Population is highly relevant to war between neighbors, particularly conscript war. But is it relevant to colonization? Over the past half century the relative population of Congo to Belgium increased by a factor of 5. A factor of 5 makes a difference in a single battle, but on the scale of a colonization project where a handful of people take over a large territory, it is nothing. At most it would require scaling down ambition by a factor of 5. Wikipedia claims that the colonial population increased by 2 orders of magnitude from 1900 to 1960, while native population did not change. The factor of 100 with no obvious cause is the big story and the factor of 5 historically irrelevant. Belgium did not lose control because the colony became too large to control, for the population grew only after independence. Perhaps it gave up because the colonial population was 1% of the metropolitan population, a real expense, but that was the result of how it governed the colony, not a necessary consequence of relative populations.
The past really was different. The ability of a thousand Belgians to control the whole of the Congo is shocking. Social technologies change much faster than populations.
Population is highly relevant to war between neighbors, particularly conscript war. But is it relevant to colonization? Over the past half century the relative population of Congo to Belgium increased by a factor of 5. A factor of 5 makes a difference in a single battle, but on the scale of a colonization project where a handful of people take over a large territory, it is nothing. At most it would require scaling down ambition by a factor of 5. Wikipedia claims that the colonial population increased by 2 orders of magnitude from 1900 to 1960, while native population did not change. The factor of 100 with no obvious cause is the big story and the factor of 5 historically irrelevant. Belgium did not lose control because the colony became too large to control, for the population grew only after independence. Perhaps it gave up because the colonial population was 1% of the metropolitan population, a real expense, but that was the result of how it governed the colony, not a necessary consequence of relative populations.
The past really was different. The ability of a thousand Belgians to control the whole of the Congo is shocking. Social technologies change much faster than populations.