Britain, France and Germany dealt with their booming population in the 19thC largely by industrialisation. Britain supplemented this with emigration and France with a revolution that changed agrarian patterns into a martial one. South and West of Germany William H. McNeill identifies the inability of industrialisation to "keep pace with population growth." McNeill argues that this political fault line or area of 'acute political distress' manifested itself in the Hapsburg Empire and the Balkans. It was the assassination of a Hapsburg Prince by a Slavic political revolutionary that started the mechanics of what would be World War I.
McNeill writes:
Consequently, the most acute manifestations of political distress appeared within the borders of the Hapsburg and ex-Ottomoman empires (Russia's Polish provinces belong in this category too.) Overseas emigration, though very great, was insufficient to relieve the problem. Youths who pursued secondary education in hope of qualifying for white collar employment were strategically situated to communicate revolutionary political ideas to their frustrated contemporaries in villages. They did so with marked success, beginning as early as the 1870s in Bulgaria and Serbia, and at somewhat later dates in other parts of eastern Europe. The Balkans, accordingly, became the powder keg of Europe. It was appropriate indeed that the spark that triggered WWI was struck by Gavrilo Princep, a youth whose efforts at pursuing a secondary school education had entirely failed to provide him with satisfactory access to adult life but had imbued him with an intense, revolutionary form of nationalism.I argued in the past that the disturbances in the Middle East are more a function of over population than culture or religion. Population growth in the Middle East is faster than the ability of globalisation and emigration to absorb it. It is striking how many parallels there are to the 19thC Balkans and the 21stC Middle East; over-population, a revolutionary educated class of youth, and the limits of globalisation's economic homogeneity (actually globalisation is more recognition of economic heterogeneity). The Middle East is definitely the modern day region under-going 'acute political distress'.
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