TITLE

Real Draft B

India

Looking at the Indian baseline - with 36.5‰ ± 4.8‰ CDR argued for in the 1650-1750 period, assuming a CBR of 42.5‰ ± 4.1‰ (41.5‰ ± 5.0‰ if CBR put at 47.5‰ ± 4.3‰, more in line with late 19th/early 20th century levels) - we see a putative rise in death rate under British rule (41.0‰ ± 4.9‰ 1800-1850, and 43.4‰±4.4‰ 1850-1871, 45.5‰ 1871-1881). Note these estimates are highly error prone however, based on a qualitative argument of rising birth rates into the late 19th century, overall long-term declining life expectancy, and rough estimates of populations at different points in Indian history. From 1891 onwards however, the picture is known more securely (see Table India-I, Figure 1). These suggest a high mortality regime 1891-1921, followed by a decline to 33.2 in 1941 and 32.4 in 1951, within the error range of the suggested Mughal baseline. This seems in line with Sumit Guha’s argument that the mortality decline 1921-1951 was due to improved weather conditions (1881-1921 was afflicted with difficult El Niño weather), rather than to improvements to public health - although these likely had some impact as well (GUHA 2001).

125.53+76.5

Table India-I. British Raj/Republic of India inferred vital metrics (1871-1921: Dyson 2018 Table 7.1; 1921-1971: Dyson 2018 Table 8.1); note for some 1921 data, and for 1931 and beyond, the metrics are for the current territory of the Republic of India; otherwise, the data is for territory of the British Raj (where both data present, the Raj data is in parentheses)

Year	Population (1e6)	Growth Rate (%)	Sex Ratio (m:f)	Life Expectancy M/F	CDR(‰)	CBR (‰)	fertility/woman	female marriage age
1891	282.1	0.92	1.042	26.3/27.2	37.4	46.4	5.81	-
1901	285.3	0.11	1.037	22.2/23.4	44.6	45.7	5.78	-
1911	303.0	0.60	1.047	25.3/25.5	39.9	45.9	5.77	-
1921	251.2(305.7)	0.09	1.047(1.056)	21.8/22.0	44.2	45.1	5.75	12.7
1931	278.9(338.2)	0.11	1.053	29.6/30.1	34.9	45.4	5.86	12.7
1941	318.5(389.0)	0.13	1.058	29.5/29.6	33.2	46.5	5.98	14.2
1951	361.0	0.13	1.057	31.0/31.8	32.4	44.9	5.96	15.6
1961	439.1	0.20	1.063	36.8/36.6	25.9	45.5	6.11	16.1
1971	548.2	0.22	1.075	44.0/43.0	21.3	43.5	6.50	17.1

In a bold article, Hickel and Sullivan (2023) argued (using the vital statistics from Dyson (2018)), against a baseline of the 1881-1891 Indian CDR (37.2), that there was an excess mortality of 50m people from 1891-1920. Based on observations that quality of life was similar in 16th century India to contemporary Europe, they find that the excess toll against a CDR of 27.18‰ (an estimate for 16th-17th century England) in the same period was 165m+ deaths. Based on the above findings, a CDR of 27.18‰ seems excessively low for India. One may note that England may have had a low CDR relative to 16th century Europe. Re-computing the toll against the baseline of 36.5‰ ± 4.8‰ gives around 58.9m for this period (error range: 114.3m to 3.5m) NOTE These types of calculations are a bit rudimentary, especially over long periods of time. Inferring demographic trends based on CONTINUE .

In general, however, given the error difficulties inherent in the data, computing an actual excess death toll seems fairly speculative. There is little hard data, for example, on what the fertility trends were from the Mughal era to the 20th century (hence the two different Mughal era CDRs suggested: 36.5‰ and 41.5‰; the latter baseline gives an excess toll of 1.2m (error range: 58.9m to -56.5m), instead of 58.9m, over 1891-1921). Certainly the pre-1881 19th century CDR estimates are very crude, and an excess death toll computation would give extremely variable results). Nevertheless, qualitatively, we can see that the British Raj remained within the agrarianate demographic regime (CDR in the 30s to 40s, CBR in the high 30s to high 40s). Further, the intercensal vital rates flatten more periodic behavior: data from Davis (1953) (see figure 1) indicate sharp CDR peaks (into the 50s even, and up to near 90 in the 1918 Influenza pandemic), followed by CDR troughs (into the mid 30s). In other words, it is difficult to push a population already at the limits of biological sustainability (that is, already in a high CBR regime) much further, as Tawney put it, reflecting on rural north China in the 1930s, the picture resembles 'that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him' (cited in O Grada 2008). At very least, British rule conserved this fragile agrarianate condition.

China

The impact of Western intervention on China is a contentious topic (see some comments here). While never directly subordinated in the manner of Africa, MENA, and South/Southeast Asia, China was also the subject of "unequal treaties" and the controversial opium trade, amidst sharpening domestic tensions. In short, there is general agreement that China experienced some form of economic contraction in the early 19th century (often dubbed the "Daoguang Depression", after the Daoguang Emperor), with arguments for domestic and foreign factors variably posited as causal. Then, in the mid-19th century, the tensions that resulted from this depression (broadly speaking at least) exploded in multiple rebellions across the Qing Empire, the most spectacular and deadly being the Taiping Rebellion. While largely civil wars understood on by their local actors in domestic terms, European intervention did play a significant role in the outcome. And in the wake of barely triumphant, and seriously debilitated, Qing dynasty, Europeans (and later Japan) pressed the advantage for trade concessions. By the late 19th and early 20th century, anxiety over foreign intervention throughout the country (such as foreign ownership of rail concerns, and concerns the country would be partitioned by Europe, with Poland often used as a reference point), combined with sharpening anti-Manchu sentiments, culminated in the 1911 overthrow of the Qing dynasty. However, there was not a political force sufficiently strong to govern what was once the Qing empire, in all its territorial expanse. Even in "China Proper", the country largely bifurcated into territories ruled by militarists ("warlords"), until Chiang Kai-Shek’s military campaigns recovered some ambiguous sense of unity in the late 1920s.

As reviewed in the baseline, the broad trend of Chinese mortality since the Ming seems to have been a CDR in the mid 30s. There were periods of heightened mortality however, especially in times of turmoil, such as the 17th century Ming-Qing transition, the mid-19th century rebellions, and the 1930s and 1940s civil wars and Japanese invasion - in these periods, CDR likely hovered around or above 40‰ (there were likely other periods of population stagnation, at least regionally, such as during the same 1881-1921 period as in India, but good data here is limited or non-existent). In the early 1930s, one of the few pieces of hard data we have comes from a survey by John Lossing Buck (husband (and then ex-husband) of famed novelist Pearl S. Buck), who found CDR and CBR both around 41‰.

Overall, while there is still lively debate over the relative impact of domestic vs international factors on China’s demographic and economic tribulations, we can see a long-term throughline of a mid 30s CDR and upper 30s/low 40s CBR.

Africa

For Africa, we have an even more vague demographic picture during and before colonialism - as reviewed in the baseline section, there are two poles to pre-colonial demographics: a Malthusian regime, and a more normal demographic regime depressed by the affects of the Atlantic (and to lesser extent, Muslim) slave trade.

TROPICAL MEDICINE...

The institutionalized ignorance resulting from 'tropical medicine' started to crack in the 1920s, as 'nutrition' opened a breach showing Africans, as humans, suffered universal health issues. While long aware of periodic famines and nutritional problems (Worboys 1988, pg 208), only in the 1920s did colonial rulers acknowledge African malnutrition as an administrative concern - with all its ramifications for labor productivity (Coghe 2020, pg 17). If these were new issues of colonialism, derived from recent 'Malthusian' overpopulation, or timeless problems of Africa, was a topic of debate then til today (Coghe 2020, pg 17-18; Worboys 1988, pg 208-209). That the issue as acknowledged in the 1920s specifically resulted from the rise of 'nutrition' in European medical concerns, African companies’ increasing anxiety - amidst horrific, deadly working conditions, often without medical service (early 1910s South African gold mines saw annual mortality rates between 5-10%!) (Coghe 2020 pg 20) - over labor efficiency (and its decline with malnutrition), and changing views of Africa, from a land of plenty with 'indolent' natives, to one that acknowledged the actual condition of agriculture in the continent (Coghe 2020, pg 18).

Notably, the first imperial acknowledgement of a nutritional problem came by observation of livestock - not people - in 1925, by British observations in South Africa and Kenya; the resulting investigations, by John Boyd Orr, identified poor nutrition as a reason for African disease susceptibility and labor inefficiency. This was a big breakthrough against the tide of 'tropical medicine', as it applied a universalist view of medicine to Africa (ie that Africans could die of diseases other people died of), partly because Orr’s background was largely outside of colonial medical discourse - although this challenge wasn’t yet registered, and thus tropical medicine wasn’t immediately overturned (Worboys 1988, 210-212). However, with the Great Depression, the more interventionist prescriptions of Orr were neglected, only returning to the issue when forced by the League of Nations (Worboys 1988, 213), and as the Great Depression hit the colonies hard (economically dependent on exports of primary commodities, the prices of which crashed), unrest developed, forcing the empires to respond, and framing the issue in structural, not public health, terms (Worboys 1988 pg 216).

The resulting Research Sub-Committee argued there were no fundamental differences between "tropical races" and Europeans, and that colonial nutrition was far below the 'ideal diet'. While field reports varied in quality (and often blamed native ignorance), the unavoidable conclusion was the problem wasn’t simply diet, but a result of poverty; ie the Antigua regional report: "I have investigated numerous cases of malnutrition in infants and in practically every case poverty is the cause. Parents cannot afford to buy food", echoed in African (nutritional deterioration since the 19th century; the Gold Coast and Mauritius reports connecting the issue with the colonial economy) and Far East reports. The vast bulk indicated undernutrition was a recent problem, with health recently deterioriating. The overall Draft Report (March 1938) blamed poverty (specifically worsened by the Depression; not only cutting into incomes, but leading to cutbacks on state and company medical services), then ignorance (now attributed to administrative officials, not local people), as the main causes; 'over-population', except in Ceylon, was not identified as the issue; it was a damning indictment of colonialism (Worboys 1988 217-219). Yet the Draft Report was rewritten, re-orienting it from economic to technical dietary/nutritional problems, over concerns of the cost of colonial administration, with the tone of the report becoming markedly more optimistic, that nutrition deficiencies could be solved with practical measures against "optimal diet" standards - standards which the Research Sub-Committee had said were irrelevant. Further, the rewritten report again emphasized native ignorance, to be ameloriated with 'native education' (Worboys 1988 219-221):

The ‘native’ was pictured here as being caught in a vicious circle of ignorance, poverty and disease. Disease was being tackled by the medical services, poverty was dependent on world economic forces, so that left ignorance as the only area where worthwhile recommendations could be made. As the analysis of the Report unfolded, it was increasingly contended that ignorance was the root cause of poverty and disease, and the point where the vicious circle could be most effectively broken. If people knew what to grow, how to grow it, what to eat and how to cook it, then there would be less poverty and hence less disease. Who would direct the ‘ignorant natives’ in good agricultural and dietetic practice? Why the very same colonial agencies that the Draft Report had condemned for their ignorance! (Worboys (1988) 221)

Rather than a structural problem, nutrition became a technical one; rather than an epidemic problem, colonial malnutrition became an endemic, unsolvable problem. Yet the report was largely ignored - the issues had already been discussed since 1936, and the swelling war in Europe put colonial issues on the backburner (Worboys (1988) 221-223).

Indonesia

Russia

As quoted in the intro, the Soviet Union was characterized by:

I am interested in exploring the period from 1880 to 1955 precisely because it is in this period before modern medicine and urban sanitation could be expected to have been so important when the Soviet population experienced massive short-term demographic crises accompanied by secular improvements (Wheatcroft 1999).

These short-term crises have captured our memory of the USSR, yet it’s the "secular improvements" which, when viewing world demographics as a whole, stand out.

In Russia we find an interesting picture. Outside of Egypt, Russia was one of the few agrarianate societies that enacted modern public health efforts in its countryside in the 19th century (KUHNKE). Thus, while the picture is still within the agrarianate demographic regime, we see some of these impacts. For example, data from Karabchuk (2017) indicates a significantly lower mortality rate than in contemporary India, even reaching an empire-wide level just below 30‰ in 1914 (although if we exclude the more industrialized western provinces, such as the Baltics and Russian-ruled Poland, the CDR remained above 30‰) - a level which was also likely below contemporary China (in the late 19th/early 20th century, we see some interventions beginning in the independent republics of Latin America as well). However, what remains unclear is what the demographic picture was before the 19th century; some calculations based on parish data suggests it may have been around 30‰ in the late 18th and early 19th century, before the commercial explosion of the early mid-19th century had taken off, at which point mortality grew to around 40‰. While population was growing, this also may have been a period of rising birth rates, although the accuracy of reported parish birth rates has been questioned. Contemporary reports indicate such, as well as infant neglect as women were required to work more. Yet this conflicts with Mironov’s work finding quality of life improving in the 19th century. Hoch pushes back on evidence based on increasing height - arguing this could be a reflection of differential infant mortality - but it’s worth keeping in mind Wheatcroft’s critiques of this same argument from Hoch, from an earlier time. Nonetheless, it may be the case there was a rise in mortality around the mid-19th century, followed by a gradual decline.

What stands out here is that in the early Soviet Union (1920s and 1930s), public health and sanitation measures brought down mortality, to around 20‰, with fluctuations (diverging of course, during the early 1930s famine). The actual Soviet CDR picture is a matter of some controversy. Between the 1926 and 1937 census, there was a large shortfall in expected population (around 5-8m) - largely a result of the early 1930s famine. Andreev, Darskii, and Kharkova have argued that this can be explained primarily by a giant spike in mortality in 1933, with a CDR peak around 70‰ (and more subtly, higher death rates around the high 20s‰ in the late 1920s, although they also report CDR in the post-1933 1930s around 20‰); yet Wheatcroft has challenged the methodology here, arguing they over-estimate birth rates (and under-estimate abortion rates), leading to a huge over-correction in mortality rates (and remarks in 1926, the CDR was under 20‰); comparably, Biraben estimated CDR in the 20s or below outside of the famine years (with a CDR in the low/mid-30s‰ from 1932-1933) and war (Wheatcroft 2009); reviewing archival data in 1990, Wheatcroft reported 1933 all-Union mortality at 37.7‰, RSFSR at 31.4‰, and UkSSR at 60.8‰ (Wheatcroft 1990). These trends are also visible from data collected by KARABCHUK. Much of the decline in 1920s CDR is attributable to a large drop in IMR, which in normal years was a persistent trend, due to improvements in healthcare and control of infectious disease (Voskoboynikov 2023).

Voskoboynikov remarks that Soviet life expectancy was low even for Eastern Europe in the interwar period; yet it’s worth observing that entering the 1920s, even after war ravages from WWI, and the adjacent Russian Civil War, Poland’s CDR was already around 20‰, falling to the mid-10s in the 1920s; Bulgaria had been around the low 20s in the 1910s; Czechoslovakia entered the 1920s below 20‰, and soon at the mid-10s; Romania - with a comparable life expectancy to the USSR in the interwar period - had entered the 20th century with a CDR in the mid 20s (Mitchell). The Russian Empire, meanwhile, was around 30‰ in 1914. While the causal reason why this was the case is of interest, overall it should be observed that one reason for varying life expectancy was the overall development in these states going into the interwar period - aside from government policies to be implemented - is the different "hands" these countries were "dealt" to start with.

This was a pre-penicillin development, and well below the CDR of an agrarianate demographic regime. In contemporary Mexico, we see a similar trend:

The Soviet CDR shift occurred amidst an apparent decline in nutritional intake (Wheatcroft), as more labor was shifted from agriculture to industry (although Voskoboynikov’s review finds evidence suggesting otherwise). By the end of WWII - before the penicillin impact could have fully registered - Soviet CDR was reportedly in the low 10s, far in advance even of Mexico. In other words, early Soviet and Stalin-era rule saw a historic drop in death rates, especially remarkable considering this was before the widespread use of effective antibiotics. However, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet government alloted an increasing portion of its budget to the military, at the expense of public health. This was one factor in the slow mortality rise seen by the mid-1960s.

The interwar Soviet demographic picture is dominated by the early 1930s famine, and the effects of collectivization. Nevertheless, we are presented with an overall picture of a remarkable drop in CDR. CDR levels stabilized by the mid 1930s at this level, as the rapid urbanization provided a nutritional challenge (as there were less agricultural workers, impacting agricultural output); yet by the mid 1940s, we see a CDR drop.

Latin America

Looking at B Table LA-IV (link to table in baseline article), we can see a few trends, as indicated by Albornoz. There are "modernizing" countries, largely around the Rio de la Plata (Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil) which see death rates lowering fairly rapidly (although Brazil is more stagnant in this group), and "old regime" countries - those that that weren’t as affected by early industrialization and European immigration; there is also the Caribbean countries, which we’ll set aside for the moment. Among this latter group are three basic trends: those that see death rate improvement (Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras (the latter may be suspect)), those that don’t, or see only gradual improvement (Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Chile), as well as some in between (Costa Rica, Venezuela). Even in this second "old regime" category, the fastest improvers largely remain in the mid-20s.

As has been pointed out, Mexico is quite an interesting case here. It had a large population for a Latin American country - second only to Brazil for the region, and itself was a large country (again, second only to Brazil). During the Porfiriato, death rates hovered in the low/mid 30s‰ - an era when public policy was more concerned with attracting foreign investment than the welfare of its population. This was one reason that the Mexican Revolution was so explosive - about 1.5m excess deaths occurred between 1910-1921 (McCaa 2003), about 10% of the population; comparable to some of the heaviest losses in the contemporaneous WWI, as well Filipino mortality in the US-Philippines War of 1900-1913.

Following the Revolution, the Mexican government public health budget skyrocketed from 0.8m pesos to 8.4m pesos in 1927 - a factor of 10.5 - cutting the death rate; this along with extension of public schooling to the countryside (Cárdenas et al. (2000) pg 136/147). This resulted in a shift from the mid-30s CDR of the Porfiriato to a CDR in the mid-20s, with a peak during the Cristeros War. Government statistics appear to under-report mortality (see Figure 1, Mex-Govt vs Mex-McCaa) up to 1930, although it appears that by that point, McCaa’s data starts to approach the government statistics. At that point, we see a sustained mortality decline.

Another interesting case is Chile;

Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

By contrast, Turkey, which had undergone ostensibly a similar secularizing revolution, had a CDR that persisted in the mid-30s until the end of WWII (one factor here was US financial aid, allowing development of roads, along with US provisions of DDT and antibiotics).

Overall Conclusions

For a population to maintain, birth rates must at least equal death rates. For agrarianate societies, death rate usually hovers in the mid-30s - for example, while China and Mexico, relatively independent in our period, were not free of international commerce, they indicate the 30s were a more general phenomena beyond the colonies. While not a hard rule, agrarianate societies typically have higher vital rates than hunter-gatherers. There are two reasons: a more varied diet (although this may not always be the case), and that settlement fosters disease. Lower disease means a lower necessary fertility rate (although this doesn’t cause the birth rate, it does set a lower limit; note that birth rate can affect death rate, as increased infant mortality may also, subtly, result). So, in the pre-settled Indian subcontinent, women typically had 4-5 live births over a life time (4.5 on average), whereas in early settlement, with formalization of marriage institutions, this rose to 5.8. As the Ganges was settled, casteism hardened, so did the subordination of women, with marriage age shifting from sexual maturity towards childhood (Dyson).

SOME REDUNDANCY WITH BELOW PARAGRAPH

Given some death rate, birth rates should be slightly higher, translating to, typically, 5-6 children per woman (note that many won’t actually survive to bear that many children, but 5-6 is an extrapolation from the necessary rate given an age structure). This may be considered the minimal sustainable fertility. Society, and to varying degrees, women themselves, could negotiate this weaning times, abstinence, and later marriages (again, younger marriage enables higher fertility). Thus a society with chronically high death rates (ie greater than mid-30s) demands women to bear more children. This can become part of the problem as well - shorter nursing periods, and harder working conditions for mothers, can make survival less likely for infants. Nonetheless, higher death rates require more children for population stability. Rather than the Malthusian formula of death chasing down high birth rates, its often quite the opposite. And importantly, there’s a limit - women can only have so many children in a life time, meaning that the crude birth rate can only be so high - around 50-60 per thousand. So while death rates can soar up to 1000 per 1000 (ie a genocide in a year), for a population to maintain, chronic death rates in the high 40s are about the highest tolerable (setting aside stasis-by-immigration). And this situation also implies the total subordination of women - high birth rates are not, as Malthus would reckon, "natural", but a social outcome of power between the sexes. Death rates beyond this cannot be resolved socially, and will necessarily lead to population decline (such as in the Americas). In interwar Africa, infertility from venereal disease and widespread mortality in fact lead colonial administrations to a pronatalist policy (Coghe).

NOTE: It should be noted that pre-colonial society wasn’t a utopia. Across much of the world, slaving was common practice. Peasants were heavily exploited. MORE. We’ll find capitalism itself not unique in this regard. What is is unique is that more global-scale features associated with commercial, profit-oriented social relations has the capacity to intensively and extensively pressure vital rates upwards. This can be enforced at gunpoint, but also by hitching the vagaries of health to the market, rather than local production and landlord avarice. The latter can be more directly rebelled against as the landlord depends on the local economy; a global market (with investors often situated in more stable, distant locales), however, can find profit in new places, or rapidly replace collapsed populations with imported slave, coolie or indentured labor. This mass movement of peoples, and global circulation of goods, facilitates a higher degree of disease transmission; in conjunction with volatile wellbeing, this can enhance disease virulence.

In short, the rapaciousness of European conquest is evident, but isn’t exceptional in character. It achieved new scales of violence, however, as capitalism emerged from the protean melange of the Habsburg and Portuguese Empires in the 16th century. Genocidal and dehumanizing aspects in European outlook arguably emerge over the subsequent 500 year period - but these should be seen as expressions of this new capacity, rather than simply causal.

Then What Happened?

What is seen in India then is a society pushed to that limit - 250m-300m people pushed towards the biological limit for around 40 years. At best, around the world, we see vitality metrics which match expectations for agrarianate society in general (around the mid-30s). A trend back to this norm, while an improvement from the heights of the late Victorian period, doesn’t necessarily suggest the trend will continue downward, beyond the mid-30s, unless dramatic interventions are made in the conditions which result in these metrics. This could be anything from land reform, sanitation reform, reduced/regulated population movements, broad primary healthcare, improved nutrition, and access to effective pharmaceuticals. In fact, the USSR did reduce baseline death rates in the 1920s to the low 20s/high 10s, and maintained them up to 1940 (dropping precipitously, apparently, towards the end of the war). This has been attributed proximally to sanitary and public health measures (Wheatcroft) - mind you, this was before antibiotics; revolutionary Mexico soon followed in this pre-antibiotic downward trend, by the mid-1930s, which had septupled its health budget in the 1920s from the liberal Porfiriato era, but faced much upheaval in the meantime. These are notably examples from the 1920s and 1930s. Yet these policies were known in Europe throughout the 19th century, certainly by the late 19th century, and were largely being implemented at that point in Europe - the public health catastrophe in the colonies was not a scientific problem, but a socio-political one, one driven by profit over human wellbeing, despite the "civilizing", "progressive" pomp of that imperialism (one potential contemporary here is Latin America, which had some success controlling disease, although was generally sparsely populated). In fact, the particularization of "tropical disease" in the 1890s followed universalist medical theories, which saw aetiological commonality between locales in Madras and Manchester, regardless of ones allegience to miasma or contagionist theory (Worboys).

One of the key refrains of colonial apologism is "yes, there may have been a lot of deaths - hundreds of millions possibly - but that wasn’t due to humans; whenever these 'virgin soil' populations inevitably made contact with Old Worlders, they would inevitably been exposed to awful disease. And besides, would the colonists have been able to treat them for these diseases anyways? They didn’t know what was going on."

An awareness that disease killed many native Americans is quite ancient, but the particular terms of the debate today were established by Crosby’s 1976 essay "XXXX", kicking off the contemporary "virgin soil" discourse which Jared Diamond would then popularize in his NYT-best seller "Guns Germs and Steel". Yet scholars have harshly criticized this approach. One, while it sounds good, there is often a large lack of evidence. Two, the diseases in question, most notably smallpox, also had horrific mortality rates in the Old World. To boot, a variety of other diseases, such as the plague, still ravaged the Old World, regularly killing over half the citizens of cities in Europe, Russia, and north Africa (the latter into the 19th century). Why then, all this considered, did not Europe face a demographic catastrophe? In fact, Europe did face one - the Black Death, yet it recovered. Further, a large reason that the black death was so deadly in Europe was a general decline in agricultural productivity in the 14th century. This insight sheds light on a third attack: disease may kill, but it usually kills far worse when you are hungry, over-worked, and your traditional lifestyle is completely disrupted.

Now this isn’t even to get into the problems with the "guns and steel" part (as a quick aside: the Spanish didn’t simply conquer natives by themselves, 500 vs 30,000 (or whatever number); they conquered the Aztecs with tens of thousands of indigenous allies, and defeated the Inca only after decades of war, with native allies of course). But the "germs" part is pretty foundational for what is at least genocide-denial-adjacent. This isn’t to say disease didn’t kill - but imagine saying that the Armenians weren’t killed by the Ottomans, they died from disease. Well, yea, maybe, but why were they dying from disease at a high rate in the first place? (or hunger, or dessication, etc). If this argument was made to deny a Communist demographic crisis, would it hold water to you? Probably not.

In the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, a new surge in imperialism brought on a similar picture. Yet different from before, Europeans had fairly robust medical ideas. As we’ll discuss, they were still pretty wrong, but they were significant in that they worked pretty good - much better than in the 16th century. By analogy, Newton might be wrong how the universe works, but he gives a pretty useful approximation! While many of the causal factors of colonial demographic catastrophe would be repeated, this time Europeans were capable, hypothetically speaking, of mitigating this crisis. This was in fact part of their so-called "civilizing mission" - to improve the lives of "savage" and "barbaric" people. But we run into a problem - commerce ought to expand, and people should work as much as possible to produce goods, but overworking is very unhealthy, and a broad health program to cover hundreds of millions of people is expensive.

What happened? In summary, X things:

1. War, new "rationalized" output demands (ie an expectation of agricultural output per year), disruption of old social patterns, and the mass movement of peoples (ie for labor) disrupted ecologies, malnourished millions, and created regional, even global, scale circuits for disease to spread.
2. Prior to the late 1890s, different climates were seen as modifying the degree, not the kind, of disease. Miasmatic and contagionist theories thus posited that similar principles operate in India and London. So, for example, the miasmas which produce cholera in London slums must be the same kind that produce cholera in India, since they both were in fact specified the same: 'asiatic cholera' (if it was a different in London, it would be called 'Angliatic cholera', or something - note this is an identification made at that time). Or from a contagionist or germ-theory perspective, the same bacterium, vibrio cholerae, operates the same whether a person is in India or London. While miasmatic and contagionist ideas implied different public health measures (slum clearance vs quarantine), they didn’t mark out the tropics and temperates as distinct disease environments. Yet the rise of "tropical medicine" made this distinction, by suggesting that parasititic, vector-based diseases were specific to the tropics, in which the natives were passive, immune carriers (and thus didn’t require medical attention), and Europeans had to be kept healthy. This shift was strongly motivated by the rapid advance of Europeans into Africa, as well as other locales (ie Burma, Indochina, Philippines). All of this seemed plausible, given the apparent success of inspired measures in the 1900s, such as in the Panama Canal. Even for the time though, this was an erroneous concept - malaria was was endemic to Europe, yet was upheld by Patrick Mason as the paradigmatic "tropical disease". Not only did "tropical medicine" represent a regression from earlier universalist medical ideas, but was scientifically dubious - political factors fuelled the shift; its notably that broader 'horizontal' medicine in Europe was in part a response to greater enfranchisement and the rise of socialist ideas - again, politically motivated, not a mere consequence of scientific paradigm (Worboys in Arnold 1996).
3. Old race-climate ideas combined with evolutionary thinking, leading to a widespread belief that non-whites had an acquired, inherited immunity to "tropical disease" . These stereotypes legitimized a sole colonial medical focus on the health of white people - and meant turning a blind eye towards the welfare of locals. Within the emerging contagionist paradigm, this could even legitimize to segregation - if the colored people have an immunity, and are carriers for the disease, white people would be safe to stay away from them (Anderson 1996)
4. Insofar as native welfare was considered, the budget imperatives of colonial administration (that colonies ought to at least pay for themselves (Reid 2019)) meant that any public health program - say, urban sanitation in India - should be financed by local taxation, that is, taxing local elites. But local elites didn’t want this, and so public health was further ignored (Chakrabarty, Arnold)
5. By the 1910s and 1920s, excessive mortality rates lead to depopulation, or at least, anxiety about it (Coghe 2020, Anderson 1996). The main problem here is that the labor force would die off. Unlike in the 16th century Americas however, there wasn’t a pool of slaves to import, as virtually the whole world had been conquered, and had to pay for itself. In fact, Latin American countries faced the same dilemma by the mid-to-late 19th century, and themselves began to elevate public health, part of a general positivist/cientifico ideology that swept the region (Brazil’s flag still bears the words "Order and Progress") (LATIN AMERICAN MEDICINE BOOK). Thus, colonial administrators were forced to recognize that locals were, in fact, dying from disease. This started to erode the more explicit racial aspects of Tropical Medicine (Anderson 1996).
6. Contrary to Malthusian logic, the resulting depopulation anxiety lead to pronatalist policies - efforts to coax colonized women to bear more children. Notably, colonized people were having a lot of sex - this alarmed many missionaries, and is evident through the spread of venereal disease, some of which (ie gonorrhea) can, however, cause infertility. Despite this promiscuity, demographic trends alarmed colonial administrators into pronatalism. In other words, mortality trends lead to political action to induce more reproduction, rather than the Malthusian formula that more reproduction will naturally lead to a rise in mortality rates. Notably, longer weaning periods were widespread in precolonial African society (Iliffe) - a so-called "barbaric" society that didn’t reproduce "maximally" (as a Malthusian logic would suppose) - and efforts to shorten this weaning period was part of this pronatalist push (Coghe 2020). As Iliffe observes, birth rates indeed rose by the 1940s, peaking in the 1970s.
7. A suggestion: the increased agriculturalization of society, and intensified production demands, meant more fertilizer was required. This was largely in the form of manure, either livestock or human. Yet exposure to human shit in particular exposed peasant populations to gastro-intestinal diseases, such as dystentery and typhoid. Increase commercial exchange thus promoted the spread of these, as well as the intensification of production (which required more fertilizing shit). While chemical fertilizer was available in western Europe, this wasn’t necessarily the case elsewhere.

19th century medicine had its issues, even in Europe. Still, miasmatic-motivated public sanitation campaigns, and contagionist campaigns of quarantine and disease investigation could, and did, translate into tangible public health outcoms. Yet this was easy enough to ignore, by reckoning scientific racialist ideas. On the whole then, there was barely any public health infrastructure for colonized peoples into the 1920s, a major factor in the horrific mortality rates in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and the general hump in chronic mortality. It wasn’t until this health crisis began to exhaust the reserve armies of labor that these racist ideas lost their hegemony.

The matter here isn’t simply racism however - in the Balkans and the Russian Empire, for example, increasing commercialization paralleled a rise in mortality rates. However, because colonial empires were both inaugurated both to stabilize commercial veins and to "civilize" the "savages", simply ignoring the welfare of locals like a run-of-the-mill landlord wasn’t a sufficient ideological basis.

World War I. A meat grinder for Europeans, millions dead. There was a broad disillusionment with the old order; the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia, calling for an entirely different order - that peoples around the world had a right to self-determination, that capital had conquered for profit, that the world had been set on fire by bourgeois mythology. Socialists acrossed Europe took note, but fascists soon did the dirty work for liberals. Several rebellions against empire shortly followed - Ireland (partially succeeding), Egypt, India (failing). Turkey overthrew the yoke of the Entente.

This is the context to keep in mind - the October Revolution wasn’t simply applied Das Kapital, but a dramatic rupture in the old ways of doing things. The USSR had its flaws, but here was a republic that told all peoples, even those not invited to Versailles, they had a right to self-determination. That a nation, even a relatively backwards peasant one like Russia, could industrialize. That the welfare and health of the people could be improved. It’s impossible to reckon how profoundly this anti-imperialist union ruptured time.

The nature of this rupture is beyond our scope here. At the time, the First Great Migration was closing in the US, along with heightened racial tensions; the NAACP; the rebellions in Ireland, Egypt, and India; the Chinese and Mexican revolutions; the labor unrest in Britain; a near mutiny in France; the German and Hungarian revolutions; the Red Year in Italy; World War I had at least rent a terrible wound into the hegemonic fabric of the West. It’s in this context that Franz Boas...

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"To us it [democracy] means, among other things, freedom of speech, assembly, and press. The Soviet interpretation of "democracy" is expressed in terms of the welfare of the masses" - Ambassador Edwin Pauley, June 22 1946, after inspections in northern Korea (from Joonseok Yang 2020, pg 12)

At first this looks like a cheeky statement, but the more I’ve read, the more it’s resonated. Reading about the harrowing conditions of people in the Global South, of the huge burden pushed on women, it’s pretty easy to realize that addressing all of that would be incredible. It makes sense how Soviets could argue democracy was "welfare of the masses", as opposed to basic liberal rights, because those rights mean almost nothing when you’re stuck in absolute poverty. Granted, I’m happy to enjoy those rights - and I believe a global, socialist society ought to have them. But simultaneously, differences in wealth and class position give differential access to these liberal rights - and that means they can rapidly be abused to argue for reactionary positions. In a liberal view, one’s autonomy is actualized through the political sphere, and thus restriction on it is despotic. But in a Marxist view, autonomy is a result of one’s material conditions and social relations to production - ie, a homeless person in America isn’t really that "free". And if apparently equal access to political action really means the wealthier (or those financed by enemy states, or greedy corporations) have greater access, then a system which limits the autonomy of the poor will continue, and only certain voices will actually be heard by anyone (maybe your friends, followers, and neighbors hear you though). Of course, restrictions on these liberal rights can have of other motivations, but certainly in the rose-tinted early revolutionary period, this Leninist reckoning can’t be ignored. The tension to resist this from the American side is palpable in Truman’s famouse "Truman Doctrine" speech:

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. - US President Harry Truman, March 12 1947, in a speech to joint session of Congress

Eventually, I found the throughline I was looking for - public health. Herein lay the crux of all the arguments.

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