The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World

by Paul Morland

Every phase since the advent of the industrial revolution - from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump - can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world.The Human Tide is the first popular history book to redress the underestimated influence of population as a crucial factor in almost all of the major global shifts and events of the last two centuries - revealing how such events are connected by the invisible mutually catalysing forces of population.


Source : https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/telling-numbers-book-review-5933785/

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While the tides of history are generally explained by the technologies and resources developed by nations and cultures, such as the Acheulian axe, gunpowder, agricultural surpluses, stock markets and penicillin, two new books deploy the weight of numbers to arrive at unusual insights. Paul Morland argues the superficially obvious, that history is shaped by the interplay of populations and their needs, while Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson look 30 years into the future, when the most advanced nations will begin to show declining numbers. The two books illustrate how far demographic thinking has moved on from the inevitability of the Malthusian crisis. With the benefit of hindsight, the apocalyptic notion that conditioned policymaking for over a century now seems naive, because in the interim, we have seen that human creativity can play the numbers game at least as well as Mother Nature, and can, for instance, innovate high-yielding crops and high-paying work to combat hunger. Or, it can simply strike camp and migrate, reducing the demographic burden.

The fall in fertility which Bricker and Ibbotson refer to has been seen already in the greying of Japan, where the proportion of the elderly is growing apace, while there are not enough young people to care for them, and technologies like robotics are being deployed to bridge the gap. However, their fieldwork in diverse locations shows that a breeding slowdown is due in population growth leaders like China. India, they suspect, will reap the demographic dividend that we don’t tire of talking up but never seem to be able to mine, and “could enjoy decades of Goldilocks years, with a large young population generating and consuming wealth.” Perhaps the Prime Minister is ahead of his time in headlining population growth as a problem in search of a solution. Perhaps, for the time being, it is a solution. But this, too, shall pass.

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Though Bricker and Ibbitson’s work is posited on falling population growth rates, looking ahead, they predict a shift of power in the West driven by a wave of migration.
Historically, though, Morland points out that Malthus had set the course. He refers to the extraordinary success of British colonialism, which produced the biggest corporation of all time, the East India Company. He suggests that the success owed to Britain’s ability to “people” the colonies, because the British Isles were in the throes of a population explosion at the right time. Waves of adventurers and clerks were pushed out of the home countries by Malthusian forces, and took over trade, administration, education and the military in distant parts. He quotes the historian Fernand Braudel on the dwindling fortunes of Spain, England’s main competitor in the colonial game, which took but could not hold Central and South America for want of numbers. And, after the Spanish Main was colourful history, the immigrant-rich US could effortlessly settle California, Arizona and New Mexico because there were too few Spaniards or Mexicans to impede their progress.

Though Bricker and Ibbitson’s work is posited on falling population growth rates, looking ahead, they predict a shift of power in the West driven by a wave of migration. Canada is taking in three times as many immigrants as the US, and some entrepreneurs and makers of opinion and policy are looking for an even higher rate. In about 50 years, the falling curve of the population of Germany, which currently leads Europe economically, politically and morally, could intersect with the rapidly rising curve of Canada. Currently, Canada is a minor player in international affairs, but the authors suggest that the sheer weight of numbers could give it heft in the 21st century.


Of course, that would depend on Canada being able to sustain its multicultural political ethic. Local nuances would matter, too. The black earth of Saskatchewan would probably turn more productive with more labour, and the Yukon could do with one more city, besides Whitehorse. But how would immigration socially and politically affect Nunavut, the Inuit-majority state which was delimited just 20 years ago, and which is the biggest and second-most sparsely populated of the northern states?

Immigration breeds autochthonous resentments, and the globalisation of labour has encouraged anxieties which powered the rise of the nativist right in several nations all over the world. The Empire Windrush dropped anchor in London in 1948, bearing over 1,000 immigrants from Jamaica in the first wave of the empire coming ‘home’ to roost. Since that time, following a long period of rampant racism in the UK, the tide turned with Tony Blair’s Labour government aggressively promoting multiculturalism. The atavistic insularity that Brexit represents will probably turn the tide again.
Britain, which enjoyed the greatest success in controlling its colonies by the weight of numbers is an exemplar of national attitudes to the tides of migration. Attitudes hold the key to populations and their influence. Operation Paperclip, the US covert project which assimilated World War II German scientists, including Wernher von Braun and his V2 rocket team, won the war technologically for the Allies. At the same time, the haunting picture of the corpse of the child Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach is a reminder that because demographic change is unsettling, it also evokes powerfully negative politics.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape. 




Source : https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-984823-21-2

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The world faces not an overpopulation crisis but a birth dearth that will reshape civilization, according to this arresting and contrarian look at the planet’s demographic future. Bricker, CEO of the research firm Ipsos Public Affairs, and journalist Ibbitson, authors of The Big Shift, critique the United Nations model that predicts world population will grow from 7.6 billion today to 11.2 billion by 2100; they instead cite demographers who foresee global population peaking at 9 billion by 2060, then shrinking to 7 billion (and falling) by 2100. They point to two main causes of the coming cull: urbanization, which makes children’s labor less valuable, and above all feminism, which encourages women to pursue education and careers instead of early childbearing. The authors interview people from Brussels to Nairobi who are planning on having just one or two kids, below the replacement rate. The authors see pros (less resource depletion) and cons (stagnating economies, fewer workers to support pensioners, extinction of small cultures, loneliness) in the population bust and predict the collapse of an aging China and the resurgence of the U.S. if it embraces immigrants. Lucid, trenchant, and very readable, the authors’ arguments upend consensus ideas about everything from the environment to immigration; the result is a stimulating challenge to conventional wisdom

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire 

William Dalrymple 






Source : Indian express
https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/william-dalrymple-the-anarchy-the-east-india-company-corporate-violence-and-the-pillage-of-an-empire-new-book-5912109/

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One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. To understand how and why it took root and flourished in so distant a landscape, one need only visit Powis Castle in the Welsh Marches.

The last hereditary Welsh prince, the memorably named Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis Castle as a craggy fort in the 13th century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation.

For Powis is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company (EIC) in the 18th century. There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi. The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s heads set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour. In pride of place stand two great war trophies taken after their owners had been defeated and killed: the palanquin of Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, left behind when he fled the battlefield of Plassey, and the campaign tent of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.

Such is the dazzle of these treasures that, as a visitor last summer, I nearly missed the huge framed canvas that explains how all this loot came to be here. The picture hangs in the shadows over a doorway in a wooden chamber at the top of a dark, oak-panelled staircase. It is not a masterpiece, but it does repay close study. An effete Indian prince, wearing cloth of gold, sits high on his throne under a silken canopy. On his left stand scimitar and spear-carrying officers from his own army; to his right, a group of powdered and periwigged Georgian gentlemen. The prince is eagerly thrusting a scroll into the hands of a slightly overweight Englishman in a red frock coat.

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In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office.
The painting shows a scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and replace them with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the Company, whom the document describes as ‘the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company’. The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.

The Company had been authorised by its founding charter to ‘wage war’ and had been using violence to gain its ends since it boarded and captured a Portuguese vessel on its maiden voyage in 1602. Moreover, it had controlled small areas around its Indian settlements since the 1630s. Nevertheless, 1765 was really the moment that the East India Company ceased to be anything even distantly resembling a conventional trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something altogether much more unusual. Within a few months, 250 company clerks, backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers, had become the effective rulers of the richest Mughal provinces. An international corporation was in the process of transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

By 1803, when its private army had grown to nearly 200,000 men, it had swiftly subdued or directly seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. The first serious territorial conquests began in Bengal in 1756; 47 years later, the Company’s reach extended as far north as the Mughal capital of Delhi, and almost all of India south of that city was by then effectively ruled from a boardroom in the City of London. ‘What honour is left to us?’ asked a Mughal official, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive. India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors…

At the height of the Victorian period in the mid-19th century there was a strong sense of embarrassment about the shady, brutal and mercantile way the British had founded the Raj… A second picture, this one commissioned from William Rothenstein to be painted onto the walls of the House of Commons, shows how successfully the official memory of this process was spun and subtly reworked by the Victorians. It can still be found in St Stephen’s Hall, the echoing reception area of Parliament… [It] shows another image of a Mughal prince sitting on a raised dais, under a canopy… and again an Englishman is standing in front of the Mughal. But this time the balance of power is very different… Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador sent by James I to the Mughal court, is shown before the Emperor Jahangir in 1614 – at a time when the Mughal empire was still at its richest and most powerful…

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.


Excerpted with permission from William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

By :Gretchen McCulloch

“Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too  






Source : Amazon & Vox
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/2/20750773/because-internet-review-gretchen-mcculloch-linguistics

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Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.


The internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with each other. It has given us GIFs, memes, emoji, and more initialisms than anyone can count — and in the process, it’s created a whole new set of norms for informal writing.

In her new book Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCulloch unpacks those norms one by one. She delves deeply into the corpus of internet speech to figure out the patterns in the way we write to one another online: what we really mean when we type “lol,” why periods seem so passive-aggressive in texts, and why emoji became so popular so fast.

McCulloch isn’t a prescriptivist, and she has no interest in telling her readers that one particular way of using language is more correct than others. Instead, she tracks how people are really communicating right now, and what meaning they are conveying to each other with their particular choice of capitalization style and GIF. What makes Because Internet so compelling is that McCulloch can parse the subconscious choices we all make every day as we type, and explain exactly how we learned to make those choices in the first place.

Here are the seven most interesting things we learned about internet language from Because Internet -

1. The keyboard smash has patterns.
2. Spellcheck actually changed spelling.
3. The first internet slang dictionary predates the internet.
4. There are many layers to the humble “lol”
5. There is an explanation for why older people fill their texts with ellipses.
6. The spoken hashtag is just the latest punctuation mark to make the jump from writing to speech.
7. Emoji aren’t a new language. They’re a new way to gesture.

And those emoji are just one part of the way we talk on the internet now, and of the new, flexible, and ever-evolving way we do language online — the new ways we’re finding to communicate with each other more effectively than ever.

RANGE : WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIZED WORLD


By :  David Epstein


“All readers eager to look into the next trench over for innovative ideas to solve their problems will welcome this remarkable, densely packed work.”


— Library Journal







Source :
https://www.davidepstein.com/the-range/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/range-why-generalists-triumph-in-a-specialized-world-by-david-epstein/
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7352-1448-4


From : Indian Express

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress