India since the 16 th century

Several historical accounts reinforce the impression that large populations of humans were living close to the environment’s carrying capacity and went through periods of severe food shortages and associated violence and hardship. One such a tale is about India since the 16th century; another one is on Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century (Vries and Goudsblom 2002). The fertile lands of the Indian subcontinent led to rather large population densities long before European colonisation started, with probably more than 100 million people around 1500 CE. Until the 17th to 18th  century, the population of 100–150 million people lived at a rather low-level equilibrium between food needs and food supplies. Pressure on the land was high because of a variety of socio-cultural factors. Variation in rainfall – sometimes as part of larger climatic/monsoon changes – occasionally triggered a cycle of bad harvests, famine and disease.

With the decline of the Mughal Empire and the advent of the East India Company and British colonialism, these cycles appear to have been negatively influenced by high land taxes due to the pressures for profit in faraway Britain, to lack of reinvestment in land maintenance and to frequent wars, to mention the most important ones. The incidence of famine increased, disease epidemics often followed. Only by the late 19th and early 20th  century did better nutrition and hygiene and more effective relief measures lead to a decline in mortality. Indian history illustrates that the more recent environmental history can only be understood in a larger geo-political context.

Migration in Russia since the 18 th century

The growth of the Russian Empire is also a narrative of overshoot, but against a totally different background. When Czar Peter the Great called himself Emperor of all of Russia in 1721, it was after three centuries of rapid territorial expansion. Although the territory was vast, its population was small: some 15 million people around 1700 CE or an average density of only three to four people/km2. The peasantry in the upper Volga region with poor forest soils heavily relied on subsistence farming on small plots of land. The severe climatic conditions of Russia required more fodder to be stored than the farmers could provide, which made cattle herding a risky and unprofitable venture. There was no potential for expansion and production for the market. Getting children was also risky, so population growth was modest.

The situation changed when the vast uncultivated territories of the southern steppes became accessible for cattle breeding to Russian peasants. Food shortages were solved by cultivating new land and not by increasing productivity. Population growth went up in line with the expansion of cultivated area. As a result, the population of European Russia had increased by the second half of the 19th century to 49.6 million in 1885 and 67.3 million in 1900, and its birth rate approached its biological maximum. In many regions of European Russia, there was rural overpopulation and scarcity of cultivable land reached dramatic proportions. In combination with large cereal exports to Western Europe, there were serious food shortages. Millions of Russian peasants were forced to leave their villages out of poverty. Unable to improve farming practises and failing the resources to migrate to new regions, they started searching for seasonal work in towns and other regions. By the end of the 1890s, their number had reached 9 million. It is an indicator of rural overpopulation, which was estimated at 23 million in 1901 by a special commission under the government of the Russian Empire. It is hardly surprising that 670 peasant riots were observed in the European part of Russia in the years 1902–1904.

One way to alleviate overpopulation was to resettle Russian peasants from the European part of the country in the southern areas of Siberia and Central Asia. By the end of the 19th  century, millions of Russians were already living in these vast and barely populated territories. Many more millions followed, but outmigration remained below 5 percent of the population and did not solve the much larger overpopulation. Thus, one can discern the social-ecological contours of a period, which, in the collective memory, is primarily associated with the Russian Revolution.