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World Population
Notes: While world population growth in a sense transcends the narrative of human history, it has important implications both for the writing of history and prediction of its future course. First, the space given particular peoples and regions in books of world history should roughly mirror their populations. Together, India and China have consistently had one third to one half of the earths population. These nations should have comparable coverage in world history. Since world history is a creation story, that formula is not strictly observed; events that have originated important practices and institutions should, of course, be disproportionately represented in the histories. Even so, world history should describe the experience of the bulk of humanity rather than of any particular subgroup. Second, to take population into consideration in world historys design helps to restore proportionality to a scheme in which historical epochs become steadily shorter in terms of time. In terms of man-years of human experience, the five epochs would become more comparable in size. World historians tend to neglect modern times. Finally, with respect to the future course of humanity, population growth is on a collision course with the earths finite territory and resources. Continued growth at present rates is physically impossible. We may confidently predict that something will happen to curtail the further growth of human populations on earth even if we cannot say what this will be. Source: Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Penguin, 1978)
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