I think the problem with population having any relationship to power is countries like Austria-Hungary, which had a larger population than France in WWI but was a weaker state.
The issue here is that France was populated mostly by Frenchmen (just like Russia had mostly Russiand, and Germany mostly Germans) who were loyal to the state, while A-H was populated mostly by different ethnic groups that hated eachother and the regime. So France had more "usefull" people.
Why can't anybody give a good reason why France's demographics dropped off? There are a lot of theories but no answers. Its wierd and frustrating; mostly becuase I'd love to come up with a TL where they keep growing. Something like 90 to 100 million Frenchman would be interesting.
Luian Boia (romanian historian) has wrote a book titled "France, hegemony or decline" and he gives the following reasons:
-french peasants did not want to divide their land among multiple heirs, so they started to look into birth control methods
- french industry did not develop quickly enough so the cities could not have apsorbed any surplus population from the countryside (as it happened in England)
- early secularization of french society which weakened the church, so it oculd not effectively fight birth control
I seem to remember Sparta did not defeat the Persians, that was Athens. The Spartiates had the crushing defeat of Thermoplyae. The great victory at Salamis was entirely the result of an Athenian politician exploiting a silver mine the right way, and if he'd failed to do that, Persia would have had a new satrapy.
You forget Plateea. Anyway, those battles were coallition efforts and no single Greek state could take full credit (but Sparta was regarded as the foremost Greek state back then and it was a Spartan who exercised overall command al all times, even during the naval battles)
This statement tends to be based on a desire to excuse failure more than objective reality.
Maybe on your part.
Horse puckey, those were military defeats, plain and simple, because the smaller party had freebie logistics from a superpower ally.
Those "defeats" depended on many special circumstances. In contrast, the ancient Greeks could not only defeat the Persians clearly and decisively, they could allso take the fight into enemy terittory. The modern equivalent would have been the Mujahedin defeatign the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and then counterattacking and conquering Tadjikistan
Wait-so if large nations are more powerful due to more room for a larger population, couldn't smaller nations have endorsed a policy of much larger/denser/more numerous cities at an earlier point in time to free up space for additional population growth/agricultural development to sustain the population?
If you do that you still miss out on all the other perks of a large terittory, such as strategic depth or access to resources.