Centre for the Study of Regional Development,
School of Social Sciences
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Invites you all to a lecture on
The Population History of Asia
Prof Tim Dyson**
Date : June 25, 2019 (Tuesday),
Time: 3:00 pm
Venue: Committee Room, CSRD, SSS III (Ist Floor)
Abstract : The hunter-gatherer population of Asia probably numbered 1-2 million. However, the appearance of agriculture saw population increase, and it is likely that by 1 CE the population was at least 100 million. For Japan and China, there are data which throw light on their populations in pre-modern times. Moreover, both countries underwent rapid demographic transitions in the twentieth century—substantially restricting the associated amount of population growth. For Southeast Asia and India, there are almost no population data prior to the late eighteenth century, although what happened afterwards is better documented. Both these diverse areas experienced quite prolonged demographic transitions and considerable population growth. The population of West Asia is thought to have been of comparable size in 1 CE as in 1900. In the twentieth century, however, most West Asian countries experienced tardy birth rate declines and very considerable population increase. Throughout history, Asia’s level of urbanization has been very low. Nevertheless, Asia contained most of the world’s biggest cities—a situation lost briefly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That said,after 1950 mortality decline fuelled urban growth. Consequently, by 2020 Asia again contained most of the largest cities, and around half of the population resided in urban areas.The continent’s population history has generally involved extremely slow population growth. In this context, death rates were usually high, marriage was usually early and universal, fertility was uncontrolled, and so birth rates were usually high too. That said, research has increasingly suggested that in some areas the levels of fertility and mortality that prevailed in pre-modern times were ‘moderate’ rather than ‘high’. Moreover, there were regulatory mechanisms,such as infanticide,which helped to maintain a degree of equilibrium between human numbers and the resource base.
** Tim Dyson is Professor of Population Studies at the London School of Economics. Educated in England and Canada, he has held visiting positions at the Australian National University in Canberra, the International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai, and the American University of Beirut. In 1994-96 he was President of the British Society for Population Studies; in 1997 he addressed the Oxford Farming Conference; and in 2015 he gave the keynote speech on the first day of the 48th session of the UN Commission on Population and Development in New York. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001. His main research interests have included work on demographic time series, interactions between populations and their food supplies, famine demography, HIV/AIDS, child mortality, urbanization, climate change, and the past, present, and future characteristics of India’s population. He has also researched the demographic underpinnings of democratization—see, for example, the paper ‘On Demographic and Democratic Transitions’ in the 2012 Supplement to Population and Development Review published in honour of Paul Demeny. Tim Dyson’s books have included: Population and Food: Global Trends and Future Prospects, published by Routledge in 1996; Twenty-First Century India: Population, Economy, Human Development and the Environment (with Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria), published by Oxford University Press in 2005; and Population and Development—the Demographic Transition, published by Zed in 2010. His latest book is: A Population History of India—From the First Modern People to the Present Day, published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
