Comments on Benjamin White's “demand for labor and population growth in colonial Java”

Abstract

The usual explanation of the large growth of population in Java since 1800 is that mortality declined as a result of the improved hygiene and medical practice, the more regular supply of food, and the peace and order accompanying Dutch colonization. In the eighteenth century, writers like Montesquieu and Adam Smith assumed that good government was necessary to produce population increase, and, conversely, that mercantilist exploitation would reduce the population. We ought to know better now. With a crude birth rate of 45 per thousand (a likely level for Java), even a dismally high crude death rate of 30 per thousand would yield a 1.5% growth rate per year and double the population in 45 years. In order to undergo no growth at all, the crude death rate should be as high as the crude birth rate. There is, of course, no evidence that the precolonial population of Java was not growing. There exists no reliable record of populations having suffered a crude death rate of 45 (or even 40) per thousand for long periods of time, possibly because the conditions causing such a high mortality are not conducive to the establishment of statistics. There are, however, examples of catastrophes causing extraordinary loss of life. This is quite different from a short-term equilibrium between mortality and fertility. A colonial administration, even without appreciably improving the habitual level of hygiene, nutrition, and health, could efficiently stave off the exceptional killers: famines by improving the transportation network, wars by political control, epidemics by quarantine measures. There are many examples of colonial areas where the level of medical practice remained primitive but where considerable population growth took place. Examples can be found on the Indian subcontinent, where the population may have tripled between 1800 and 1941, or in West Africa.