so rome’s initial explosive population growth can be seen as a combination of growth via increased food production and the citizenry leaving the countryside for the urban areas. the proletariat roman citizenry flocked to (you guessed it) the cities. this destroyed the back bone of the republic – the free citizen farmer. The main cause was vastly increased agricultural production due to the aggregation of farming land into the hands of the few, creating the huge latifundia estates. Urban infrastructure (like aqueducts, etc.) were certainly a factor, but not the main cause for the population expansion. Regarding the fossil fuel population boom, if you were looking at it rather like a stock price and you saw a graph like this:, knowing that the thing that made it spike was running out shortly even by conservative estimates, would you buy the stock? Cain says above, the global population was higher in the 16th century than the 1st, meaning that dominant European cities were not quite as powerful as we might imagine. Secondly, the Renaissance took place in a city that was much smaller than is imagined. The number of people alive globally during the Roman Empire was of the order of the US population.īut that’s not what I find interesting here (other than the rate of industrial expansion) – as noted above, its the fact that contrary to what people have been saying about imminent decline of western civilization, the stagnation, decline and fall of Rome took longer than the rise. ![]() Octoat 6:25 yes the recent spike is representative about the planet as a whole it coincides with a supply of free energy (low entropy) via coal and oil. ![]() Not entirely facetiously, note that the extended period of decline and relative stagnation between 4 roughly corresponds to Nicaean Councils of the 4th century and the Copernican revolution of the mid 16th, events which stake out what could reasonably be called the Christian period, (or partially, at least, the Muslim one, depending on your perspective). I’m not sure what the population of Rome’s hinterland would have been in ancient times, but assuming that present day Rome is more sprawling, the 4 million inhabitants of greater Rome would perhaps show the post industrial city’s growth as being even more extreme than its ancient counterpart. Some points: the rise and fall of Ancient Rome was roughly symmetrical (compared to the rapid decline of societies such as Greenland in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’) the population during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K) Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees) the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome. I plotted a graph of Rome’s population through history.
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