What Was Shattered With The Eighteenth Century

What was shattered in both China and Europe with the eighteenth century was a biological ancient regime.  A set of constraints, barriers, structures, ratios, and numerical links that had been the rule.

There is a regular drift towards a balance between patterns of births and deaths.  Under the ancient regime, the two coefficients were both around 40 per 1000.  What life added, death took away.  In the short term, credit and debit kept pace.  When one side grew, the other reacted.  

   

Directly after a plague that halved the populace of Verona in 1637, the soldiers of the garrison, many of whom had avoided the plague, married the widows, and life gained the upper hand again.

   

In Germany, which had suffered from the ruins of the Thirty Years War, there was demographic renewal once the bad times were over.  This was the marvel of recompense in a country quarter or half devastated by the horrors of war.  An Italian visitor to Germany in 1648, when the European populace was static or waning, observed there were few men of an age to bear arms, but an unusually high number of children.

   

When the balance was not restored fast enough, the authorities interceded.  Venice, usually closed, passed a liberal decree on 30 October 1348, after the dreadful Black Death.  It gave complete citizenship to every person who would come and settle there with his family and assets within the period of a year.  The towns endured thanks to new blood from elsewhere.  Generally, people came of their own accord.

   

Increases and declines thus oscillated in the short term, offsetting each other.  This is consistently verified by the zigzag curves denoting births and deaths anyplace in the West.