The biggest story on the planet

One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too many people,’ she said. From among the many other piquant factoids in Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, I was unnerved to learn that ‘Hitler was obsessed with demography’ too.

Whether you also suffer from this unhealthy preoccupation or are simply shopping for a new way of looking at the world, this is a readable, trenchant, up-to-date overview of the biggest story on the planet — one in which we’re all actors. The author has a moderate bent, and doesn’t claim that population — its surging, contraction and migration — explains all of human history. But it comes awfully close.

After all, the long view is astonishing. It took 1,800 years for humans to increase from 250 million to one billion at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837. As of 2018, we’d reached more than 7.6 billion, the vast majority of that growth post war. And ‘the human tide’ (an expression this text repeats enough times to become annoying) continues to rise.

Yet we’re political animals. The long view of the human race is inevitably less fascinating than a closer-in look at which peoples lead the race in a competitive sense. Since the 1960s, writing about demography has steadily shifted from regarding high fertility rates as tragically entrenching poverty to accepting that numbers confer power. Not mincing words, Morland declares boldly at the outset that ‘ethnicity matters politically’. He spells out that ‘nations and ethnic groups are real’ and ‘they matter in history’.

The author charts the standard demographic transition after modernisation: in country after country, industrialisation, better sanitation and medical advances lead to more surviving children and longer life expectancy.