Culture contacts and population growth.

Abstract

The population growth of native peoples is an inevitable result of European cultural incursion. The expansion of Europe carries in its wake a disruption of the balance of numbers in non-European societies. The populations, especially of preliterate peoples, tend to be transformed from relatively stationary, near optimal numbers to aggregates which follow the Malthusian law of the increasing pressure of numbers on the food supply. The disequilibrium thus created is apparently neither guided nor restrained by the motives, expectations, and plans of either the cultural invader or the culturally invaded. It seems rather to follow from impersonal forces which weaken population checks and stimulate population growth.