We always kill the millionth citizen

[Snaake]

Yeah, very few cities should get to a million, Rome being one, London perhaps, but that should be it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Population_growth_tables

The 1800 numbers are a good reference point about what should happen. If you look at 1850, that already has had a lot of immigration happen to the Americas.

Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_sizes#Early_Modern_era

Looking at the 1825 numbers, at least some Chinese provinces should reach 1 million (quite easily in fact). In Europe, London, Paris, maybe Istanbul.

 

[unmerged(199227)]

http://www.youtube.com/user/YaleCourses#p/c/E60A08636F41C128/15/Y4pwqWNdIfE

Watch this if you want to understand why I say China's boom didn't start until the 20th century.

The 1399 start, there's virtually no difference between Asian and European populations. One just recovered from the Black death, and the other just lost millions fighting the Mongols.

 

[unmerged(193306)]

@alexender,

I agree with some of what you said, but the "hot" versus "cold" climate thing mistakes the underlying cause and effects I think. The baseline issue is agricultural productivity -- the Nile Delta, the Mediterranean Basin, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yangtze River Delta... these are just amazingly productive regions which supported lots and lots of people. They're warm, yes, but that's because they must be.

You know, it's quite amazing to think about, but Europe was being "settled" (in a very similar way to how the Americas were being "settled" post-1492) as late as 1200! Europe was truly a very sparsely populated place for much of its history; the feudal manor system has long been argued to be a sort of optimization scheme for managing clusters of small groups of people over large distances. That makes sense to me, and it also I think speaks to just how much harder it is to _thrive_ in cold climates than warm ones. That doesn't mean Europeans were smarter, just that Europe would be one of the last places to be settled -- and indeed, that seems to be historically the case.

@arbiter6,

As Trin Tragula said, India -- which inverts all the usual "this is why China's so big" arguments -- is, and always has been, basically just as big!

To me, that says there's nothing at all particular to "Chinese" people or "Chinese" civilization that's responsible for their very large scale.

@scholar,

Paragraphs are your friend.

Incidentally, I don't think China was MORE raped and pillaged than other non-European places... just, again, that the scales were always so much larger.

BUT, I will concede this: Europeans have had a bizarre fetish/fascination with "Cathay" since Marco Polo, if not earlier. I don't know why, but I do know it's heavily influenced European culture from way before the Imperial Age. If you ever read Renaissance literature, it's ripe with idealizations of China and the Ottoman Empire and the others. In that era, they believed these places to be super-advanced and super-wealthy and held them up as utopias compared to their backward, diseased, warring continent. Turned out they were just super-wealthy, so the Europeans took what they could.

And yes, it's rather interesting that an infusion of Christianity managed to spawn China's most devastating war...

@ Multiversal,

Don't want to out myself here but I've a healthy disregard for the Yale English dept

And it's a well-established archaeological fact that the largest cities in Europe were basically (1) Constantinople and (2) Cordoba. I'd also read about much larger cities than these much earlier in China, but I need to find a good reference.

 

[scholar]

Sorry about that, I meant for a very brief summary of the events but I ended up making a fairly big block of texts. In Europe there were far fewer battle deaths, and far fewer troops being committed to each battle. Sure I'll concede the very big ones such as the Napoleonic era, but... other than that? WWI, WWII (Which both had Asian venues.)

 

[unmerged(193306)]

Sorry about that, I meant for a very brief summary of the events but I ended up making a fairly big block of texts. In Europe there were far fewer battle deaths, and far fewer troops being committed to each battle. Sure I'll concede the very big ones such as the Napoleonic era, but... other than that? WWI, WWII (Which both had Asian venues.)

No worries, happens to all of us.

Yeah, no one would argue against that. Everything in East/South Asia was just so much bigger. The battles were 10x the size, the deaths 10x; same with the plagues, and everything else.

But I still don't really know why. If we had perfect data and I were a betting man, I'd say that China and India were just likely settled & relatively centralized millennia before everywhere else. But, IIRC, even though Chinese legends date the civilization to very very ancient history, the earliest archaeological evidence indicating settlement is significantly later than that in Babylonia.

Like I said, there's a puzzle here. I think the truth is, the state of our knowledge about the distant past just isn't sufficient. Maybe that'll change in the future. I mean, Troy was thought to be legendary a little over 100 years ago. Who knows what's still out there under the sands.

 

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Population_growth_tables

The 1800 numbers are a good reference point about what should happen. If you look at 1850, that already has had a lot of immigration happen to the Americas.

Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_sizes#Early_Modern_era

Looking at the 1825 numbers, at least some Chinese provinces should reach 1 million (quite easily in fact). In Europe, London, Paris, maybe Istanbul.

I haven't seen those figures before, I must admit, but they seem reasonable. Still the data indicates very few provinces should reach the 1 million mark, rather than basically every province with a CoT.

Perhaps the growth bonus from CoTs should be reduced to a flat 1% or so, and increase growth in capitals based on the size of the country somehow (I'm thinking triggered modifiers?). That should reproduce the numbers in London, Paris, Istanbul fairly well, and those high pop Chinese provinces will get there easily too. The only thing is that Iberia will probably explode with people

 

[unmerged(193306)]

...That should reproduce the numbers in London, Paris, Istanbul fairly well, and those high pop Chinese provinces will get there easily too...

Constantinople. It was renamed in the 1920s.

 

[unmerged(84079)]

I know, I was just using the language of the poster I was responding to.

 

[WankoStankins]

Until I read this post, I just realized I've NEVER even taken note of the population of a province, is it next to the manpower number? I just look at the modifiers, manpower and profit. Is this a problem in HttP?

 

[scholar]

No worries, happens to all of us.

Yeah, no one would argue against that. Everything in East/South Asia was just so much bigger. The battles were 10x the size, the deaths 10x; same with the plagues, and everything else.

But I still don't really know why. If we had perfect data and I were a betting man, I'd say that China and India were just likely settled & relatively centralized millennia before everywhere else. But, IIRC, even though Chinese legends date the civilization to very very ancient history, the earliest archaeological evidence indicating settlement is significantly later than that in Babylonia.

Like I said, there's a puzzle here. I think the truth is, the state of our knowledge about the distant past just isn't sufficient. Maybe that'll change in the future. I mean, Troy was thought to be legendary a little over 100 years ago. Who knows what's still out there under the sands.

Chinese culture, people, and society was forming well before the Shang Dynasty. We place most of the blame on the Xia which relies mostly on archeological evidence to about 2100 bc. But just because we don't have anything from before that doesn't mean there wasn't anything there. There could have been entire civilizations dating back to the third mellenium, or even further back. Paper and Wood (prime building blocks for people in the heavy forests/plains/riverbasis of China) decay rapidly.Pots and other things are made of clay, which could have been reused or returned to the earth. There is nothing to support anything before 2100 bc. But there is certainly enough theoreticals to make it plausible, if not a definitive. We just don't know

 

[unmerged(193306)]

...Paper and Wood (prime building blocks for people in the heavy forests/plains/riverbasis of China) decay rapidly.Pots and other things are made of clay, which could have been reused or returned to the earth. There is nothing to support anything before 2100 bc. But there is certainly enough theoreticals to make it plausible, if not a definitive. We just don't know

It may very well be that the same thing that makes the land so productive -- alluvial flood plains, warm temperatures, periodic mass flooding -- also does a pretty damn good job of eradicating all the traces of a human past.

Consider this: isn't it a bit interesting that most all of the oldest archaeological sites are in deserts? It seems to me that you can draw one of two conclusions: (1) they're indeed the oldest sites, and ancients may have had some sort of preference (or perhaps the climate was dramatically different then); (2) they're the best-preserved sites of all the ancient settlements.

I'd bet on #2. And wasn't there a very recent find in a desert in north Tibet that was quite ancient? I think the NYTimes ran an article on it [EDIT: found it here] last week. There's nationalistic forces at work here for the Chinese and Uighur groups wanting to claim it, but I thought it was pretty funny that the DNA traces are of Siberian and "European" (more like, the people who would later colonize Europe!) origin.

Just goes to show, no one owns the past. Every time I'm in Rome and I see the Italian dudes dressed up in gladiator outfits, I have to laugh. Italians today are way more Visigoth than Roman.

 

[unmerged(199227)]

Consider this: isn't it a bit interesting that most all of the oldest archaeological sites are in deserts? It seems to me that you can draw one of two conclusions: (1) they're indeed the oldest sites, and ancients may have had some sort of preference (or perhaps the climate was dramatically different then); (2) they're the best-preserved sites of all the ancient settlements.
p

They weren't deserts when they were first inhabited.

'twas slash and burn that did it.

 

[unmerged(193306)]

They weren't deserts when they were first inhabited.

I know, I just kept that line for completeness' sake. They became deserts and the deserts preserved everything

 

[unmerged(199227)]

Constantinople. It was renamed in the 1920s.

Heh, according to this game it's Istanbul as soon as you can make the national decision to make it Istanbul.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Heh, according to this game it's Istanbul as soon as you can make the national decision to make it Istanbul.

That's not entirely wrong though. While the name wasn't technically changed until the 1920s the popular use changed long before that.

 

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The population of China during the Europa Universalis timeline

In what was known as the middle ages in Europe, China's population increased substantially due to relative political stability and agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution was due to factors including the completion of the Great Canal by the Sui Dynasty, and the finding of a new rice strain from Champa (Vietnam) of an early ripening rice -

"As a result of this agricultural revolution, a massive increase in the population of China occured, from the 50 million or so it had been at the height of the Tang in 750 (which was less than the 63 million estimated for the year 200), to well over 100 million by the twelfth century"

It later suffered dramatically due to the Mongolian Invasion -

".... the total Chinese population loss during the Mongol conquest was a horrifying 35 million, compared with a population in 1200 of 115 million"

This figure rose to about 160 million on the year 1600 during the stable Ming dynasty. After the invasion of the Manchus (Qing), This figure fell to 145 million in 1620, dropping slowly to 126 million. However, as a result of agricultural revolution, the population skyrocketed. This agricultural revolution was due to doubling of cultivated land, and large increases per acre due to the introduction of New World crops:

"The Pax Manchurica saw a vast expansion of population in China from the late seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. According to Maddison (1998, p.169), the population fell from 145 million in 1620 to 126 million in 1680, recovering to 157 million in 1710 before simply taking off, more than doubling by 1800 and almost trebling to 412 million by 1850."

Before the agricultural revolution in China, it had a comparable population to Europe. In 1700 China had 138 million compared to Europe with 100 million (West: 81, East 19).

We generally think of the period during the 18th and 19th century as Europe advancing and the other cultures declining. This is not entirely correct, as the other cultures were also advancing, but not in the areas of industrialisation, finance, military science etc. that Europe was. China as we can see above, had a trading and agricultural boom during this period and had an economy larger than any of the European states until mid 19th Century, when it was taken over by Great Britain.

Quotes are from Power and Plenty by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H, O'Rourke who gets the statistics from Chinese Economic Performance in the long run by Maddison, A.

 

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^Good post

 

[Fornadan]

From 184-->263 in China over 5/6 of it's population died.

No

5/6 stopped paying taxes

Big difference

 

[Saben]

Are you suggesting they should start football clubs so they can riot?! But that's outside the timeframe of the game! :wacko:

hooliganism is older than one might think, even if football wasn't around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

 

[luitzen]

I'd say the industrial revolution (and other revolution) play a significant role in the modern status quo. When the industrial revolution took place in Western Europe, medicine was improved, and agricultural production was increased, populations were booming. As a result of these population growth, birth control, female emancipation (which was largely a result of improved birth control) and, more recently, decreased overall fertility, societies in Europe slowly started to develop in a direction where less children were born and population growth slowely ceased. Agricultural and industrial revenue started increasing much later in India and China as well as access to better medicine. Population growth is starting to decrease in China as well, but in a more artificial way, by means of birth control policies. Chinese society did not take the same route as European society and India is even further behind (in terms of reduction of population increase).