South-East Asian Population History and the Colonial Impact

Abstract Southeast Asia’s population history as usually represented is marked by very low growth and low population densities until the late eighteenth century, and by very rapid growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its challenge to conventional demographic transition theory is not so much the timing of the upturn in population, since it occurred at about the same time as that in Europe, as its scale and its cause. Until the revisionist writings of the 1960s and subsequently it was believed that the Javanese population had grown by 2.2 per cent a year in the nineteenth century, and even the latest revisions have not been able to get that rate down below about 1.4 per cent (Boomgaard, 1989: 1, 202). A marked reduction appeared to have taken place in mortality without any substantial rise in standards of living.