34

The Structures o f Everyday Life

of secondary importance. Ernst Wagemann, the economist and demographer, held this view. The synchronism is evident in the eighteenth century and more than probable in the sixteenth. It can be assumed that it also applied to the thirteenth and stretched from the France of St Louis to the remote China of the Mongols. If so, this would both shift and simplify the problem. The development of the population, Wagemann concluded, should be attributed to causes very different from those that led to economic, technical and medical progress.4 In any case, fluctuations like this, occurring more or less simultaneously from one end of the inhabited world to the other, make it easier to envisage the existence of numerical relationships between the different human masses which have remained relatively fixed over the centuries: one is equal to another, or double a third. When one is known, the other can be worked out; eventually, therefore, the total for the whole body of people can be assessed, though with all the errors inherent in such an estimate. The interest of this global figure is evident. However inaccurate and inevitably inexact, it helps to determine the biological evolution of humanity considered as a single entity, a single stock as statisticians would say. The lack o f statistics Nobody knows the total population of the world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Statisticians working from the conflicting, sparse and un certain figures offered by historians cannot agree. It would seem at first glance as if nothing could be constructed on such doubtful foundations. It is none the less worth trying. The figures are few and not very reliable. They apply only to Europe and, as a consequence of some admirable research, to China. In these two cases, we have censuses and estimates that are almost valid. The ground may not be very solid, but it is reasonably safe to venture on to it. What about the rest of the world? There is nothing, or almost nothing, on India, which is not greatly concerned either with its history in general or with the statistics that might shed light on it. There is nothing in fact on non-Chinese Asia, outside Japan. There is nothing on Oceania, only skimmed by European travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Tasman reached New Zealand in May 1642 and Tasmania, the island to which he gave his name, in December of the same year; Cook reached Australia a century later, in 1769 and 1783; and Bougainville arrived at Tahiti, the New Cythera (which, by the way, he did not discover) in April 1768. In any case, is there really any need to discuss these thinly inhabited areas? Statisticians estimate two million for the whole of Oceania, whatever the period under consideration. Nor is there anything definite on Black Africa, south of the Sahara, except conflicting figures on the extent of the slave trade from the sixteenth century onwards - and it would be difficult to