Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
In: 78
So the key things that affect population size are birth rates and death rates. If more people die than get born, then the population goes down. If fewer people die than get born, then the population goes up.
For most of human history, people died at a shockingly high rate, especially among children. Because of this (and lack of contraception) people tended to have lots and lots of children in the hope that one or two of them would survive to adulthood. As an example Queen Anne (probably one of the richest and most powerful person on the planet) had 17 pregnancies. Only 5 were born alive, only one lived past the age of two, and he died at 11. This was not unusual.
What changed was a better understanding of how diseases worked. Simple measures such as keeping wounds clean, washing hands etc. Helped greatly. As did vaccination which started to take hold in the 18th century. By the Victorian era the death rates had plummeted in much of the world. However people still tended to have large families out of habit.
Victoria, 150 years later, had 9 children, all of whom survived to adulthood.
During this phase the population goes up fast. Eventually people stop having as many kids and the population stops growing as fast. Most developed countries are at this stage now. Developing countries are still in the earlier stage where the population is exploding, which is why the world population is up to 8 billion, but it won’t keep growing at this rate forever.
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