This chapter explores whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, it examines the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. This chapter analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources, including media reports, human rights records, data on violence and displacement collected by nongovernmental organizations, and interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that were conducted in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. The findings question the common characterization of state-induced displacement in Syria as ethno-sectarian cleansing and challenge the notion that these tactics have been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change. The regime induced displacement to separate and differentiate the loyal from the disloyal, improve the “legibility” of local communities, and extract much-needed revenues, military recruits, and symbolic benefits from the population – showing that strategies of depopulation can also exhibit the sorting logic of strategic displacement, similar to strategies of forced relocation.

The first part of this chapter distinguishes war-related displacement from other types of population movements, including displacement due to communal violence, state repression, development, and natural disasters. It then unpacks the “black box” of war-related displacement by distinguishing between “collateral” displacement, “opportunistic” displacement, and “strategic” displacement. It then disaggregates strategic displacement into three subtypes – cleansing, depopulation, and forced relocation – and shows that they vary in orientation, targeting, and intended duration. The second part of the chapter introduces a new dataset on population displacement strategies in 166 civil wars from 1945 to 2017. It describes the relative frequency of these strategies across conflicts and over time and how they vary by perpetrator and types of civil wars. The dataset serves both descriptive and explanatory purposes. It shows that strategic displacement has been much more common in civil wars than previously thought and reveals important patterns in how, where, and when these strategies have been employed, which can be leveraged to explain why they occur.

The invasion of Mesoamerica – set off by the arrival of Cortés and his followers – was neither peaceful nor simple. These events played out in three phases between February 10, 1519 when the expedition left Cuba and August 13, 1521 when the Mexica tlatoani, Cuauhtemoc, was captured. During the first phase, Moteuczoma and Spaniards sought to learn about each other. Each used diplomacy, Moteuczoma to repel the Spanish, Cortés to gain indigenous allies, to affect events. The second phase of the Spanish-Mexica war began with the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan and their imprisonment of Moteuczoma shortly thereafter. That phase ended with Spaniards forced to retreat after their disastrous assault on the Templo Mayor and slaughter of many Mexica leaders. Re-equipping and solidifying his alliances, Cortés and his fighters succeeded in defeating the Mexica in mid-August, 1521. Many kinds of transformations would follow including extensive depopulation and the introduction of new technologies and religious beliefs. Adjustments by Nahuas followed in social and legal affairs as well as in forms of identity. The idea of “Aztec” has tenaciously survived. It exists in contemporary Nahua communities, as an element of national history and culture in Mexico, and as a transnational idea.

This chapter provides an institutional variant of the model studied in the previous chapter, where the key variable driving the economy's latent dynamics is the quality of institutions. This chapter also analyses, using that framework, the interactions between economic development, institutional changes and inequalities.

Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

This chapter analyzes the implementation of a plan the crown approved in August 1604 to depopulate by force the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola by destroying the existing villages and relocating their population to newly erected villages around Santo Domingo. The depopulations of Hispaniola were an attempt by the crown to impose order on a colony that in the previous two decades had been perceived as increasingly disorderly from the perspective of its extremely active contraband trade, but also from a social and religious perspective. Even though smuggling might have been the cause of the increasingly frequent alarms that reached Madrid during these years, the perception of religious and political impropriety, and the risks that these posed to the presumed religious purity and loyalty of Spanish vassals on the island might have been just as important (or arguably even more so) in spurring the Council of the Indies to action. This narrative, however, was fiercely challenged by the Hispaniola elites, who exculpated themselves of all wrongdoing while blaming any and all questionable behavior on landless peasants, whom they accused of leading all the smuggling efforts.