From classic demographic theory to the best contemporary thinking, this book will fruitfully replace previous ways of looking at population expansion and contraction. The 50 years of scholarship that covers 2 1/2 millennia, peoples in all parts of the world, and aggregates from hamlets to the global level, this volume shows that populations grow or decline according to six related patterns. Looking at the path taken by unrestricted population growth, the effects of limited resources, demographic disaster, population explosion, and the implications of stable population theory and...

Building upon models set forth in Volume I of this work, Harris turns his attention to populations on the move. Through examples from literature on migration, the Atlantic slave trade and slave demography, and urbanization, this study demonstrates how all types of migration--free and forced, long-distance and local--build up and are then absorbed into populations according to the same patterns that characterize populations in general. What causes these few closely related trends to reappear, Harris argues, is the way structures of populations alter, according to a standard absorption of...