Presentation

The number of people is one of the most basic information about any society. Rulers have tried to know it for taxing or drafting their subjects since 4000 years BC and scholars have started to guesstimate the total world population since the 17th century. In more recent years, historical demographers have produced series of population by country painstakingly collecting and, when necessary correcting, official data and any available information. Unfortunately, many of their results have not trickled down in data-sets which are most commonly used in quantitative historical analysis (Guinnaine 2021). The scientific data-bases by McEvedy-Jones 1978 and Maddison 1995 do not take into account more recent work and provide only benchmarks for most countries, while on-line data-bases, such as Gapminder, build on the same data-bases to build yearly series with hardly transparent method.