Geography and Demography

Summary

Sizes

An atlas of material life in a pre-industrial setting can best begin with providing basic information with regard to the natural environment in which people lived. Let us begin with information on the sizes of the entities we will discuss. The globe in its entirety measures 510 million sq. km. Just under 150 million sq. km consist of land. Europe, including Russia west of the Urals, measures roughly 10.5 million sq. km and Asia roughly 44.5 million sq. km. The following maps show the size of the entities that play a (major) role in our descriptions. (See Maps 1-1/1-5.) Maps of the Mughal and the Ottoman Empires have been added to provide an idea of relative size. (See Maps 1-6/1-7.) All maps are on the same scale.

The immense size of Qing China is striking. Many of its provinces were the size of major European countries. For those provinces we refer to the map on page 277.

For the sizes of the United Kingdom and its components and of the Dutch Republic/The Netherlands see Table 1-1 on page 20. Tokugawa Japan, which comprised only the three big islands Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku, and a string of tiny islands, measured about 285,000 sq. km. The fourth major island, which became known as Hokkaido, would become part of the country only after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Map 1-8 shows how tiny the United Kingdom, the Dutch Republic and Tokugawa Japan were as compared to the big empires shown, on the same scale, on Maps 1-2/1-7.

Actually, the United Kingdom, the Dutch Republic and Tokugawa Japan were all so-called ‘composite states’, i.e. states composed of separate territories with often different rights, regulations, institutions and ways of control by the centre. (See Maps 1-9/1-11.) The Qing Empire, as an empire, to a certain extent was also a composite polity, in which territories that were incorporated later on might have specific arrangements. (See for its aggrandising over time Map 8-15.) For the constituent parts of the United Kingdom see Map 1-9. England and Wales together formed Britain since the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542. England, Wales and Scotland formed Great Britain since the Act of Union of 1707.