ABSTRACT
The population of the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed from that of today in almost every respect. Most notably, it totalled only about one billion, less than one-sixth of what it is projected to be in 2000 and equivalent to only 11-12 years of world population growth at the current rate in the 1990s. This estimate for 1800 is of course no more than a crude guess, because only the Scandinavian countries and America had held modern censuses of population; the first rather skeletal censuses were taken in Britain and France in 1801, and it was not until 1837 that centralized vital registration was introduced into Britain. Indeed, most of the world’s population remained unenumerated during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.
