POPULATION

In modern usage the word population, means "the total number of persons inhabiting a country, town, or other area," or "the body of inhabitants" (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]). The two meanings seem much the same and are often conflated, but conceptually they are distinct–the first, the number of persons, is the demographer's stock in trade; the second, the body of inhabitants, is the stuff of social science generally. The word derives from the Latin populare, "to populate, to people," and the late Latin noun populatio. Curiously, in classical times the verb more commonly meant to lay waste, plunder, or ravage, and populatio was a plundering or despoliation. Both meanings entered English. The usage of population as devastation, however, had become obsolete by the eighteenth century.

The word's first recorded use in a modern sense, according to demographer Adolphe Landry, is in an essay by the philosopher Francis Bacon from 1597. Another Bacon essay, cited by the OED in a 1625 edition, already gives the term a distinctive Malthu-sian flavor: "It is to be foreseene, that the Population of a Kingdome, (especially if it not be mowen downe by warrs) doe not exceed, the Stock of the Kingdome, which should maintain them." But at this time, and for most of another two centuries, population retained its gerund-like connotation of process–the process of populating or peopling. That usage appears in the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States, where one of the particulars among the "abuses and usurpations" charged against George III was: "He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."

Adolphe Landry, in his Traité de démographie (1945) traces the parallel shifts in usage in French. He notes the early use of dépopulation, in the sense of devastation, and in the eighteenth century the gradual loss of the connotation of population-as-peopling. The new meaning was affirmed when the statesman Comte de Mirabeau could title his 1757 work L'ami des hommes, ou traité de la population. A fuller account is contained in Hervé Le Bras's L'Invention des populations (2000).

The main demographic interest in population is as a simple magnitude: population size. Well before Bacon there was of course a need to talk about numbers of inhabitants in a particular territory. In English, for example, the word "souls" in the sense of enumerated individuals was used from the fourteenth century or even earlier. But for most purposes the egalitarianism implied by weighting individuals equally would have been seen as distorting reality. Nobles and commoners, or citizens and noncitizens, could not be simply added together. Women and children might count for little; slaves for nothing. Plato's optimal size of a city-state, 5040, referred to the number of citizens–a category that excluded women, children, and slaves. The actual population corresponding to this figure would have been ten or twelve times the size. The populus of republican Rome, in the phrase Senatus populusque Romanus (SPQR) displayed by its legions and on present-day Rome's manhole covers, were the freeborn citizens–far fewer than the population.

In later times it was the disadvantaged in the society, potentially a charge on the exchequer, that might need to be enumerated. Here, the word "populace" could be employed–in its meaning, dating from the sixteenth century, of riffraff or rabble, to be distinguished from the gentry. In early modern England, a significant motivation for measures to record population numbers was to identify those receiving assistance under the Poor Law.

In England, the subsequent emergence of the word population, qua population size, can be traced in the documents assembled by the demographer David Glass on the history of census-taking. A 1753 bill (not enacted) called "for Taking and Registering an annual Account of the total Number of People,…" The term population did not appear, the text constantly referring to the total number of persons or inhabitants. Within two decades the word was in use. English agriculturalist Arthur Young's pamphlet of 1771 advocating a census was entitled Proposals to the Legislature for Numbering the People. Containing Some Observations on the Population of Great Britain, and a Sketch of the Advantages that would probably accrue from an exact Knowledge of its present State. Population was used repeatedly in the text, unitalicized and with minimal echoes of its origins as process. The 1800 law establishing the British census was called simply An Act for taking Account of the Population of Great Britain, …

The application to nonhuman collectivities dates at least from T. R. Malthus's Second Essay (1803), where Malthus wrote: "The population of the tribe is measured by the population of its herds." Straightforward extensions of usage cover sets of inanimate objects, especially where age or vintage is a member characteristic. Often demographic analysis finds immediate application to such collectivities–for instance, deriving life tables for stocks of forest trees or automobiles, or investigating birth and death processes for organizations. In the field of genetics, a population is a collection of organisms as opposed to a collection of genes, giving rise to the contrast between genetic processes and population (or sometimes, demographic) processes (see, for example, Young and Clarke 2000). Metapopulation, a term used in ecological studies, is a system of local populations connected by dispersing individuals (see Gilpin and Hanski 1991).

In both ordinary English usage and in demographic analysis, population refers to a well-defined set, with clear-cut membership criteria. Thus, to take a common example, the population of the United States as identified in the 2000 census–281,421,906–refers to the residents (legal and illegal) of the 50 states and assorted territories plus U.S. military and civil officials stationed abroad, as of April 1, 2000. Conceptually, the membership criteria are clear, even if the resulting number inevitably has a margin of error–by Census Bureau estimates, for example, the 1990 U.S. census missed about 8.4 million persons and double-counted 4.4 million. In some other cases, the concept of population to be applied is itself fuzzy. Consider, for example, the population of a city. The boundaries of an urban agglomeration defined by some specified array of functional characteristics may bear scant relationship to a city's administrative borders, the former being more than a little arbitrary and the latter reflecting historical contingency. Even if there are agreed physical boundaries, the number of legal residents may differ greatly from the number of de facto residents, and there is an evident fringe or penumbra of membership beyond both, comprising persons with lesser degrees of attachment. The actual number of people within a city's defined borders varies greatly by time of day, day of the week, and season.

POPULATION

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