The New Penguin History of the World (186 page)

Perhaps we need not be too gloomy. Fertility has tended to fall in developing countries when economic well-being increases. Even when countries like India have not been able to generate obvious improvement in the lot of their masses, Latin America provides evidence that such improvement eases the way to a decline in natality. The still-expanding influence of civilization in the European tradition, however it is packaged on arrival, remains the most powerful solvent of traditional ways that history can show. Change in population structure seems in one way or another to accompany it as unavoidably as the weakening of religious culture, the building of factories or the liberation of women – and such a list could be much extended.

Differences of population and changes in them affect the comparative strength of nations, although they are not simply to be equated with differences of power. Resources and culture come into the matter, and power for one purpose is not always power for another. Nonetheless, power and population are related in many ways. China, for example, has a population so large as to make her virtually unconquerable. But there is not always so direct and obvious an equation. Towards the end of the twentieth century, estimates recorded the ten largest states in population as:

(
In 1997, Germany’s 82 millions made her the largest European country
)

On any reckoning, that list contains the three most powerful countries in the world; they were not, of course, the three most powerful a hundred years earlier. Some of the ten are also very poor. While China’s social
transformation has forged ahead, others on the list are still sunk in a poverty that for some of them looks insurmountable, whether it is absolute, because natural resources are few (Bangladesh) or relative, in that they are swallowed up by population growth which is too fast (India and Indonesia) and has overtaken the cashing of the cheque of development. Newly generated wealth has in such cases been at best largely consumed in longer life expectancy. But it is not easy, though tempting, to generalize; India’s agricultural output doubled between 1948 and 1973 and she was thought to be about to enter a period of self-sufficiency in food, yet this barely held the line for a population growing at the rate of a million a month.

World population was changing in another way, too; as the twentieth century ended nearly half of it lived in cities. The city is becoming the typical habitat of
Homo sapiens
. This was a remarkable change from most of human history. It registered the fact that cities have been losing their old killing-power. In the past, the high death rates of city life required constant demographic nourishment by country-born immigrants in order to keep up numbers. In the nineteenth century, city-dwellers in some countries had begun to reproduce themselves in sufficient surviving numbers for cities to grow organically. The results are startling; there are now many cities whose numbers of inhabitants are literally uncountable. Calcutta already had a million in 1900, but now has more than fifteen times as many; Mexico City had only 350,000 inhabitants as the twentieth century began, but ended with over 20 million. Other impressions can be derived from the longer term. The world had only five cities of more than a half-million inhabitants in 1700; in 1900 there were forty-three; and now Brazil alone has seven of more than a million. Sanitary regimes and public health measures have moved more slowly in some countries than others to make such changes possible, and the tide of urbanization is far from ebbing.

THE NEW PLENTY

Population and urbanization dynamics both imply a huge growth in world resources. To simplify the question ruthlessly, though many have starved, many more have lived. Millions may have died in famines, but there has so far been no worldwide Malthusian disaster. If the world had not been able to feed them, human numbers would be smaller. Whether this can continue for long is another question. Experts have concluded that we can for a good while to come provide food for growing numbers. There is still hope, too, that population policy may help to stabilize demand. But in such matters we enter the realms of speculation, though the very existence
of such hopes interests the historian, for they say something about a present and actual state of the world where what is believed to be possible is important in settling what will happen. In considering that, we have to recognize the major economic fact of modern history, and especially of the last half-century: that it brought about an unprecedented production of wealth.

Readers of this book are probably used to seeing harrowing pictures of famine and deprivation on their television screens. Yet over much of the world since 1945, continuing economic growth has, for the first time, come to be taken for granted. It has become the ‘norm’, in spite of hiccups and interruptions along the way. Any slowing down in its rate now provokes alarm. What is more, as population figures show, in gross terms real economic growth has been the story in most of the underdeveloped world. Against the background of the way the world still thought, even in 1939, this can be accounted a revolution. Yet that story does not just begin with the decades since the end of the Second World War, the golden age of unprecedented growth. The appropriate historical background for the surge in wealth creation, that has successfully carried the burden of soaring world population, is much deeper. One way of measuring it is to reflect that the average human being today commands about nine times the wealth of an average human being in 1500. The world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen from a base of 100 five centuries ago to a figure of more than 11,600 today – but has, of course, to be shared between many more people.

Changes in per capita GDP in US (1988) dollars

Wealth and human numbers, indeed, tended to rise more or less in parallel until the nineteenth century. Then some economies began to display much faster growth than others. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new intensification of wealth creation was already under way which, though badly set back by two world wars and the upheavals caused
by the depression of the 1930s, was to be resumed after 1945 and has barely ceased since, in spite of serious challenges and striking contrasts between different economies. GDP rose almost everywhere after 1960 and, generally, per capita, too. For all the huge disparities and setbacks in some countries, economic growth has taken place more widely than ever before.

Selected figures like those in the table above must be interpreted cautiously, and they can change very quickly, but they give a truthful impression of the way in which the world has become richer in a century. Yet some of humanity still remains woefully poor:

Poor countries in the 1990s: per capita GDP in US dollars

If the overriding fact is one of wealth creation, it must have helped that the major powers were at peace with one another for so long. The years since 1945 have, of course, been studded with many bloody smaller-scale or incipient conflicts, while men and women have died every day of them, hundreds of thousands in warlike operations or their aftermath. The great powers have had much fighting done for them by surrogates. Yet no such destruction of human and economic capital as that of the two world wars took place. The international rivalry that underlay often notable tension tended, rather, to sustain or provoke economic activity in many countries. It provided much technological spin-off and led to major capital investments and transfers for political motives, some of which did much to increase real wealth.

The first such transfers took place in the later 1940s, when American aid made possible the recovery of Europe. For this to be successful, the American dynamo had to be available to promote recovery, as it had not been after 1918. The enormous wartime expansion of the American economy that had at last brought it out of the pre-war Depression, together with the immunity of the American home base from physical damage by war, had ensured that it would be. Explanation for the deployment of American economic strength as aid has to be sought in circumstances (of which the Cold War was an important part). International tension made
it seem in America’s interest to behave as it did; an imaginative grasp of opportunities was shown by many of its statesmen and businessmen; there was for a long time no alternative source of capital on such a scale; finally, it helped that men of different nations, even before the end of the war, had already set in place institutions for regulating the international economy in order to avoid any return to the near-fatal economic anarchy of the 1930s. The story of the reshaping of the economic life of the world thus begins before 1945, in the wartime efforts that produced the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The economic stability they provided in the non-communist world after 1945 underpinned two decades of growth in world trade at nearly 7 per cent per annum in real terms. Between 1945 and the 1980s the average level of tariffs on manufactured goods fell from 40 per cent to 5 per cent, and world trade multiplied more than fivefold.

Over a longer term still, scientists and engineers were making their contribution to economic growth in less formal, often less visible, ways. The continued application of scientific knowledge through technology, and the improvement and rationalization of processes and systems in the search for greater efficiency, were all very important before 1939. They came more dramatically to the fore and began to exercise even greater influence after 1945. What they meant in agriculture, where improvement had begun long before industrialization was a recognizable phenomenon, is one of the clearest examples of their effects. For thousands of years farmers edged their returns upwards almost entirely by ancient methods, above all by clearing and breaking in new land. There is still a lot left that, with proper investment, could be made to raise crops (and much has been done in the last twenty-five years to use such land, even in a crowded country like India). Yet this does not explain why world agricultural output has recently risen so dramatically. The root explanation is a continuation and acceleration of the agricultural revolution that began in early modern Europe and has been visible at least from the seventeenth century. Two hundred and fifty years later, it was vastly speeded up, thanks, largely, to applied science.

Well before 1939, wheat was being successfully introduced to lands in which, for climatic reasons, it had not been grown hitherto. Plant geneticists had evolved new strains of cereals, one of the first twentieth-century scientific contributions to agriculture on a scale going far beyond the trial- and-error ‘improvement’ of earlier times; only much later did genetic modification of crop species begin to attract adverse criticism. Even greater contributions to world food supplies had by then been made in areas already growing grain by using better chemical fertilizers (of which the first had become available in the nineteenth century). An unprecedented rate of replacement of nitrogen in the soil underlay the larger yields that have now become commonplace in countries with advanced agriculture. Their costs include huge energy inputs, though, and fears of ecological consequences began to be expressed in the 1960s. By then better fertilizers had been joined by effective herbicides and insecticides, too, while the use of machinery in agriculture had grown enormously in developed countries. England had in 1939 the most mechanized farming in the world in terms of horsepower per acre cultivated; English farmers nonetheless then still did much of their work with horses, while combine harvesters (already familiar in the United States) were rare. But not only were the fields mechanized. The coming of electricity brought automatic milking, grain-drying, threshing, the heating of animal sheds in winter. Now, the computer and automation have begun to reduce dependence on human labour even more; in the developed world the agricultural workforce has continued to fall while production per acre has risen and genetically modified crops promise even greater yields.