![]() ![]() This means that Java was more populous than other Indonesian islands before 1800, and kept growing faster than them after 1800, reaching 80% of all the Indonesian population at the end of the 1900s. This means that Java was growing faster than the whole of Indonesia, so it was probably growing as fast as other fast-growing Southeast Asian countries. Java was already populous in 1800, and only grew more so during that century, increasing its share of the Indonesian population. So I corrected 19th century data with another source, which adjusted the data based on salt consumption, which is probably reasonable given that it’s a more reliable indicator than population estimations, which were not conducted by an official census until 1930. Note that the data from the 1800s isn’t too reliable, as can be read in Population growth in Java in the 19th century, A new interpretation. The other is the population of Java, which comes from the paper Demand for labor and population growth in colonial Java, from Benjamin White. Maddison is one of the most famous sources of historic country population data. This graph that I made comes from two very different data sources: One is Maddison, for the population of Indonesia. Let’s overlap the population density map we had before with the volcanoes map: Same for Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. But the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and the north of Sulawesi also have plenty of volcanoes, and have smaller populations. More importantly, if this volcano thing were true, shouldn’t all the volcanic areas be fertile and sustain a big population? We’ve seen this isn’t true: Yes, Java, the Philippines, and Japan have plenty of volcanoes and big populations. Wouldn’t intensive agriculture exhaust them, the way farmers have to fallow ground after some harvests to let it build up its nutrients again? They erupt every few hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, and when they do, they don’t cover the regions where they are. These volcanoes are active, but they’re not covering the soil every few years with a new layer of lava. This makes sense in theory, but I’ve always had questions about this.įirst, you can have fertile terrain, but it’s not like lava is constantly renewing the land. ![]() ![]() That’s because volcanic soils are very fertile because they have plenty of minerals, brought by the lava. There’s lots of people around the ring of fire: Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico… ![]()
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