billion in 2200. In world terms, the population is growing at about 1.2% annually (compared with 0.1% in ancient times and a rate of 1.75% as recently as the 1990s) in population. Although a 1.2% growth rate may appear small, it annually adds some 77 million persons to the world's population, with nearly all of this growth taking place in less developed nations.

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Center of Population, 1790-1900United States Population, 1900
Energy flows, products and...Afghanistan
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REFERENCES

  • Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.1985.
  • Easterlin, Richard A., “The American Population.” In American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States, edited by Davis, Lance E., et al. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
  • Ferrie, Joseph P.Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States, 1840-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Haines, Michael R.“Long-Term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present.”History of the Family1 (1996): 15-39.
  • Haines, Michael R., “The Population of the United States, 1790-1920.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, edited by Stanley L. Engerman; Robert E. GallmanVol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996-.
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From Credo

  • Haines, Michael R.; Richard H. SteckelA Population History of North America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Preston, Samuel H.; Michael R. HainesFatal Years: Child Mortality in Late-Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  • Schapiro, Morton Owen. Filling Up America: An Economic-Demographic Model of Population Growth and Distribution in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI, 1986.
  • Steckel, Richard, “Stature and Living Standards in the United States.” In American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War. Edited by Robert E. Gallman; John Joseph WallisChicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  • Vinovskis, Maris A. ed. Studies in American Historical Demography. New York: Academic Press, 1979.
  • Wells, Robert V.Revolutions in Americans' Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982.
  • Wells, Robert V.Uncle Sam's Family: Issues in and Perspectives on American Demographic History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.
  • R. S. Bagnall; B. W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge, Eng., 1994).
  • Beloch, K. J., Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (Leipzig, 1886).
  • Parkin, T. G., Demography and Roman Society (Baltimore, 1996).

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