An English population series runs for three hundred and thirty four years

Edward Wrigley and Roger Schofield reconstructed the population history of England from parish registers covering the years 1539 to 1873. Their series shows births, deaths and marriages all rising across the period, with births consistently ahead of deaths except during one interval between 1640 and 1709. They explain the rise in fertility through a fall in the proportion of people who never married, which they tie to the availability of food and the possibility of setting up a household. The finding cuts two ways in the argument about the industrial revolution. A pattern that runs steadily from the sixteenth century is not evidence of a sudden eighteenth century break, and the authors also want to argue that England escaped the old link between population size and food prices at some point between the early eighteenth and the late nineteenth century. Both claims cannot easily do the same work.

In March 1529 Ahmed Gran, who led the armies of the Muslim sultanate of Adal, destroyed the Ethiopian army at Chembra Koure. He then worked through the country year by year, starting in the east and moving north and west, targeting churches and monasteries. Dabra Libanos went up in flames on 14 July 1532 and a number of its monks threw themselves into the fire. The cathedral of St Mary of Zion at Aksum, which probably dated from the sixth century, was reduced to rubble. Early in 1540 the royal fortress of Amba Geshen fell with the treasury and the state archives inside it. Tens of thousands of people accepted Islam and many more were marched off into slavery. Almost no Ethiopian manuscript survives from before 1530. By 1540 Gran considered himself king of the country and much of the population obeyed him. His soldiers had brought their wives from Adal and settled.

A colonial census taken in Santo Domingo in 1606 listed 9,696 enslaved people in a total population of perhaps sixteen thousand. Of those, only 800 were employed in sugar. Forty years earlier the same colony had held about twenty thousand captives and had shipped sugar in quantity. Three things ended that. Spain restricted where and with whom its colonists could trade. The empire turned its attention and its best administrators toward New Spain and Peru, which had silver and large settled indigenous populations. Brazilian sugar undercut the Dominican product in Europe. What replaced the mills was cattle ranching, tobacco and small plots farmed by peasants, many of them freed people or their children, often far from any official who might interfere. Church and state in Santo Domingo became among the weakest in Spanish America. That weakness frustrated the local elite and left room for everyone the sugar regime had ground down.

France declared sovereignty over western Hispaniola in 1664. The declaration covered a place French settlers and buccaneers had already been living in for decades, so the novelty lay in the claim rather than in the occupation. Spain rejected it. Madrid had held the island since Columbus and regarded every French farm on it as a trespass, and thirty three years passed before Spanish recognition came in a European peace treaty. Through those years the French planted, imported captives, and fought. The ground in question is the western third of the island, and it became Saint-Domingue. By the 1780s that strip of land was producing more wealth than any comparable territory on earth, more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies together, and every unit of it was produced by people carried across the Atlantic in chains. A claim made on paper in 1664 is the legal ancestor of that arrangement.