828 _ CHAPTER 31 Striving for Independence: India, Africa, and Latin America, 1900-1949

armed members of one faith hunted down people of the other faith. Leaving most of their pos­sessions behind, Hindus fled from predominantly Muslim areas, and Muslims fled from Hindu

areas. Trainloads of desperate refugees of one faith were attacked and massacred by mem­bers of the other or were left stranded in the middle of deserts. Within a few months some 12 million people had abandoned their ances­tral homes and a half-million lay dead. In Jan­uary 1948 Gandhi died too, gunned down by an angry Hindu refugee.

After the sectarian massacres and flights of refugees, Muslims were a minority in all but one state ofIndia. That state was Kashmir, a strategically important region in the foot­hills of the Himalayas. India annexed Kash­mir because the local maharajah was Hindu and because the state held the headwaters of the rivers that irrigated millions of acres of farmland. Most inhabitants would have joined Pakistan if they had been allowed to vote on the matter. The annexation of Kash­mir turned India and Pakistan into bitter ene­mies that have fought several wars in the past half-century.

SECTION REVIEW

• Under British rule, India's population grew but remained divided by religion and caste.

• The British introduced certain modern technologies but discouraged Indian industry that might compete with British industry.

• British racial policies, brutality, and arrogance awakened a sense of nationhood among educated Indians.

• The Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim league demanded independence.

• Mahatma Gandhi led the independence movement using nonviolent tactics and turned an upper-class rebellion into one involving all of India.

• Nehru, Gandhi's successor, wanted to modernize India, and the Indian National Congress resisted British rule during World War II.

• When the British left India in 1947, it split into two nations amidst widespread riots and massacres between Hindus and Muslims.

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1900-1945 Of all the continents, Africa was the last to come under European rule (see Chapter 28). The first half of the twentieth century, the time when nationalist movements threatened European rule in Asia (see Diversity and Dominance: A Vietnamese Nationalist Denounces French Colonialism), was Africa's period of classic colonialism. After World War I Britain, France, Belgium, and South Africa divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Then in the 1930s Italy invaded Ethiopia. The colonial empires reached their peak shortly before World War II.

Colonial Africa: Economic and Social Changes Outside of Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa, few Europeans lived in Africa. In 1930 Nigeria, with a population of 20 million, was ruled by 386 British officials and by 8,000 policemen and mili­tary, of whom 150 were European. Yet even such a small presence stimulated deep social and economic changes.

The colonial powers had built railroads from coastal cities to mines and plantations in the interior to transport raw materials to the industrial world, but few Africans benefited from these changes. Colonial governments took lands from Africans and sold or leased them to European companies or to white settlers. Large European companies dominated wholesale commerce, while Indians, Greeks, and Syrians handled much of the retail trade.

Where land was divided into small farms, some Africans benefited from the boom. Farmers in the Gold Coast (now Ghana [GAH-nuhJ) profited from the high price of cocoa, as did palm-oil producers in Nigeria and coffee growers in East Africa. In most of Africa women played a major role in the retail trades, selling cloth, food. pots and pans, and other items in the markets. Many maintained their economic independence and kept their household finances separate from those of their husbands. following a custom that predated the colonial period.

For many Africans. however, economic development meant working in European-owned mines and plantations, often under compulsion. Colonial governments were eager to develop the resources of the territories under their control but would not pay wages high enough to attract

Sub-Saharan Africa, 1900-1945 829

Palm oil one of the most impor­

crops of West Africa. two farm women

workers. Instead, they used their police powers to force Africans to work under harsh conditions for little or no pay. In the 1920s, when the government of French Equatorial Africa decided to build a railroad from Brazzaville to the Atlantic coast, a distance of312 miles (502 kilometers), it drafted 127,000 men to carve a roadbed across mountains and through rain forests. For lack of food, clothing, and medical care, 20,000 of them died, an average of 64 deaths per mile of track.

Europeans prided themselves on bringing modern health care to Africa; yet before the 1930s other aspects of colonialism actually worsened public health. Migrants and soldiers spread syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and malaria_ Sleeping sickness and smallpox epidemics raged throughout Central Africa. In recruiting men to work, colonial governments also depleted rural areas of farmers needed to plant and harvest crops. Forced requisitions of food to feed the work­ers left the remaining populations undernourished and vulnerable to diseases. Not until the 1930s did colonial governments realize the negative consequences of their labor policies and begin to invest in agricultural development and health care for Africans.

In 1900 Ibadan (ee-BAH-dahn) in Nigeria was the only city in sub-Saharan Africa with more than 100,000 inhabitants; fifty years later, dozens of cities had reached that size. Africans migrated to cities because they offered hope of jobs and excitement and, for a few, the chance to become wealthy.

However, migrations damaged the family life of those involved, for almost all the migrants were men leaving women in the countryside to farm and raise children. Reflecting the colonial­ists' attitudes, cities built during the colonial period had racially segregated housing, clubs, res­taurants, hospitals, and other institutions. Patterns of racial discrimination were most rigid in the white-settler colonies of eastern and southern Africa.

Religious and Political Changes Traditional religious belief could not explain the dislocations that foreign rule, migrations, and sudden economic changes brought to the lives ofAfricans. Many therefore turned to Christian­ity or Islam.

Christianity was introduced into Africa by Western missionaries, except in Ethiopia, where it was indigenous. It was most successful in West and South Africa, where the European influ­ence was strongest. A major attraction of the Christian denominations was their mission schools, which taught both craft skills and basic literacy, providing access to employment as minor functionaries, teachers, and shopkeepers. These schools educated a new elite, many of whom learned not only skills and literacy but Western political ideas as well. Many Africans accepted Christianity enthusiastically, reading the suffering of their own peoples into the biblical stories of Moses and the parables of Jesus. The churches trained some of the brighter pupils to become catechists, teachers, and clergymen. Independent Christian churches associated Christian beliefs with radical ideas of racial equality and participation in politics.

Islam spread inland from the East African coast and southward from the Sahel (SAH-hel) through the influence and example of Arab and African merchants. Islam also emphasized

830

A Quranic School In Muslim countries. religious education is centered on learning to read, write, and recite the Quran, the sacred book of the Islamic religion. in the original Arabic. This picture shows boys in a Libyan madrasa (Quranic school) studying writing and religion.

832 _ CHAPTER 31

Blaise Diagne Senegalese political leader. He was the first African elected to the French National Assem­bly. During World War I, in exchange for promises to give French citizenship to Senegalese, he helped recruit Africans to serve in the French army. After the war, he led a movement to abolish forced labor in Africa.

lIII"'rli

SECTION REVIEW

Striving for Independence: India, Africa, and Latin America, 1900-1949

literacy-in Arabic rather than in a European language-and was less disruptive of traditional African customs such as polygamy.

In Dakar in Senegal and Cape Town in South Africa, small numbers of Africans could obtain secondary education. Even smaller numbers went on to college in Europe or America. Though few in number, they became the leaders of political movements. The contrast between the lib­eral ideas imparted by Western education and the realities of racial discrimination under colo­nial rule contributed to the rise of nationalism among educated Africans. In Senegal Blaise Diagne (dee-AH N -yu h) agitated for African participation in politics and fair treatment in the French army during World War I, and in the 1920s J. E. Casely Hayford began organizing a move­ment for greater autonomy in British West Africa. These nationalist movements were inspired by the ideas of Pan-Africanists from America such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who advocated the unity of African peoples around the world, as well as by European ideas of liberty and nationhood. To defend the interests of Africans, Western-educated lawyers and journalists in South Africa founded the African National Congress in 1912. Before World War II, however, these nationalist movements were small and had little influence.

The Second World War had a profound effect on the peoples of Africa, even those far removed from the theaters of war. The war brought hardships, such as increased forced labor, inflation, and requisitions of raw materials. Yet it also brought hope. During the campaign to

oust the Italians from Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie (H I-lee seh-lASS-ee) (r. 1930-1974) led his own troops into Addis Ababa, his capital, and

• Colonial rule developed Africa's economies atthe expense of its peoples' livelihoods and health.

reclaimed his title. A million Africans served as soldiers and carriers in Burma, North Africa, and Europe, where many became aware ofAfrica's role in helping the Allied war effort. They listened to Allied propaganda in favor of European liberation movements and against Nazi racism and returned

• Many Africans turned to Christianity or Islam; some, especially those who participated in World War II, began to demand independence.

to their countries with new and radical ideas.

MEXICO, ARGENTINA, AND BRAZIL, 1900-1949

African National Congress An organization dedicated to obtaining equal voting and civil rights for black inhabitants of South Africa. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Con­gress, it changed its name in 1923. Though it was banned and its leaders were jailed for many years, it eventually helped bring majority rule to South Africa.

Haile Selassie Emperor of Ethiopia (r. 1930-1974) and symbol of African indepen­dence. He fought the Italian invasion of his country in 1935 and regained his throne during World War II, when British forces expelled the Italians. He ruled Ethiopia as a traditional autocracy until he was overthrown in 1974.

Latin America achieved independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century but did not industrialize. Most Latin American republics, suffering from ideological divisions, unstable governments, and violent upheavals, traded their commodities for foreign manufac­tured goods and investments and became economically dependent on the United States and Great Britain. Their societies remained deeply split between wealthy landowners and desper­ately poor peasants.

Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina contained well over half of Latin America's land, population, and wealth, and their relations with other countries and their economies were quite similar. Mexico, however, underwent a traumatic social revolution, while Argentina and Brazil evolved more peaceably.

Background to Revolution: Mexico in 1910

At the beginning of the twentieth century Mexican society was divided into rich and poor and into persons of Spanish, Indian, and mixed ancestry. A few very wealthy families of Spanish ori­gin, less than 1 percent of the population, owned 85 percent of Mexico's land, mostly in huge haciendas (estates). A handful of American and British companies controlled most of Mexico's railroads, silver mines, plantations, and other productive enterprises. At the other end of the social scale were Indians, many of whom did not speak Spanish. Mestizos (mess-TEE.so), peo­ple of mixed Indian and European ancestry, were only slightly better off; most of them were peasants who worked on the haciendas or farmed small communal plots near their ancestral villages.

After independence in 1821 wealthy Mexican families and American companies used brib­ery and force to acquire millions of acres of good agricultural land from villages in southern

Decolonization and Nation Building 857

Despite recurrent predictions that multilingual India might break up into a number of lin­guistically homogeneous states, most Indians recognized that unity benefited everyone; and the country pursued a generally democratic and socialist line of development. Pakistan, in contrast, did break up. In 1971 the Bengali-speaking eastern section seceded to become the independent country of Bangladesh. During the fighting Indian military forces again struck against Pakistan. Despite their shared political heritage, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have found cooperation difficult and have pursued markedly different economic, political, religious, and social paths.

During the war the Japanese supported anti-British Indian nationalists as a way to weaken their enemy; they also encouraged the aspirations of nationalists in the countries they occupied in Southeast Asia. Many Asian nationalists sawJapanese victories over British, French, and Dutch colonial armies as a demonstration of the political and military capacities of Asian peoples. In the Dutch East Indies, Achmad Sukarno (1901-1970) cooperated with the Japanese in the hope that the Dutch, who had dominated the region economically since the seventeenth century, could be expelled. The Dutch finally negotiated withdrawal in 1949, and Sukarno became the dictator of the resource-rich but underdeveloped nation of Indonesia. He ruled until 1965, when a military coup ousted him and brutally eliminated the nation's once powerful communist party.

Britain granted independence to Burma (now Myanmar [my-ahn-MAR)) in 1948 and estab­lished the Malay Federation the same year. Singapore, once a member of the federation, became an independent city-state in 1965. In 1946 the United States kept its promise of postwar indepen­dence for the Philippine Islands but retained close economic ties and leases on military bases.

The Struggle for Independence in Africa Between 1952 and 1956 France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco, but it sought to retain Algeria. France had controlled this colony for nearly 150 years and had encouraged settle­ment; in 1950, 10 percent of the Algerian population was of French or other European origin. France also granted political rights to the settler population and asserted the fiction of Algeria's political and economic integration in the French nation. In reality few Algerians benefited from this arrangement, and most resented their continued colonial status.

The Vietnamese military victory over France in 1954 helped provoke a nationalist uprising in Algeria, during which both sides acted brutally. The Algerian revolutionary organization, the Front de Liberation National (FLN), was supported by Egypt and other Arab countries who sought the emancipation of all Arab peoples. French colonists considered the country theirs and fought to the bitter end. When Algeria finally won independence in 1962, a flood of angry colo­nists returned to France. Since few Arabs had received technical training, this departure under­mined the economy. Despite harsh feelings left by the war, Algeria retained close and seemingly indissoluble economic ties to France, and Algerians in large numbers emigrated to France to take low-level jobs.

Independence was achieved in most of sub-Saharan Africa through negotiation, not revolu­tion. In colonies with significant white settler minorities, however, the path to independence followed the violent experience of Algeria. African nationalists were forced to overcome many obstacles, but they were also able to take advantage of many consequential changes put in place during colonial rule. In the 1950s and 19608 world economic expansion and growing support for liberation overcame African worries about potential economic and political problems that might follow independence. Moreover, improvements in medical care and public health had led to rapid population growth in Africa, and the continent's young population embraced the idea of independence.

Western nationalist and egalitarian ideals also helped fuel resistance to colonialism. Most of the leaders of African independence movements were among the most westernized members of these societies. African veterans of Allied armies during World War II had exposure to Allied propaganda that emphasized ideas of popular sovereignty and self-determination. In addition, many leaders were recent graduates of educational institutions created by colonial governments, and a minority had obtained advanced education in Europe and the United States.

African nationalists were able to take advantage of other legacies of colonial rule as well. Schools, labor associations, and the colonial bureaucracy itself proved to be fertile national­ist recruiting centers. Languages introduced by colonial governments were useful in building multiethnic coalitions, while networks of roads and railroads built to promote colonial exports forged new national identities and a new political consciousness.

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Decolonization and Nation Building 859

Jomo Kenyatta Kenya's newly elected premier, Jomo Kenyatta, cheered by crowds in Nairobi in 1963. Kenyatta (waving ceremonial "wisk") had led the struggle to end British colonial rule in Kenya.

The young politicians who led the national­ist movements devoted their lives to ridding their homelands of foreign occupation. An example is Kwame Nkrumah (KWAH-mee nn-KROO­mUh) (1909-1972), who in 1957 became prime minister of Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast), the first British colony in West Africa to achieve inde­pendence. After graduating from a Catholic mis­sion school and a government teacher-training college, Nkrumah spent a decade studying phi­losophy and theology in the United States, where he absorbed ideas about black pride and inde­pendence propounded by W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey.

During a brief stay in Britain, Nkrumah :.0

8 joined Kenyan nationalist Iomo Kenyatta, a Ph.D. in anthropology, to found an organization

devoted to African freedom. In 1947 Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast to work for indepen­dence. The time was right. There was no longer strong public support in Britain for colonialism, and Britain's political leadership was not enthusiastic about investing resources to hold restive colonies. When Nkrumah's party won a decisive election victory in 1951, the British Gold Coast governor appointed him prime minister. Full independence came in 1957. Although Nkrumah remained an effective international spokesman for colonized peoples, he was overthrown in 1966 by a group of army officers.

Britain soon granted independence to its other West African colonies, including large and populous Nigeria in 1960. In some British colonies in eastern and southern Africa, how­ever, white settler opposition resisted independence. In Kenya a small but influential group of wealthy coffee planters claimed that a protest movement among the Kikuyu (kih-KOO-you) people was proof that Africans were not ready for self-government. The settlers called the move­ment "Mau Mau," a made-up name meant to evoke primitive savagery. When violence between settlers and anticolonial fighters escalated after 1952, British troops hunted down movement leaders and resettled the Kikuyu in fortified villages. They also declared a state of emergency, banned all African political protest, and imprisoned Kenyatta and other nationalists. Released in 1961, Kenyatta negotiated with the British to write a constitution for an independent Kenya, and in 1964 he was elected the first president. Kenyatta proved to be an effective, though auto­cratic, ruler, and Kenya benefited from greater stability and prosperity than Ghana and many other former colonies.

African leaders in the sub-Saharan French colonies were more reluctant than their coun­terparts in British colonies to call for full independence. Promises made in 1944 by the Free French movement of General Charles de Gaulle at a conference in Brazzaville, in French Equa­torial Africa, seemed to offer dramatic changes without independence. Dependent on the troops and supplies of French African colonies, de Gaulle had promised Africans a more democratic government, broader suffrage, and greater access to employment in the colonial government. He had also promised better education and health services and an end to many abuses in the colonial system. He had not promised independence, but the politics of postwar colonial self­government led in that direction.

Most Africans elected to office follOWing the reforms were trained civil servants. Because of the French policy of job rotation, they had typically served in a number of different colonies and

860 _ CHAPTER 32 The Cold War and Decolonization, 1945-1975

taJ PRIMARY SOURCE: ~ t_

It ~ Comments on Algeria, April 11, 1961 Read excerpts of a press conference held by Charles de Gaulle, in which he declares France's willingness to accept Algerian independence.

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Rivonia Trial

Speech to the Court Read how Nelson Mandela defended himself against charges of trea­son before an all-white South African court in 1964.

thus had a broad regional outlook. They realized that some colonies-such as Ivory Coast, with coffee and cacao exports, fishing, and hardwood forests-had good economic prospects, while others, such as landlocked, desert Niger, did not. Furthermore, they recognized the importance of French public investment in the region-a billion dollars between 1947 and 1956-and their own dependence on civil service salaries. As a result, they generally looked to achieve greater self-government incrementally.

When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in France in 1958, at the height of the Algerian \var, he warned that a rush to independence would have costs, saying: "One cannot conceive of both an independent territory and a France which continues to aid it." Ultimately, however, Afri­can patriotism prevailed in all ofFrance's West African and Equatorial African colonies. Guinea, under the dynamicleadership ofSekou Toure (SAY.koo too-RAY), gained full independence in 1958 and the others in 1960.

Independence in the Belgian Congo was chaotic and violent. Contending political and ethnic groups found external allies; some were supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union, while others were supported by the West or by business groups tied to the rich mines. Civil war, the introduc­tion of foreign mercenaries, and the rhetoric of Cold War confrontation roiled the waters and led to a heavy loss of life and great property destruction. In 1965 Mobuto Sese Seko seized power in a military coup that included the assassination ofPatrice Lumumba, the first prime minister. Mob­uto controlled one of the region's most corrupt governments until driven from power in 1997.

The opposition of European settlers delayed decolonization in southern Africa. While the set­tler minority tried to defend white supremacy, African-led liberation movements were committed to the creation of nonracial societies and majority rule. In the 19608 African guerrilla movements successfully fought to end Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique. Their efforts led to the overthrow ofthe antidemocratic government of Portugal in 1974 and independence the following year. After a ten-year fight, European settlers in the British colony ofSouthern Rhodesia accepted African majority rule in 1980. The new government changed the country's name to Zimbabwe, the name of a great stone city built by Africans long before the arrival of European settlers.

South Africa and neighboring Namibia remained in the hands of European minorities. The large white settler population of South Africa achieved effective independence in 1961 but kept the black and mixed-race majority in colonial-era subjection, separating the races in a system they called apartheid (a- PART-hite). Descendents of Dutch and English settlers made up 13 per­cent of the population but controlled the productive land, the industrial, mining, and commer­cial enterprises, and the government. Meanwhile, discrimination and segregation in housing, education, and employment confined the lives of people of mixed parentage (10 percent of the population) and South Asians (less than 3 percent).

Indigenous Africans, 74 percent of the population, were subjected to even stricter limita­tions on housing, freedom of movement, and access to jobs and public facilities. The government created fictional African "homelands" as a way of denying the African majority citizenship and political rights. Not unlike Amerindian reservations, these "homelands" were located in poor regions far from the more dynamic and prosperous urban and industrial areas. Overcrowded and lacking investment, they were impoverished and lacking in services and opportunities.

The African National Congress (ANC), formed in 1912, led opposition to apartheid (see Diversity and Dominance: Race and the Struggle for Justice in South Africa). After police fired on demonstrators in the African town ofSharpeville in 1960 and banned all peaceful political pro­test by Africans, a lawyer named Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) organized guerrilla resistance by the ANC. The government sentenced Mandela to life in prison in 1964 and persecuted the ANC, but it was unable to defeat the movement. Facing growing opposition internationally, South Africa freed Mandela from prison in 1990 and began the transition to majority rule (see Chapter 34).

The Quest for Econornic Freedorn in Latin America Although Latin America had achieved independence from colonial rule more than a hundred years earlier, European and American economic domination of the region created a semicolo­nial order (see Chapters 28 and 31). Foreigners controlled Chile's copper, Cuba's sugar, Colom­bia's coffee, and Guatemala's bananas, leading by the 1930s to growing support for economic nationalism. During the 19308 and 1940s populist political leaders experimented with programs that would constrain foreign investors or, alternatively, promote local efforts to industrialize (see discussion of Getulio Vargas and Juan Peron in Chapter 31).

884 _ CHAPTER 33 The End of the Cold War and the Challenge of Economic Development and Immigration

States, Britain, and France acted on behalf of NATO by launching an aerial war that forced the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo.

Progress and Conflict in Africa Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced political instability, military coups, civil wars, and con­flicts over resources since independence. It has also remained among the poorest regions in the world. Southern Africa, however, has seen democratic progress and a steady decline in armed conflicts since 1991. A key change came in South Africa in 1994, when long-time political pris­oner Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANe) won the first national elections in which the African majority could participate equally. Also hopeful has been the return to democracy of Nigeria, Africa's most populous state, after decades of military rulers. In 1999, after a succession of military governments, Nigerians elected President Olusegun Obasanjo (oh-LOO-she-gun oh-BAH-san-jo) (a former coup leader), and a 2003 vote renewed his term, despite serious voting irregularities. Similarly, in 2002 Kenyans voted out the party that had held power for thirty-nine years.

Africa was also a scene of ethnic cleansing. In 1994 the political leaders of the Central African nation of Rwanda incited Hutu people to massacre their Tutsi neighbors. Since the major powers had promised to intervene in genocides, they avoided using the word genocide to describe the slaughter. Without foreign intervention, the carnage claimed 750,000 lives with millions more refugees. Finally, the United States and other powers intervened and the United Nations set up a tribunal to try those responsible for the genocide. In 1998 violence spread from Rwanda to neighboring Congo, where growing opposition and ill health had forced President Joseph Mobutu from office after over three decades of dictatorial misrule. Various peacemaking attempts failed to restore order and by mid-2003 more than 3 million Congolese had died from disease, malnutrition, and injuries related to the fighting.

The Persian GulfWar The Persian Gulf War was the first significant conflict to occur after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Iraq's ruler, Saddam Husain, had borrowed a great deal of money from neighboring Kuwait and failed to get Kuwait's royal family to reduce this debt. He was also eager to control Kuwait's oil fields. Husain believed that the smaller and militarily

weaker nation could be quickly defeated, and he SECTION REVIEW suspected that the United States would not react.

The invasion occurred in August 1990. • The Cold War ended when growing unrest and criticism led to The United States decided to react. Saudi Ara­

the collapse of the Soviet Union and allied socialist nations. bia, an important ally of the United States and a Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies accelerated this process. major oil producer, also supported intervention.

With his intention to use force endorsed by the• The rise of ethnic nationalism led to war and genocide in United Nations and with many Islamic nationsYugoslavia. supporting military action, President George H. W.

• South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya escaped from oppressive Bush ordered an attack in early 1991. Iraq's military conditions, but hundreds of thousands losttheir lives in ethnic defeat was comprehensive, but Husain remained violence in Rwanda and Congo. in power, crushing an uprising just months follow­

ing his defeat. The United States imposed various• After Saddam Husain invaded Kuwait, the United States and its conditions on Iraq that kept tensions high, helpingallies defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War of 1990. create the conditions for a new war in 2003.

THE CHALLENGE OF POPULATION GROWTH

For most of human history governments viewed population growth as beneficial, a source of national wealth and power. Since the late eighteenth century, however, growing numbers of experts and politicians have viewed population increases with alarm, fearing that food sup­plies could not keep up with population growth. Late in the nineteenth century some social critics expressed concern that growing populations would lead to class and ethnic struggle. By