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The Conclusion argues that the origins of Athenian dependence on imported grain date to the reforms of Solon in the early sixth century. It was at this time that Athens discovered or adapted the cleruchy as a social and economic tool, that the Athenian elite became involved in leading the city's first imperialist adventures overseas, and that Attica began to specialize in the intensive cultivation of cash‐crops. The Athenian democracy led to the intensification of all of these trends, and to the creation of an ideological system, deployed in rhetoric, to mask the serious incongruities between popular and elite interests. A need for imported grain drove Athens at different times to depopulate neighboring Aegean landscapes in order to extract grain surpluses, or to enlist the help of foreign kings, acting as Athenian citizens and benefactors. A supply system of such ruthlessness, sophistication, and ambivalence lay at the heart of Athenian democracy.

This chapter briefly discusses the history of malaria in the Maremma, the coastal region of Tuscany, in antiquity, with particular reference to Graviscae, the port of Tarquinia — the first locality in respect of which a contemporary ancient source (Cato the Elder) provides evidence for the presence of endemic malaria in the 2nd century BC. Tiberius Gracchus’ observations of depopulation and the replacement of the original population by imported slave labour are related to the spread of malaria.

This chapter studies malaria in the countryside around Rome, the Roman Campagna. It considers the interaction between malaria and the agricultural system of Latium in the past, in which animal husbandry was largely separated from agriculture by the practice of seasonal transhumance, which removed the animals (possible alternate prey for mosquitoes) from the lowlands in summer, the peak season for malaria. The relationship to malaria of the system of large estates, latifundia, is also discussed, as well as the effects of malaria on the distribution of viticulture and on other crops. The evidence of field surveys for depopulation in the Roman Campagna in antiquity is mentioned, and the increasing use of slave labour in the villa-based agricultural economy of the Roman Campagna is related to the diffusion of malaria, particularly in the vicinity of Setia.

This chapter tells of the destruction brought by the European contact with Pacific islanders. It explains that the case of Polynesian depopulation offers a particularly revealing case study of how the civilizing mission took shape in the first decades of the Third Republic. It also notes of the depopulation in late-nineteenth-century France and the Pacific. It also suggests that in France, missionaries were viewed as the imperfect solution for Republicans. It also narrates Paul Gaugin's experience as a witness to a failed mission. It tells that in almost every French possession and protectorate, the ministry met some resistance.

This chapter shows another equally important reason for the Liberals' faltering rural support during 1886-1899: their abandonment, on a national level, of the language of rural reform that had helped them win victory in 1885.The first two sections briefly discuss the reasons for the Liberals' neglect of rural questions after 1885, and the alienating impact that this neglect had on voters in the counties. The remaining sections focus on the topics that dominated county politics in the absence of a compelling national agenda: agricultural depression and village depopulation in the predominantly agrarian constituencies, and the concerns of industrial labour in such semi-urbanized divisions as Holmfirth. The chapter argues that, in the constituencies where the Liberals retained significant public support, their popularity was usually brought by the efforts of a single Liberal candidate or MP who played an active role in promoting reforms of local significance.

This chapter takes the house as a prism to shed light on the transformation of the intimate topographies of belonging, care, and the material world in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina resulting from the “postsocialist” and “postwar” junctures. Ethnographically and historically grounded, this chapter shows how for village Muslims the house is first and foremost a container of hi/stories, trails of past lives, materialization of care across generations, materials of religious experience, and bundles of relations and exchanges that are enacted with and through them. These elements of intimate relations and belonging constitute the ground of one’s life. Yet this is a ground that is nowadays profoundly shifting for many villagers. In the postsocialist, postwar years, many families have been driven away from their houses due to ongoing economic marginalization, long-term unemployment, and heavy indebtedness. The story of the house in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina thus bears witness to the scale and pervasiveness of the push factors, and corrosive effects of the neoliberal restructuring on rural communities in the world today.

Chapter five moves from ethnography at the village level to examine the demographics of declining fertility and rural depopulation plaguing many affluent nations. A failure of generational renewal threatens the well-being of individuals, communities and societies. With the story of a child who is the last child in his remote Italian village, the author illustrates the critical importance of children to each other and to their communities. After introducing demographic concepts such as birth rate and replacement rate, total fertility rate and replacement rate fertility, the book discusses the low birth rate crisis in Italy where the population is declining at an unsustainable rate. It examines factors affecting birth rates, including adolescent fertility rate, mother’s marital status, percentage of women in the workforce, and gendered division of domestic labour. In comparison with Italy, US birth rates have been relatively robust; however, after the Great Recession US birth rates declined steadily and are now well below replacement rate. The chapter closes with discussion of the interplay between politics and demographics, including rules on birth right citizenship, the role of immigration in rejuvenating populations, and the misuse of demographic data to fuel anti-immigrant, sectarian, and racial conflict.

This chapter describes the cycles of aggregation and dissolution of the largest villages in the VEP study area. Because these villages were often central nodes among a number of smaller settlements and contained civic-ceremonial architecture used for large gatherings, these villages have been termed “community centers.” We assess how the location, types of civic-ceremonial architecture, and association with agricultural land changed over time for these villages. A detailed history of the development and abandonment of community centers provides important context for understanding the differences between the two periods of out-migration that occurred during the occupation of the study area.

This chapter examines the history of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It discusses the Young Turks' Revolution, the extirpation of the Muslims, and the depopulation of the Empire due to military losses during the Balkan Wars. The chapter describes how Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro took advantage of the turbulence in Istanbul to launch a combined attack on what was left of the Ottoman domain in southeastern Europe.

Low-frequency climate records, available from pollen depositional sequences, provide an important adjunct to the high-frequency paleoclimate records provided by tree-ring research. Resampling of Beef Pasture, a subalpine fen located at 3,060 m asl along the western flank of the La Plata Mountains, 25 km northwest of Durango, Colorado, resulted in a new paleoclimate record derived from 71 pollen samples chronologically anchored by 16 14C samples beginning about 200 BC.Various proxies (ponderosa pine/spruce ratios for temperature and sedge/cheno-am ratios for winter precipitation) show that temperatures and winter precipitation below their long-term means prevailed from about AD 800 to 1000, and from the early AD 1200s until about 1400. These two declines coincide with the two episodes of depopulation of the VEP area.

We present a new approach for quantitatively modeling drinking water suppliesin the central Mesa Verde region from AD 600 to 1300. We developed regional and site-specific conceptual models of the ground- and surface-water systems and quantitatively characterized the modern and paleohydrologic system using parameter-estimation techniques and mathematical modeling. The result is a quantitativeestimateof spring discharges associated with the groundwater system over definable periods of time. Important paleoprecipitation cycles at 6.25 and 12.5 years are identified, coinciding closely with 6- to 10-year cycles published for the southwestern United States. The complete depopulation of the central Mesa Verde region by the end of the thirteenth century does not appear to have been caused by a decline in drinking water supplies, due either toannual variability in precipitation or lower-frequencyvariability on the order of 6 to 12 years. We can calculate a rough upper bound of 5 km on how far the average household would have had to go for water by the population peak, though given the rearrangement of households to be close to water in the mid-AD 1200s, the actual average distance was probably much lower.

Comparison between the real and simulated settlement distributions allows us to assess the goodness-of-fit between them. Since our agents optimize their locations, this is also a measure of the extent to which the real households optimized their locations, which we call “settlement efficiency.” Settlement efficiency tends to peak at the end of each population cycle, as households were leaving the area. We also develop methods for determining which combinations of parameters maximize the goodness-of-fit as that changes through time. This reveals two distinct settlement regimes, separated at AD 1060.

This chapter recounts how Maine's once-great mills lost jobs as the 1990s and 2000s wore on, and demonstrates how frequent layoffs hollowed out once-great institutions and ways of life. It mentions the historic Westbrook Mill, which contracted from over two thousand jobs to only several hundred in the early 2000s and the Great Northern Paper Company's employment at three mills, which shrank by two-thirds over the same period. It also talks about historic mills that hung on after 2000 as private equity companies swooped in and bought the mills using highly leveraged sources of credit. The chapter cites the well-established influx of paper imports from advanced mills subsidized by governments and the shrinking markets for publication papers as the digital reading became widespread. It elaborates how the loss of the well-paid source of rural employment sparked a progressive depopulation of rural towns in Maine.

This chapter explores the connections between Britain's food system and global violence. It first examines famines in Ireland and India, arguing that such famines were used as tools for economic and political transformation, and, in the case of Ireland, of deliberate depopulation and nutritional transition. The second part of the chapter shows how Britain's outsourcing of food production (particularly grain) created a novel panic around food security around 1900. However, rather than changing course, Britain entered World War One heavily dependent on imports, and used its naval power to effectively blockade Germany, resulting in generalized food crisis across central Europe. Britain's food system was equally successful in World War Two. These studies show how the British food system was adaptable, resilient, and murderous.

This chapter illustrates how the author came to Kansas to seek answers for how to bring a rural town back to life. Like much of the region known as the “Big Empty,” portions of central and western Kansas are experiencing such profound depopulation that they have taken a page from the Homestead Act and begun to offer free land to a new generation of hoped-for homesteaders. The youth out-migration problem there is so pernicious and long-standing that it has now been battled by multiple generations. As far back as 1966, editors at the state's leading newspapers, including the Lawrence Daily Journal-World, owned the problem by name in a column entitled “Our Brain Drain.” Forty-some years later, in 2008, the same story was told by NPR's Noah Adams. The author met up with the good folks of Tescott, Kansas, population approximately three hundred, whose creative city burghers have offered free land to families willing to build a home on the city-owned lots next to the K–12 school the town has fought to keep.

A new phenomenon where there is less concern for the downward trajectories of many rural economies is becoming evident in Britain and its sister states as well as in other parts of the world. In the rapidly urbanising and developing world, rural depopulation has been seen as the inevitable correlate of national economic progress. For many of these countries, there is an unspoken acceptance of rural areas as ‘backward’. In the advanced economies, where counter-urbanisation has been the norm for the last four decades, low-wage rural populations have experienced two sorts of problem — differential capacity for economic growth with the decline of fragile areas; and dual economies, where locals's buying power is outstripped by that of commuters or in-migrants. This chapter looks at the economic base of the rural housing question. The central argument of this chapter is that perspectives on current rural housing systems are linked with the fate of rural economies and views on the purposes of Britain's countrysides.

This chapter is an examination of Indigenous responses to changes in the administration of Indian affairs in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands during the Mexican period. This period was characterized by steady erosion of the mission system, the rupturing of the colonial pact, and the eventual Jesuit Expulsion. While Hopis had minimal contacts with independent Mexico, Yaquis once again revolted in defence of political autonomy, this time under the complicated leadership of Juan Banderas. O’odhams endured chaotic decades of drought, frontier warfare, and administrative changes that resulted in significant mission depopulation and the decline of the town electoral model, although not its complete disappearance. This chapter demonstrates that these three Indigenous nations confronted the electoral-political upheavals of the Mexican period in distinct ways that ensured their survival as sovereign peoples.

London appears to have shrunk significantly in the Antonine period, although the evidence remains contested. A major concern has been expressed over whether bioturbation and disturbance has removed the evidence of slightly built timber structures, leaving us with an exaggerated idea of the scale of contraction. This chapter looks to the detail of this evidence, including the formation of a dark-earth horizon that may mark the conversion of abandoned buildings to urban wastelands, to conclude that 57 per cent of sites show evidence of contraction that cannot be accounted for by later disturbance. It is consequently estimated that London’s population may have reduced from over 30,000 to under 20,000. Depopulation was perhaps hastened by an evacuation of the military garrison from the Cripplegate fort, and is reflected in reduced settlement densities in London’s rural hinterland and the cessation of some industrial production. There were no signs of this contraction before c. AD 165, but little evidence of routine urban maintenance in the following decades. Factors that might have contributed to London’s depopulation are considered. One of the most important may have been urban flight and manpower shortages following the epidemic known as the plague of Galens. Anxiety over the effects of this plague is attested by an amulet inscribed with a magical phylactery from the Thames foreshore, and the popularity of a London cult of Apollo the archer. The potential importance of such a pandemic to the changed mentalities of later antiquity is considered.

This chapter examines how farming families in Broome County experienced and adapted to the transformation of the region's agriculture and rural economy. In the early twentieth century, the rural economy of Broome County was transformed by two interconnected socioeconomic trends: a structural shift toward more specialized, larger-scale agriculture and an emerging pattern in which families combined farming with wage-earning. In what is commonly termed part-time farming, families sent some members to work off the farm—a practice known as off-farm labor—while the rest conducted a range of small-scale subsistence and market-oriented operations on the land. This chapter first provides an overview of the rural depopulation and economic decline in Broome County during the twentieth century before discussing the county's changing rural economy as well as the connections between class position and the utilization of family labor. It shows that class position corresponded with distinctly different patterns of intergenerational and gender relations in rural families.