Some thoughts about the population collapse of the indigenous Americas, possibly the most catastrophic demographic decline in history.
This graph is from two Taino communities living under close Spanish rule in 1514, before what is generally thought to be the first smallpox epidemic on the particular island. We see unbalanced gender ratios (120 men to 100 women) and, most tellingly, extremely low fertility. (0.28 children per 1 woman!) Even with no disease, just the maintenance of this terrible woman:child ratio alone would have made the Taino fall to 10% of their original population in just two generations (65 years).
Italian historian Livi-Bacci says of the Spanish impact in Taino country (emphasis mine):
Livi-Bacci then contrasts the Tainos with the Guaranis in Paraguay, who came under Jesuit rule. The Jesuits, given their Catholic origins, were rather more concerned about maintaining high fertility and large populations than the typical encomiendero. The result was that the Guarani population more than tripled.
This graph is from two Taino communities living under close Spanish rule in 1514, before what is generally thought to be the first smallpox epidemic on the particular island. We see unbalanced gender ratios (120 men to 100 women) and, most tellingly, extremely low fertility. (0.28 children per 1 woman!) Even with no disease, just the maintenance of this terrible woman:child ratio alone would have made the Taino fall to 10% of their original population in just two generations (65 years).
Italian historian Livi-Bacci says of the Spanish impact in Taino country (emphasis mine):
The explanation proposed by competent, though at times biased, eyewitnesses can be summarized as follows. The Spanish conquest involved widespread economic and social dislocation that created the conditions for higher mortality and decreased fertility. Economic dislocation was due to the “confiscation” of native labor, coerced from the normal subsistence activities and employed in the production of food, goods, and services for the newcomers and, later, also in the production of gold. Labor employed in the mines, in turn, had to be supported by native labor working in the conucos (fields). This double “attack” on the traditional patterns of production and consumption increased work, decreased consumption, worsened living conditions, and increased vulnerability to scarcity in a subsistence economy where accumulation was unknown. Although only a few hundred Spaniards were living on Hispaniola until the beginning of the sixteenth century, their demands for food, labor, and services placed a heavy burden on the relatively small Taino society. The more so in the following decade, when the colonists numbered in the thousands and the Taino population had become smaller.
[...]
The loss of Taino women from the native reproductive pool—one-sixth of them, according to the repartimiento—reduced reproductive potential significantly. But this would not affect the child–woman ratio (0.281 in Table 2), which was extremely low. Such a ratio would occur in a stable population declining at an annual rate of 3.5 percent. Unusually high infant and child mortality, or unusually low fertility, or a combination of the two, could be responsible for the low child–woman ratio—there is no way to tell. However, many contemporary observers commented upon the scarcity of children, the fruitless unions, the consequences of the forcible separation of women from their husbands, and the like.
[...]
The extremely low Taino reproductive rates can be explained by the geographic and social dislocation of the community. While the violent campaigns of conquest and “pacification” undoubtedly took a heavy toll, it was dislocation that produced an irreversible decline. Contemporaries saw the continuous shifting of the population from one place to another as one of the major causes of the island’s depopulation. This constant dislocation caused hunger, disease, and mortality, but it also caused a separation and weakening of family and clan ties. Marital unions were more difficult and precarious and fertility declined. Living conditions deteriorated, survival conditions worsened, and new diseases (before smallpox), while maybe not responsible for major epidemics, certainly added complexity to the island’s microbial world and increased its mortality. Not only the economic and social systems but, with them, the demographic system of the Tainos collapsed. Neither the Black Legend, with its exceptional cruelty, nor the “virgin soil” paradigm, with its disease-related mortality, is required to explain the extinction of the Tainos. The disruptive effects of conquest were sufficient cause.
[...]
The loss of Taino women from the native reproductive pool—one-sixth of them, according to the repartimiento—reduced reproductive potential significantly. But this would not affect the child–woman ratio (0.281 in Table 2), which was extremely low. Such a ratio would occur in a stable population declining at an annual rate of 3.5 percent. Unusually high infant and child mortality, or unusually low fertility, or a combination of the two, could be responsible for the low child–woman ratio—there is no way to tell. However, many contemporary observers commented upon the scarcity of children, the fruitless unions, the consequences of the forcible separation of women from their husbands, and the like.
[...]
The extremely low Taino reproductive rates can be explained by the geographic and social dislocation of the community. While the violent campaigns of conquest and “pacification” undoubtedly took a heavy toll, it was dislocation that produced an irreversible decline. Contemporaries saw the continuous shifting of the population from one place to another as one of the major causes of the island’s depopulation. This constant dislocation caused hunger, disease, and mortality, but it also caused a separation and weakening of family and clan ties. Marital unions were more difficult and precarious and fertility declined. Living conditions deteriorated, survival conditions worsened, and new diseases (before smallpox), while maybe not responsible for major epidemics, certainly added complexity to the island’s microbial world and increased its mortality. Not only the economic and social systems but, with them, the demographic system of the Tainos collapsed. Neither the Black Legend, with its exceptional cruelty, nor the “virgin soil” paradigm, with its disease-related mortality, is required to explain the extinction of the Tainos. The disruptive effects of conquest were sufficient cause.
Livi-Bacci then contrasts the Tainos with the Guaranis in Paraguay, who came under Jesuit rule. The Jesuits, given their Catholic origins, were rather more concerned about maintaining high fertility and large populations than the typical encomiendero. The result was that the Guarani population more than tripled.
From the 1640s—when the Jesuit missions of Paraguay achieved territorial stability—to the early 1730s, the Guaraní population guided by the Jesuit fathers increased from 40,000 to over 140,000 (Maeder and Bolsi 1980). This was a consistent long-term increase, with only a trickle of new arrivals due to proselytizing balanced by the losses of Indios escaping the strict control of the fathers. During a short period—between 1733 and 1739—disaster struck the missions: wars, hunger, epidemics, and emigration halved the population, after which a steady recovery set in until the final crisis and the end of the experiment in 1767, the year of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its colonial empire. The political, social, and economic regime overseen by the Jesuits had a profound impact on the Guaraní demographic system: in spite of very high mortality and the recurrent epidemics introduced from abroad, early and monogamous unions and a stable social structure allowed high birth and growth rates. Whenever mortality rose because of epidemics or other exceptional events, the dynamic reproductive system was able to repair the damage. The statistics collected every year for each of the missions (at their height there were 30 missions in the valleys of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers) provide reliable data on population, families, births, deaths, and marriages. The median birth rate in the period 1690–1767 was 61 per thousand and the death rate was 44 per thousand, allowing—in years not affected by mortality crisis—a natural increase of 17 per thousand (Table 4). The median value of the expectation of life at birth was 24.5 years and the total fertility rate was 7.7 births per woman; about half the population were muchachos or muchachas, males and females below the ages of 17 and 15 (Livi-Bacci and Maeder 2004).
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The Guaraní experience is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the demography of the colonial period. Three major conclusions can be drawn from it. The first concerns the epidemiological and demographic consequences of contact: one or two centuries after initial contact, the epidemics continued to be devastating even though they took place in a non-virgin population. Each epidemic found a population in which two persons out of three were susceptible. The high population density of the mission villages increased the risk of infection despite the efforts of the fathers to isolate the sick. It follows that the impact of epidemics in the nearly 150 years of Jesuit rule was no less devastating than in the century following contact.
The second conclusion is that the Jesuits’ policy of fostering early marriage and enforcing its stability maintained the birth rate at the maximum possible level for a normally constituted large population. The high birth rate generated a large surplus of births over deaths in normal years and compensated for the deficit of births in years of crisis. In contrast with other American experiences following contact, where the high mortality from imported diseases combined with a low birth rate consequent on the destruction and dislocation of the population, the Guaraní population grew rapidly for a century and compensated for the losses due to four epidemics, two wars, and related famines.
[...]
The Guaraní experience is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the demography of the colonial period. Three major conclusions can be drawn from it. The first concerns the epidemiological and demographic consequences of contact: one or two centuries after initial contact, the epidemics continued to be devastating even though they took place in a non-virgin population. Each epidemic found a population in which two persons out of three were susceptible. The high population density of the mission villages increased the risk of infection despite the efforts of the fathers to isolate the sick. It follows that the impact of epidemics in the nearly 150 years of Jesuit rule was no less devastating than in the century following contact.
The second conclusion is that the Jesuits’ policy of fostering early marriage and enforcing its stability maintained the birth rate at the maximum possible level for a normally constituted large population. The high birth rate generated a large surplus of births over deaths in normal years and compensated for the deficit of births in years of crisis. In contrast with other American experiences following contact, where the high mortality from imported diseases combined with a low birth rate consequent on the destruction and dislocation of the population, the Guaraní population grew rapidly for a century and compensated for the losses due to four epidemics, two wars, and related famines.