Walter Willcox on the Expansion of Europe and Its Influence on Population

Abstract

This essay by the American statistician and demographer Walter Francis Willcox (1861-1964) was first published in 1906 under the title Upon the Expansion of Europe and its Influence on Population. His theme is the expansion of Europes population and its overseas or transcontinental offshoots in the modern age. He asks what the influence of the spectacular growth of European populations was on the rest of the world and shows that the European demographic expansion also greatly accelerated the growth of nonEuropean populations. He demonstrates that in contrast areas with limited or no exposure to Europes influence remained demographically stagnant. (In this essay Willcox underestimates Chinas modern demographic growth.) Even though nonEuropean populations as a whole grew rapidly by historical standards the picture drawn by Willcox particularly for the 19th century implies a rapid relative expansion of the share of the populations in areas of European settlement. Soon after Willcox wrote his esseay this relative expansion came to a halt; the 2nd part of the 20th century witnessed a spectacular decline in the share of populations of European origin within the world total with as yet no end of the decline in sight.