Demographic Decline
For those who extend the General Crisis outside Europe, one symptom is dramatic population decline. For example, with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty the population of China fell by approximately 50 million between 1600 and 1644, a decrease of over 30%. Likewise, Germany's population was reduced by approximately 15% to 30% in the Thirty Years War. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth also lost about a third of its population.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)