intensive cultivation techniques, and more complex regional distribution systems
in some areas.
The empires of Eurasia also exhibited population growth, boosted by natural
growth more than in Europe since no systematic contraceptive practices were afoot.
The demographic record of the early modern Russian empire is harder to recon-
struct than that of its peers, lacking sources. Working backwards from the 1678
survey of households, demographers estimate that at 1500 the parts of European
Russia controlled by the grand princes of Moscow had recovered from a
fourteenth-century onslaught of plague and had reached a population of around
6 million; the population grew steadily thereafter; estimates forc.1678 by Ia.
E. Vodarskii and B. N. Mironov, using a survey of households, propose a
population of 10.5 or 11.2 million. Eighteenth-century statistics, grounded on
a head tax, are somewhat more reliable: the population rose from around 15.6
million at 1719–24 to 23.2 million in 1762 and 37.4 million in 1796. Such
growth was aided by territorial expansion but primarily reflects natural increase.
As discussed in Chapter 17, there were regional variations: the Russian center,
particularly northwest of Moscow and in Belarus’an lands, and Ukrainian lands
suffered land deficit from overpopulation, while epidemics kept the growth of the
native Siberian population slow.
Russian demographic growth was part of a Eurasian phenomenon. In the
sixteenth century core lands of the Ottoman empire in southeastern Europe and
Anatolia grew by about 60 percent (1520–80), with major cities increasing by as
much as 83 percent. Across its vast realm in the late sixteenth century, the Otto-
mans controlled a population of nearly 7.5 million in the Balkans and Anatolia,
about 8.5 million in North Africa and 12 million in the Near East. After a general
Mediterranean decline in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman empire’s popula-
tion rose across the eighteenth century reaching about 25 to 32 million by 1800.
Few statistics document the Chinese population, but indirect indications show
population expansion. In the Yuan and Ming dynasties (1279–1644), for example,
China included between 1,127 and 1,173 counties, each of which was calculated to
have a population of between 50,000 and 500,000 people. Population growth was
somewhat stymied by unrest and regime change in the seventeenth century, but in
the relatively peaceable eighteenth century an estimated population of more than
200 million in 1762 doubled by 1834.
Not only quantity but density is relevant in assessing the significance of early
modern population. Dense population settlement offered opportunities for urban-
ization and economic diversification, but also posed perils of famine and natural,
Malthusian checks if population outstripped resources. Much of western Europe
was far more densely settled in these centuries than Russia. According to
P. Malanima, around 1500 Belgium was Europe’s most densely settled area with
43 people per square kilometer; Italy 30, the Netherlands 29, France 28, Britain
23, the Germanies 20, and the Habsburg lands 18. At the same time, Poland
averaged 8.3 and European Russia 2.8 people per square kilometer. After the
demographic boom of the eighteenth century, around 1800, Belgium registered
97 people per square kilometer, the Netherlands 63, England 61, Italy 60,
30 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801