Exporting 55 million people drove the rise of the West

Evidence

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history. In centuries past, differential growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental policies have produced massive migrations by Greeks, Jews, Germanic tribes, Norse, Turks, Russians, Chinese, and others. In some instances these movements were relatively peaceful, in others quite violent. Nineteenth-century Europeans were, however, the master race at demographic invasion. Between 1821 and 1924, approximately 55 million Europeans migrated overseas, 34 million of them to the United States. Westerners conquered and at times obliterated other peoples, explored and settled less densely populated lands. The export of people was perhaps the single most important dimension of the rise of the West between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to larger demographic power arguments in contemporary geopolitics (e.g., declining Western fertility vs. Youth Bulge in the Islamic world and Africa) that Huntington develops next.
• SEED: An essay angle: framing Western emigration as ‘demographic invasion’ reframes colonization as a demographics-driven process rather than a purely economic or ideological one — a lens applicable to modern migration debates.