Population, migration & cities

Topics represented

British Empire (27) · Migration & diaspora (15) · Colonization & sovereignty (13) · Law & imperial government (13) · Población, migración y ciudades (11) · Resistance & colonized agency (9) · Decolonization & independence (8) · War & conquest (8) · Indigenous peoples & dispossession (7) · Self-government & Commonwealth (5) · Companies, trade & extraction (4) · Slavery & coerced labor (4)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 10000 BCE–c. 9500 BCE

   Natufian settlements and pre-agricultural sedentism

   Southern Levantine communities, including Ain Mallaha, built stone dwellings and repeatedly buried people in the same place before fully developed agriculture. Evidence for wild-cereal storage documents unusual territorial fixation among still hunter-gatherer populations; it does not establish a single or universal transition to sedentary life.

2. c. 9600 BCE

   Jericho: documented early continuous occupation

   Archaeological layers at Tell es-Sultan document occupation from about 9600 BCE. It is among the best-documented candidates for very early continuous human settlement; calling its earliest, probably few-hundred-person phases a “city” would be anachronistic.

3. c. 9500 BCE–c. 9000 BCE

   Göbekli Tepe: seasonal aggregation of dispersed population

   Göbekli Tepe’s monumental enclosures required temporarily coordinating more people than an isolated resident band could sustain. This entry records periodic gathering of dispersed groups, distinct from both permanent settlement and a nomadic band; it does not infer a precise attendance figure.

4. c. 7100 BCE–c. 6000 BCE

   Çatalhöyük: streetless urban density

   At its greatest extent, Çatalhöyük has estimates of roughly 5,000–8,000 inhabitants. Its contiguous houses, without streets between them and accessed from roofs, document a dense residential arrangement. The range comes from archaeological reconstruction, not a contemporary count.

5. c. 4000 BCE–c. 3100 BCE

   Uruk: large-scale city

   During the Uruk period, the settlement grew to several square kilometres and reached estimates of roughly 25,000–80,000 inhabitants. It is widely, though not unanimously, considered an early city in the full sense; the interval reflects different methods of reconstructing area and density, not a census.

6. c. 3400 BCE–c. 3200 BCE

   Proto-cuneiform tablets: resource and labour accounting

   The earliest proto-cuneiform tablets record rations and labour for categorised groups—such as temple personnel and textile workers—alongside grain and livestock. They are documentary precedent for labour-linked administrative counting, not a general census of inhabitants.

7. c. 3000 BCE–c. 1300

   Austronesian maritime dispersals across the Indo-Pacific

   Austronesian-speaking communities expanded over millennia through Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and as far as Madagascar. This broad period combines distinct migrations rather than one expedition and shows how vessels, environmental navigation, and cultural transmission connected more than half the planet.

8. c. 2900 BCE–c. 1700 BCE

   Old Kingdom Egyptian biennial “count”

   Royal annals record an official count performed roughly every two years and used to date regnal years. It appears to have counted chiefly cattle and resources; evidence does not confirm a systematic count of human population. It is included as an administrative antecedent, not as a confirmed modern census.

9. c. 2900 BCE–c. 2350 BCE

   Sumerian city-state urban system

   Regional studies of southern Mesopotamia make it possible to reconstruct a network of city-states—Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, and others—of very unequal size. The relevant fact here is the regional settlement hierarchy, not a political narrative of each city.

10. c. 2600 BCE–c. 1900 BCE

    Indus Valley planned urbanism

    Mohenjo-daro and Harappa show orthogonal layouts, standardised bricks, and household drainage connected to street networks. This entry records urban form and infrastructure, not markets or weights. City population estimates vary considerably, so no single figure is fixed.

11. c. 2589 BCE–c. 2504 BCE

    Worker mobilisation and housing at Giza

    Excavation of the worker settlement beside Giza documents bakeries, breweries, dormitories, and work crews. Estimates for the simultaneous workforce vary roughly from 20,000 to 40,000 people; they record mobilisation, housing, and provisioning, not the size of a permanent residential settlement.

12. c. 1600 BCE–c. 500 BCE

    Lapita expansion into Remote Oceania

    Lapita sites and pottery trace a rapid expansion from the Bismarck Archipelago toward Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Reaching islands separated by open sea required ocean knowledge, transported crops, and navigation that cannot be reduced to a single founding date.

13. c. 1200 BCE–c. 1150 BCE

    Late Bronze Age settlement abandonment

    Archaeological studies document abandonment of numerous settlements in mainland Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant within a few decades. Causes and the exact scale of regional depopulation remain debated: displacement, mortality, and fragmentation into smaller settlements are hypotheses that should not be reduced to one cause.

14. 1606–1607

    Virginia charter and the Jamestown settlement

    An investor company received a charter to colonize Virginia and founded Jamestown in Paspahegh territory within Tsenacomoco. Its early survival depended on exchange and conflict with the polity led by Powhatan

15. 1619

    Restricted representative government and captive Africans in Virginia

    A representative assembly of male colonists met at Jamestown as the first documented Africans arrived in English Virginia. The conjunction shows institutions for some growing alongside racial coercion and dispossession, although those Africans’ legal status was not yet identical to later hereditary chattel slavery

16. 1636–1638

    Pequot War and New England expansion

    English colonies and Indigenous allies fought the Pequot; the Mystic massacre and the enslavement and dispersal of survivors shattered their regional political power. The war opened land to colonial expansion, but the Pequot survived as a people

17. 1698–1700

    Failure of Scotland’s Darien colony

    The Company of Scotland attempted to establish “New Caledonia” on the Darién isthmus. Disease, poor planning, Spanish resistance, and the lack of English support destroyed the colony, and its financial losses weighed on union negotiations

18. 1788

    First Fleet and the beginning of Australia’s penal colony

    The First Fleet established a penal colony at Sydney Cove on Gadigal land after Britain lost North American convict destinations. Settlement began an expansion bringing disease, frontier violence, and dispossession, met by continuing Indigenous resistance

19. 1792

    Black Loyalists found Freetown under the Sierra Leone Company

    More than a thousand Black settlers from Nova Scotia reached Sierra Leone and founded Freetown through negotiation and conflict with Temne leaders and an abolitionist company. It was not a simple “return to Africa”: Loyalist migration, corporate colonization, Black aspirations for autonomy, and local African sovereignty intersected

20. 1834–1920

    The empire expands Indian indentured labour

    After emancipation, governments and planters moved more than a million workers, chiefly from India, to Mauritius, the Caribbean, Fiji, Natal, and elsewhere. Contracts promised wages and return, but recruitment, penal sanctions, and restricted mobility produced coercive conditions; diasporic communities transformed entire societies

21. 1845–1852

    The Great Famine transforms Ireland and the Atlantic

    Potato blight repeatedly destroyed the crop, but unequal landholding, dependence, and state policy magnified the catastrophe. Roughly one million died and another million emigrated—estimates rather than exact counts—accelerating depopulation, diaspora, and nationalism under Union government

22. 1867

    Confederation creates the Dominion of Canada

    The British North America Act federated Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick under the Crown. The new dominion gained broad settler self-government and soon extended authority west and north without general consent from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples

23. 1869–1870

    Louis Riel and the Métis form a provisional government

    The transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada, negotiated without its inhabitants, prompted Métis resistance at Red River. A provisional government led by Louis Riel negotiated the Manitoba Act, which promised land and language rights; defective implementation drove dispersal and renewed dispossession

24. 1899–1902

    The South African War combines guerrilla warfare and concentration camps

    Britain fought the Boer republics in a war over regional power and a mining-centered order. Against guerrillas it used scorched earth and confined Boer and African civilians in segregated camp systems; tens of thousands died, but African records are incomplete and totals require caution

25. 1901

    Australia federates and restricts non-white immigration

    Six colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia under the Crown. The same year the Immigration Restriction Act created the dictation test underpinning White Australia; settler self-government coexisted with migration exclusion and continued denial of First Nations sovereignty

26. 1922–1923

    The League approves the Mandate for Palestine

    The instrument incorporated the Balfour Declaration and charged Britain with facilitating the Jewish national home and developing self-governing institutions, alongside an obligation to safeguard all inhabitants. Tension between these duties and the absence of Palestinian consent structured mandate rule

27. 1936–1939

    The Arab Revolt challenges mandate, immigration, and dispossession

    A Palestinian general strike developed into insurgency against British rule and fears of displacement through Zionist immigration and land purchase. Britain used detention, demolition, collective punishment, and auxiliary forces; repression severely weakened Palestinian political capacity before 1948

28. 1942

    The fall of Singapore shatters the myth of invulnerability

    British, Indian, Australian, and local forces surrendered to Japan after the Malayan campaign. Japanese occupation was brutal for local communities, but the defeat also shattered claims of British military and racial superiority and transformed Southeast Asian nationalisms

29. 1947

    Independence arrives with Partition

    The Independence Act created the dominions of India and Pakistan while commissions chaired by Cyril Radcliffe divided Punjab and Bengal at great speed. Partition produced one of history’s largest mass migrations and communal, state and paramilitary violence; Imperial War Museums places disputed death estimates between 200,000 and one million

30. 1947–1948

    UN partition, mandate’s end, Israel, and Nakba

    The UN recommended partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an internationalized Jerusalem. Britain ended the mandate on 14 May 1948 without implementing an agreed transition; Israel’s creation and war accompanied the flight and expulsion of roughly 750,000 Palestinians, a widely used estimate rather than an exact count