ABSTRACT
The interwar years saw a profound shift in global population dynamics, as rapid expansion of European populations gave way to moderate growth in Europe, while populations in much of the rest of the world entered a new, more rapid phase of expansion. This development was perceived to have profound implications for the balance of power in the world, and was the subject of intense discussion, and increasingly violent attempts to manage populations, by the 1940s. Those policies, however, had almost no demographic impact. From the perspective of the history of demography, then, the interwar period is not a distinctive period at all; it is simply the beginning of the demographic regime that would prevail for most of the next century, from about 1920 to about 2000.
