Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 145
began to shift perceptibly, as migrants from a crowded countryside set
out to make their fortunes in town, or, in a few cases, crossed the
Atlantic to take up land in North America.^1 How to cope with a
growing rural population when most of the readily cultivable land was
already in tillage became critical throughout northwestern Europe in
the second half of the eighteenth century. Only later did comparable
problems confront central and eastern European societies, for when
the eighteenth-century population surge set in, there was much un
tilled land in those parts that could be brought under cultivation by
applying existing agricultural methods without resort to exceptional or
costly capital improvements. By way of contrast, in England, France,
Italy, the Low Countries, and Germany west of the Elbe, generally
speaking, any extension of cultivation to new ground did require some
sort of costly and unusual preparation of the land—fertilizing it,
draining it, or altering its composition by bringing in sand or marl or
some similar material to mix with the existing soil. Consequently, in
eastern Europe until after the middle of the nineteenth century rising
population constituted not a problem but an opportunity to make
grainfields out of what had before been left as woods, wasteland, or
rough pasture—without altering patterns of rural labor or customary
routines and social relations in any significant degree.
Another way of describing the difference between western and east
ern Europe between 1750 and 1830 is this: in the east, population
growth allowed simple replication of already familiar patterns of village
life. Export of local products—grain, livestock, timber, or minerals—
though increasing in quantity with the growth of population was not
massive enough to provoke any really new forms of social organization.
In the west, however, strains were greater. The countryside could
absorb only a portion of the expanding labor force. Urban occupations
had to be found for a greater proportion; and insofar as this proved
difficult or impossible, manpower was likely to shift towards predatory
- Europe’s population rose from about 118 million in 1700 to 187 million in 1801.
The population of England and Wales grew from something like 5.8 million at the
beginning of the century to 9.15 million in 1801; and French population rose from
about 18 to 26 million between 1715 and 1789. Cf. Jacques Godechot, Les revolutions,
1770–1799 (Paris, 1970), pp. 93–95; Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic
Growth, 1688–1959: Trends and Structure, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1967), p. 103; M. Rein-
hard and A. Armengaud, Histoire générale de la population mondiale (Paris, 1961), pp.
151–201. A convenient summary of demographers’ opinions about the causes for
population surge in the eighteenth century is to be found in Thomas McKeown, R. G.
Brown, and R. G. Record, “An Interpretation of the Modern Rise of Population in
Europe,” Population Studies 26 (1972): 345–82. Perhaps the most important single
factor was an altered incidence of lethal infectious disease; cf. William H. McNeill,
Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), pp. 240–58.
