technologies into agriculture or industry. If slavery was good for philosophy it
wasn’t good for technological change. Other historians have argued that the
rapid ascent of the US to technological leadership at the end of the nineteenth
century can be explained in part by its scarce and expensive labour. Low wages
in the US were never an option. Wages had to be high to induce people to invest
the time and effort for labour to travel across the ocean from the cities and
villages of Europe. The abundance of land meant migrants if treated badly or
paid poorly could always head west and become family farmers. According to
this view American factories were compelled to introduce modern, labour-
saving technology. The more rapid adoption of the production line, most
famously by the Ford Motor Company after 1913 could then be explained less
as a result of American ingenuity than as a response to the difficult labour
market conditions faced by entrepreneurs.
The demographic transition
Three main stages of demographic transition lead a country from high-mortal-
ity/high-fertility to low-mortality/low-fertility. Some scholars add a fourth
stage characteristic of very high income countries, where fertility can fall
below mortality and lead to (before immigration) population decline. The
fertility rate in Italy, for example, is now only slightly greater than one child
per woman. Without migration the population will fall by around 25 per cent
by 2050. This chapter covers the first three as those being most relevant to
developing countries.
Stage one: high mortality, high fertility and slow population growth
In a developing country poor working conditions, bad sanitation and nutrition
and lack of basic health care lead to low life expectancy. Mortality is high in the
very young and in those at vulnerable moments in the life-cycle such as child-
birth. Fertility rates are also high. Many will depend upon subsistence agricul-
ture, which offers productive employment even to young children. In
traditional agriculture women can also combine bearing and caring for chil-
dren. The lack of insurance for parents in old age and high child mortality
necessitates high fertility to ensure that sufficient children survive into adult-
hood to care for the parents. Even today in China more than half of the elderly
live with their children, usually a son. Insecure property/land rights place a
premium on having children (especially sons) for physical protection.
Catastrophic mortality from famine and illness is common during the first
stage. Nineteenth-century India, for example, faced recurrent famine. 5 million
to 8 million died in 1876–88, 2 million to 4.5 million in 1899–90, and in the
last famine before independence in 1942–3 2 million to 4 million died in
Bengal. During the late nineteenth century famine caused life expectancy in
India to drop to roughly 22 years. In the district of Berar this famine raised the
Population and Economic Growth/Development 85