Dan Snow's History Hit - The Human Tide

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

I was thrilled to chat to Paul Morland, a historian who uses population to explain almost all the major global shifts and events of the last two centuries. Using the power of sheer numbers, Paul has the answer to all the big questions - why China is going to get old long before it gets rich, why Russia is heading for disaster and the future is African, and why fertility rates are plunging where we would least expect it.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' for a month free and the first month for just £/€/$1

Hi everybody, welcome to Danso's History Hit. I've got another podcast for you today. I hope everyone enjoyed listening to Professor John Oxford, one of the world's leading virologists. He was on the podcast just yesterday talking about coronavirus. There was both good and bad news in there. It was just a totally fascinating episode. Listen to that podcast, inform yourself about what we're facing here. Just in general, I'm trying to be a very responsible broadcaster here. Please make sure where you're getting information for your COVID-19 updates. Please follow accurate public health advice from places like the World Health Organization and your local health authority.

And please, let's all try and avoid spreading rumours. It's so tempting. I often hover over the retweet button and realise that I haven't actually checked the source of that information. and hover over the retweet button and realise that I haven't actually checked the source of that information. Let's be the best version of ourselves over the next few weeks and we can get through this just fine. This episode is about demographics which is not unlinked to Covid-19. I was lucky enough to talk to Paul Morland, he's a historian, he uses population, he uses population demographics as a prism through which to look at historical shifts and events over the last couple of centuries. It is such a fascinating topic and I really, really enjoyed the chance to catch up with him and talk about this. Things like what China's population means for the present and the future of its economy, the importance of West

Africa and the demographics there, and where fertility rates are plunging and what it might mean. If you want to support History Hit the best way you can do that is to go and become a subscriber to History Hit TV. A lot of past episodes of History Hit are now only available on our own platform on History Hit TV. You pay a small subscription you can listen to them all ad-free and you can watch hundreds of history documentaries that are on there as well. We're trying all the time to become one of the world's best resources for history. We're on the way. Thank you for all your support so far. If you use the code POD1, because you're our podcast listeners, if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then you get your first month for just one pound, euro, dollar.

So please head over there and do that. Be very grateful for your support. In the meantime, here's Paul morland talking about the human tide well thank you very much for coming on on the show thank you for inviting me is this another big history book where you're trolling lots of historians who talk about humans and individuals and ideas and you're actually just saying we're just riding a great wave of facts like demography. Well, I don't want to disparage historians who take other approaches. If you want to understand an individual, I suppose you'd want to know about his or her past, family, ethnicity, where they were brought. All these things are relevant for an individual. And so I suppose it's the same for history. My point really with the human tide is that this

is an important angle. It's not the only angle. Understanding the big demographic population trends and that a story of the last 200 years can be told from that perspective. Far be it from me to say it's the only story of the last 200 years, or even that it's the primary one, but I think it's been neglected. And I think it's time for it to get a bit more of the limelight. What is the most important thing that's happened in terms of numbers and character of human beings last 200 years? I think the most important thing at this stage, although in 50 years time, this will look different, was that the first group of people to undergo a modern population expansion, a sustainable population expansion, a sustainable

population expansion, were the people of the British Isles, who poured out of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales into the wider world and created the world that we know today, Canada, Australia. And even in the areas they didn't dominate ethnically, they were powerful enough and their numbers were part of that power, to form the structures of states, the boundaries of states, and the lingua franca of many countries, India, many countries in Africa, and so on. So it was the explosion of the Anglo-Saxons, as I call them, but broadly the people of the British Isles, followed on by the population explosion of other Europeans, which has shaped the world as we know it. But, and that's why I

think in 50 years it will look very different, which is about to go into reverse. What caused that population explosion? Some people may have learned about the so-called population transition, the demographic transition at school, and they may have vague memories of this, but essentially in nature, animals, plants and humans until the beginning of the 19th century, to use a term that I often deploy, breed like rabbits and die like flies. People are always having large families. They can't really control that.

And they're dying because they can't really look after themselves properly. And that's just man in the state of nature, man as a hunter-gatherer, man in agricultural society. Of course, there are interesting stories within that, the Black Death. The 18th century itself was a sort of precursor to what came. But essentially, high fertility, high mortality, low population. And then as development happens, as modernity happens, people get more education. They learn how to look after themselves. Medicine advances.

They're able to have facilities of hygiene, a whole range of things which we call modernity, which I kind of define in the book. The death rate falls, and it takes some time for the birth rate to fall. And so in that period, the population expands enormously. birth rate to fall. And so in that period, the population expands enormously. More people are arriving through the delivery suites or at home, wherever they're born. Fewer are departing to the graveyard. And so the country fills up. And then eventually, people start to have smaller families. They urbanise. Women become more educated and want to find other things to do. Contraception becomes available. So as they

go through that pattern, populations expand enormously. And that starts off in the British Isles, spreads to Europe and then spreads globally, different times, in different phases, different places. And I think that tells a hugely important story about what's been happening in the last 200 years. What is the relationship between that and the imperial impulse of the Brits, the Irish and the Europeans? Like, what comes first? Is it push-pull? What comes first?

In the 16th, 17th century, they discover, quote unquote, places that they can expand into. Those places are cleared out, thanks in many parts to European microbes and things like that. So they appear virgin territory. So is it that there's lots of land that you can fill? Or is it that you're filling up the aisles and that just everyone needs to get out? And they do so by staking out bits of land in the rest of the world?

Well, like anything in history, it's quite complex and there are feedback mechanisms. So for sure, the imperial impulse is as old as pretty much as old as city-states, as old as civilisation. And if you look at the British Empire, it certainly got going in some form back in the, at least you could say, the 17th century, long before this expansion. The Spaniards conquered the Americas, but as Ferdinand Brodel said, they couldn't grasp it. And the reason they couldn't grasp it was because they never really populated it. They influenced its culture and in some places its demography, but overwhelmingly they didn't really control it.

When you had imperial infrastructure, if you like, you had colonies and you had spaces, and then you have a population expansion, you have something quite new. So think how long those 13 colonies, I mean, they weren't 13 all the way back to the 17th century, but really the European settlers clung on to the eastern coast of what became the United States, and they had their revolution. It was only once you had this kind of population transformation, both among the Americans and in Europe,

and the country filled up with Europeans, that America realised its so-called manifest destiny and spread across the country. So on the one hand, you have the imperialism there beforehand. On the other hand, it changes its nature once you have a population to fill it. And then on the third hand, if you're allowed a third hand, once you have these populations in places like Canada and the United States. You have modern railways, you have modern, what was modern in the 19th century means of agriculture.

You can then send food back to the motherland, which in turn sends industrial products. That's important because Malthus at the beginning of the 19th century said populations will always push upward, but they'll be constrained by the local resources. And in his day, shipping food around the world was almost unthinkable. Maybe a few luxuries, maybe spices or wine from Bordeaux. But the idea of the prairies and mass export of food and bread was, of meat and bread was unthinkable. So that was a 19th century phenomenon. What that meant

was the population explosion fed the colonies. Those populations in the colonies could then send back to the mother country the food to allow its population to grow. So it becomes a sort of a positive feedback loop. It's kind of a gigantic coincidence, isn't it, that just as the revolution was taking place in longevity and infant mortality and things, was taking place in longevity and infant mortality and things, that there happened also to be, in the society in which that was going on, gigantic areas of the rest of the world which they could exploit for settlement. But I think that exploitation... So I think the underlying thing is modernity, however we describe that. That is about education, it is about urbanisation, it is about industrialisation.

It can't get very far unless you have a population to feed it. So Britain couldn't have been the workshop of the world if it hadn't had a massive population expansion. That allowed it to have large-scale industry, otherwise it would have been like Belgium. So just as imperialism and the demography feed off each other, so the industrialisation and modernity and the demography feed off each other. On the one hand, you couldn't have got very far with industrialisation if you hadn't had a large population to feed the factories effectively and to become a mass workforce. But on the other hand, if you had had the population expansion without the industry, you wouldn't then have been able to develop the global economy whereby you export industrial goods, you import mass food, and you're able to feed the population.

You would have hit a Malthusian ceiling. So all these things feed into each other. And I think historians like to sort of look for an original cause, a first mover. And I certainly can't say demography is the first mover, but you can see how it feeds into these other things. And without it, without this massively growing population, Britain wouldn't have become the workshop of the world. It wouldn't have been able to settle the colonies and transform countries like the United States,

even though it broke away from Britain politically, Canada, Australia, and so on. And I guess without that industry, it wouldn't have been able to project force that then swept great swathes of the world's surface. Yes, of course, the industry also feeds the imperialism. So although the Europeans first got round the world back in the 16th century and were very innovative navigators,

the great empires of China and India, I the Americas, as we know, there was an interesting demographic and tragic demographic event there where diseases largely wiped out the local population. But the great empires of the Mughals and in China were not easy picking for the Europeans until they got some sort of power in the 18th century, which was in many ways the precursor to their 19th century power, which obviously fed into not only armaments, but obviously the means of transport, the means of getting armies to places and logistics. By the end of the 19th century, the Europeans with their large demography and with their

industrial power and with their modernity and with their arms were very hard to push back anywhere in the globe but that was really quite although from the set from the 18th sorry from the 16th century they were spanning the globe it was only in the 19th century really with mass population expansion and industrialization that they became its undisputed masters okay so you've got say let's take You've got the majority of the world under direct political military control of these European powers. Europeans all over the shop, owning tracts of land, Sri Lanka, Australia, settler communities.

How does the demography change, and how does that reflect the changes that then took place the rest of the 20th century? Well, already by 1930, the transformation was underway in much of Europe. So in Britain, in the 1860s, women were still having six children. By the First World War, they were down to three. By the 1930s, it was down to two. And I often tell the story of Queen Anne with her 13 or so pregnancies and none of them survived. Queen Victoria, I think 11 and none of them survived. Queen Victoria,

I think 11 children, they all survived. So that's the phase where we have a high fertility rate, but a low mortality rate. And then we get the Queen Mum with her two in the 1920s. And that was typical. That was the new phenomenon then. That was just about at that point, people were beginning to understand what happened. And that was spreading across Europe. So other parts of Europe, the more developed, the more advanced, were experiencing falling family sizes. On the other hand, what was stirring in what we now call the third world or in parts of the empire was the arrival of that modernity and the growth of young populations. So I would say even in the interwar period, you start to have a sense of mortality of imperialism. And I think if you, it's very hard to quantify, but if you read the literature of the 1920s and 30s, as

opposed, say, to 1910, you get a real sense of Europeans coming to terms with the fact that empire was not going to go on forever. I mean, as I said, hard to quantify, but I always give as an example Leonard Wolfe's diaries of his time as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka. It was slain back in the first decade of the 20th century with George Orwell's Burmese Days. And I think those two, if you contrast those two, it's obviously only two works of literature, you get a sense that in the interwar period, the European powers did realise the game was going to be up before too long. And I think obviously, the First World War was a huge knock to the confidence of the Europeans, but also a sense that their own population was beginning to slow, and that the populations of Africa and Asia were not just going to melt away. I mean, we forget this,

but in the 19th century, there was this sense that the white man was going to triumph, that he was the wave of the future, and that native peoples melted away. If you read the debates in the Congress in America talking about what should they do when they conquered Mexico in the 1848 war, some people were saying, well, let's just annex the whole country. And others were saying, oh, we need to be careful. We don't want all these Mexicans. To which the riposte came, they will melt away like the Red Indians. And similarly, if you read the diaries of people in late 19th century explorers in East Africa, and we've got an interesting case, I found some diaries, someone saying this would be great for white people to settle.

What a shame if we lost all the indigenous people. We ought to try and preserve them. It's almost like David Attenborough going around the world and sort of seeing these natural species retreating before the advance of man. That was the sense in the 19th century. By the interwar period, I think the Europeans had realised that this was not going to go on forever, that their imperial power was weakening, and that had a demographic basis.

They were going through that phase whereby they were no longer expanding so enormously. Others were reaching the point where their demographic transition was beginning to take off. A couple of points there, Ray. First of all, First World War, a wrinkle in the great history of human demography or not? It was a wrinkle in terms of the second decade of the 20th century in Europe resulted in a population expansion. So even though you had the terrible war and even though you had the Spanish flu, there was so much momentum in European population expansion that the population of Europe continued to grow. And actually, there were fewer emigrants. So that also helped the population of Europe continued to grow. And actually, there were fewer emigrants. So that also helped the population of Europe grow. I mean, if you take a case like Syria, about a quarter of the Syrian population has been displaced out of the country and a quarter inside the country. But if you look at the deaths in Syria, it's barely 18

months of population growth for a country like that. So that doesn't mean that it isn't absolutely tragic and needs to be condemned in all sorts of ways. But these sorts of disasters, when you have a population that's growing one or two percent a year, don't actually really knock the population back in the way they did back in, say, the years of the Black Death in the Middle Ages, when there wasn't this modernity, there wasn't this huge upward force in population growth. There had been some population growth. It was not back in the Black Death or in the 17th century, in the Thirty Years' War. In places, it took centuries to recover. That was quite different in Europe in the early 20th century, and it's quite different everywhere now. And second point there is about, you mentioned young populations of young people.

There's a lot of, strikes me, kind of shoddy journalism and thinking around saying, oh, lots of young people, might be a bit unstable, might be a problem. What does societies, the ones that you've looked at that have huge pools of young people, are they different in character? They're definitely different in character. It's definitely the case that they are more prone to violence. So the fact is that there are pretty much no elderly societies which are violent. If you look at the countries where the median age is 35, 40, 45 now in countries like Germany and Italy, they're all pretty peaceful. Having said that, young populations are not necessarily violent. So it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for violence to have a young population, I would say.

The other thing, of course, with the young is there is a great economic opportunity. Now, I think you need to distinguish two things. You need to distinguish a society, let's say like Niger or Chad, where they still have very, very large families. So the population pyramid looks like that. And countries like Indonesia, where the population pyramid looks like that. And countries like Indonesia, where the population pyramid looks a bit more like that, people are starting to have smaller families. So where there are lots and lots of people in their 20s, there's a fantastic economic opportunity. Where there are lots and lots of very, very young people, the so-called

demographic dividend hasn't really started to yield itself. If you've got the people in their 20s looking after lots of babies and still having six, seven, eight children, you won't get that economic so-called demographic dividend. When you get a country like Indonesia that has had a huge expansion and now the people in their 20s want to have two or three kids, that's when you have a real opportunity for economic growth. Having said that, just to add another wrinkle of complexity, a country like Syria had actually had a big slowdown in its population expansion. Syrian fertility rate was only about three. So Syria could be enjoying a demographic dividend. You need the demographic conditions, lots of young people, not too many

babies. But you also need political stability whereby people can invest and integrate into the global economy. So a young, young-ish but not very young population with a stable political environment and the right economic incentives can be a fantastic economic opportunity for countries. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed

not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week. What other big events in the 20th and now early 21st centuries that historians are prone to put down to sort of political decisions and tactics? Do you think demographics are lurking behind?

Well, there are a number, about practically anything. If you dig enough, there's some kind of demographic story behind it. So just to sort of identify some of the very big ones, the First World War itself, I make the case in the book that the huge change, the rapid growth of populations was itself feeding into the paranoia. The Brits and the French worried about Germany's demographic growth. Germany worried about Russia's, all at slightly different stages. The result of the First World War was where you've got grinding

forces in trenches up against each other. The people who run out of young men are the ones who lose in the end. So even before the Americans came in, Germany was essentially running out of men. And of course, the arrival of the Americans has its demographic angle, because of course, the population of America was rising very rapidly. If you look at the rise of the so-called superpowers, before the First World War, there were so-called great powers. After the Second World War, there were the superpowers. And if you want to track why that was, why Russia and America, as it were, broke away from the pack sometime between, let's say, 1918 and 1945,

look at the population charts. In fact, de Tocqueville, the French commentator who spent a lot of time in America, predicted this, I think, as early as the 1830s or 1840s. These two countries can become vast homes for populations, and they're going to potentially outstrip the powers of Europe. And the United States just took off, as did Russia. The United States, both because of high fertility and low mortality, and because of mass immigration. Russia, because of supercharged demographic change in the early 20th century when they were still having large families and their mortality rate fell all the way back even in the Cyrus days and even through the Stalin

period. These two countries rose essentially because they had much bigger populations. I mean, the United States might have had a higher per capita GDP than the UK, but really it was overshadowing the UK by the period of the Second World War because it had a population double, triple that of the UK. And likewise, the Soviet Union was only able to become a superpower because of its sheer population scale. So I think we can put down, to some extent, the First World War, the Second World War, and the rise of the great powers, and also the fall of the great, well, certainly of the Soviet Union.

The rise of the Soviet economy and the Soviet model was driven off an enormous population growth. It was never very productive, but more and more young people were coming into the workplace. And that, in a way, was the Soviet demographic dividend in the Stalin period. By the 1970s, two things were happening. First of all, there was a general decline of the growth of the population of the Soviet Union which was causing resource constraints. And secondly, the minorities, the non-Russian minorities were going through their demographic

expansion as the Russians were going through essentially a demographic contraction. And that very much hit the self-confidence of the Russians, partly because of the economics, partly they were trying to raise a conscription army. And each year, more and more of these conscripts they were sending off to Afghanistan, for example, in the early 80s, didn't speak Russian, were probably Central Asian or from the Caucasus,

quite possibly Muslim, and of suspect loyalty to the Soviet model. So if you want to understand the decline of the Soviet Union, I'm not saying it's all about demography, but both its rise and its fall certainly have a demographic component. If demography is partly destiny, why is the US not just trying to outgrow... There's plenty of space there, so why don't they say, well, rather than just whining on about India and China

being the superpowers of the future, why don't we just keep aggressively growing our population? Presumably that's where it's clashing against culture and identity. Well, it is. And I think I make the case in the book that if you want to understand Brexit and Trump, actually, you also want to understand demography. So on the one hand, of course, the United States would like to be top dog. On the one hand, of course, the United States would like to be top dog.

And I'm sure if the United States had its current per capita income and had a billion and a half people like China, it would be leaving China in the dust rather than worrying about China. So you might say, well, let's fill up, you know, let's fill up our boots. Let's pull in hundreds of millions of people. But there is a backlash against that. There's been enormous ethnodemographic change in this country since the early 90s. And in the United States, the white, so-called, however defined white population can see itself rapidly becoming a minority by the middle of the 21st century. On the one hand, yes, people want their countries to be powerful, generally. But on the other other hand they are resistant to rapid demographic

ethnic change and they don't want to have 10 kids anymore well they certainly don't want to have 10 kids and i don't blame them oh no nor do i i'm quite happy with my three i think you also have three so we're probably you know that seems a reasonable number um they don't want to have have a huge families um but equally they don't want to see the demographic for good or ill. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. So if you actually look at the Trump vote and you look at the Brexit vote, a lot of work has been done on this by Eric Kaufman who we've been talking about earlier, Matt Goodwin, people like that.

Of course there are economic causes but the biggest driver really is not economics. It's a set of attitudes, a set of social attitudes, among which a desire to see either the United States or the UK change ethnically more slowly than it has been is a major driver. What about other countries? We talk a lot about Trump, Trump and Brexit, Germany as well. What are some of the demographic debates that you know more about that I know nothing about in Indonesia, in China, in India? What are the, for example, in Nigeria, they've been explosively expanding population. Well, let's just do a sort of quick tour of the world.

Yeah, let's do it. Japan is a very interesting country. It has the oldest population, has the longest life expectancy, has one of the lowest fertility rates. That's been going on for decades. And the Japanese population is now declining. Now, I think of Japan as a country. Japan also doesn't like immigration. And it seems self-evident to most Japanese people that they don't want demographic change, ethnic demographic change. It's also arguably a difficult culture to assimilate into. People do know the European languages, say in Africa, they might go to France

or Britain. Japan seems more forbidding. So it's a country which I think of as interesting from the late 80s when the model ended, essentially. Everybody said the future is Japanese until about 1989. That was the point their workforce peaked. And they've had this problem ever since. So it's very interesting to see how they cope with it. Two things I'd point out. One is their macroeconomics, the way they have done some monetary easing, massive fiscal easing, huge debt before anybody else. So they're kind of the, for demographic reasons, I think,

they are the kind of economic laboratory well before the 2008 problems we had here in North America. And then they're also working very hard on the technology. How do you ensure that people can look after the elderly when there are no young to look after them? A lot of technology will come out of Japan. So Japan, in a way, shows us where many of us will be in the near future. Japan, in a way, shows us where many of us will be in the near future. China, I think, made the case in the book very strongly that the one-child policy was iniquitous. It was a terrible violation of human rights.

But apart from that, it was completely unnecessary. The fertility rate of China, when demographers talk of fertility, they talk about the number of children that women have rather than whether they can or can't, reasons why they have them or can't have them. But the average woman in China was having six children in 1970. That had gone down to three by 1980 when the one-child policy was introduced. So it was falling off a cliff. If you look at other Chinese communities in places like Malaysia or Taiwan, similarly, it was falling very rapidly. So it wasn't necessary to introduce such a draconian policy. And China is now looking at a peaking workforce. And it'd be very interesting.

Of course, they seem to have perfectly managed economic growth. It's this year at 6.3%, next year at 6.2%, and the year after, no doubt, it'd be 6.1%. But they will have a challenge because, yes, they've still got some peasants effectively to get into the factory, and that always adds a lot of productivity. But they are beginning to flatten off and the workforce will be falling. And they will age very, very rapidly before long. I think they may even be already be older than the United States. But the average, the median age in China will soon be older if it isn't already. And India will have a larger population sometime in the current decade. So, you know, China's now rode back on that policy, but it's too late.

And it seems the early indications are that people are not having larger families. And it's one thing to say, I don't want 10, two or three is enough. It's another in large swathes of the world to say, for whatever reason, you end up with one or slightly more than one per woman. And large parts of the world are already in that situation. Hungary is a good example. The government is desperate. And Hungary's had low fertility for 30, 40, 50 years and falling. And the government, both in Hungary and Russia, has been very keen to boost the fertility rate, with some success. They've had pronatal policies, mostly monetary, and in both cases the fertility rate does appear to have recovered somewhat,

but not back to replacement level, and I wonder if it ever will. Africa is very variable in terms of government policy. South Africa is quite different. The fertility rate is quite low. North of the Sahara, the Arab countries of North Africa, the fertility rates come down to two or three. But between these two areas and the bulk of sub-Saharan Africa, fertility rates are very high. And there are countries like Nigeria where it's hardly fallen. And then there are countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, which are clearly on the downward path. And what happens to fertility in Africa? Throughout Africa, mortality rates are falling, life expectancy is growing, economic conditions are improving. Basic medical care is often the 80-20 rule. A little bit of medical care, washing your hands, a little bit

of education, literacy can make a huge difference to mortality rates. And the big question for the future of the world's demography is how quickly African fertility rates will fall. Because if demography is destiny, then Nigeria is the great superpower of the 22nd century. Well, demography is part of destiny. I hate to be mealy-mouthed about this, but we mustn't over-claim. And we do have to remember, for example, that China had the largest population for much of human history. And now we think of China as enormously powerful and a rising power. But it was really in the 19th century, it was the early 20th century, it was completely prone before European and Japanese intervention. So

again, sufficient and necessary conditions. I think in today's world, it's a necessary condition to have a large population if you want to be a major power. Small countries, however prosperous, can only hit a certain amount above their weight. But having a large population alone won't necessarily deliver you the superpower status. It gives you the opportunity to manage it successfully. First of all, you have to then bring down your fertility rates. You've got lots of young people who are not distracted, essentially, by having very large families. Also, when you get to the people in their 20s having smaller families, it's because they've got the education. So there are other forces at work, which mean they are getting into that point where they can start integrating into the global economy.

But you need the right governance, you need the right sort of politics, you really need the right opportunity. So I think Nigeria has a fantastic opportunity. Whether it will grasp it or not is anyone's guess. Just talking to you, I'm very struck by this weird way in which we talk about global power politics. Because, of course, for actual people, who gives a toss? If you're Danish, you don't really give a toss that you don't have one of the most powerful armies in the world. We're talking here about states like we would have been in the 19th century if we were sitting in the Reform Club.

I think people do give a toss, actually. I think sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. So if you think, talking of the Reform Club of the late 19th century, there was something called popular imperialism. In the 1860s, the average Brit probably didn't care. By 1900, through the press, you know, perhaps through manipulation or popular books like Sealy's The Expansion of England.

So it's a complicated story. You're absolutely right. There are times when people really do care. And people do care about America and Germany and America. but i think it's so fascinating that in their own lives they don't want more kids they're like the one thing that they could do to guarantee the continuation of particularly kind of white american hegemony is have tons of children and they're like actually i don't want to do that it's interesting i think pronatalism has a future so i think we've heard very little of it so far um i think we hear a lot of the calamitous environmentalism, which says don't have any children. But I think we are going over the next 10, 20 years to have a more vocalised, pro-natal view. In fact, something I said in, I wrote an article in the FT in the summer,

and talking about immigration, and I said, you know, on the one hand, it is reasonable for people to say, I don't want massive, dramatic, rapid demographic change, I feel myself part of a continuity, and I want that continuity for my country. That's a, I don't think it's necessarily racist or unacceptable. But for those who say it very stridently, the question has to be, you don't want to be replaced, they shall not replace us, is the sort of slogan of the racist neo-far-right. My question is, are you going to replace yourselves? Are you prepared to have the number of children, which means your economy can still grow, your hospitals can still have nurses, your trains can still have drivers, or whatever it is that the economy requires, without having to import large numbers of people from countries and cultures that you'd rather not?

I remember seeing some graffiti in Germany saying, Kinder, not Inder. Right, well, that's perhaps a rather crude way of putting it but it was during the you know during the the rise of the far right yes at which point there weren't any people coming from india well obviously we knew what they meant yeah yes the the risk of being sort of um blinded by tech do you think demographics will continue to matter in a world of ai and mechanization and you know do, do we... It does not feel a bit old-fashioned sitting here talking about the great numbers of people

that all these powers can call on to conscript and to put into the factories. I think that the technology is going to be very important. So I think we talked a bit about the technology in Japan and how that is perhaps going to be able to substitute people, substitute people in the workforce. But I think it's far too early to say that that is going to be significant within the next sort of 10 or 20 years.

I think as long as people matter... Um... Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Demography will matter. So let us imagine, for example, that in, let's say, 40 or 50 years,

most of the work in society is done by robots. It's very hard to imagine what people will be like, what they'll be doing with their time. Writing books about demographics and podcasting about them. Hopefully not too many because we don't want too much competition there, do we? Reading books and watching television programmes about them, I hope. But as long as people are people, the numbers of people will matter. Of course, you then get into the sort of sci-fi, which is, are human beings going to remain as they are? Are we going to have some kind of event whereby people are able to replicate themselves

or download themselves? And I'm afraid that's all beyond my ken. I mean, that's looking too far to the future and talking about stuff which I know very little. But however, let's quickly talk about climate crisis. As the world is currently growing, what are the headlines? Are we all screwed or are we all talking about Malthusian ceilings that don't exist because we're going to find ways to smash through them? Well, that's a very good way of putting it. I mean, I tend to be optimistic by nature and I think

there are grounds to be optimistic. And what I would say is the following. Technology has made a huge difference. So we know, for example, the fantastic advance we've made in solar panels in the last 20 years mean that we can actually envisage a future whereby we're powering ourselves from renewables, things that don't necessarily give rise to emissions. All that advance is around science technology, and all that is around human genius, and all that is around a large number of people in universities, science, communities of scientists. Now, in the past, the overwhelming majority of people have had no access to that. They've been peasants scrabbling in the fields. My ancestors, perhaps your ancestors, let's say 200 years ago,

the vast majority, certainly of mine, would have been very poor and pretty ignorant, possibly not illiterate. Now we're moving into a world where it's not just that we have 7 billion, rising to 8 billion people, but the more and more of them are able to participate in this collective enterprise of technological advance. And we should see the benefits of that.

We should, you know, how many Africans have had the opportunity to contribute in the last 200 years to scientific advance? Well, now look at the number of literate people there are in Africa. Look at the numbers going to university, women as well as men. And I think we can look forward to enormous contributions. So the technological pace could get much faster as more and more people get a basic education. And then out of that, more and more get the opportunity to make their contribution one way or the other. And of course, with the internet and modern information technology, networks can get denser, people can exchange ideas more and more. So we go from a world 200 years ago where those contributing to knowledge

were a tiny elite in a small number of countries to potentially a mass effort. And in those circumstances, I think our potential to find technological fixes becomes much greater. What a great place to end on. Thank you very much indeed. The book is called...

The Human Tide, How Population Shaped the Modern World. Go and get it, everyone. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all

were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. He tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, everyone.

Just a massive favour to ask if you could go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, give it a rating, five stars, obviously. in you. you