"ImagiNations - Need Population density sources" Topic

While working on my ImagiNations map and gazetteer, I realized my intended scale is too small by far and that I need to make some adjustments.

I also want to have reasonable populations to support the military forces in the region.

Thus, I need a source for population densities of European states in the 18th century, should such even exist.

Ideally, there would be some kind of encyclopedic tome containing such things.

As I am battling a migraine today, my time looking at a computer screen is rather limited.

Could a knowledgeable person please point out any known sources of such information as I need?

In "With Eagles to Glory", Gill gives population and treaty obligation contingents for the members of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1809. I could send that list to you, and you could index it against a map to get approximate density figures. (Also, as a simple rule of thumb, a country can support a standing military equivalent to 1% of population.)

This is a game, correct? Awfully deep.

@Peachy Rex, if you don't mind, that list would be great. My copy of Gill is in storage, buried in boxes of books.

As far as percent of population, are you talking about modern era, horse and musket, or overall? The French had about 2.5% of its population in uniform on the eve of WWI, this grew, drastically, over the course of the war.

I am more looking at Prussia of 1748 as a model, highly militarized, as the top end of things.

@nnascati, I am working on the background of a game world, yes. However, I want to get things to where they seem to fit, as opposed to required a suspension of disbelief for all aspects.

All #s in thousands
Bavaria 3,231 & 30
Wurttemberg 1,211 & 12
Baden 924 & 8
Berg 931 & 7
Hesse-Darmstadt 541 & 4
Frankfurt 170 & 1.68
Nassau 272 & 1.68
Hohenzollern-Hechingen 14 & .097
H-Sigmaringen 36 & .193
Salm-Salm 30 & .323
S-Kyrburg 19 & (with above)
Isenburg-Birstein 43 & .35
Aremberg 58.6 & .379
Liechenstein 5 & .04
Hohengeroldseck 4.5 & .029
Wurzburg 285 & 2
Saxony 1,987 & 20
Saxe-Weimar 109 & .8
S-Gotha 180 & 1.1
S-Meiningen 48 & .3
S-Hildburghausen 33 & .2
S-Koburg 59 & .4
Anhalt-Bernburg 35 & .24
A-Dessau 53 & .35
A-Kothen 28.8 & .210
Schwarzburg-Sondershausen 45 & .325
S-Rudolstadt 52 & .325
Waldeck 47.8 & .4
Lippe-Detmold 70.5 & .5
Schaumburg-Lippe 20 & .15
Reuss 82 & .45
Westphalia 1,942 & 25
Mecklenburg-Strelitz 70 & .4
M-Schwerin 328.6 & 1.9
Oldenburg 159.5 & .8

There are innumerable confounding factors, of course. Size definitely helps, as you can see from the Rheinbund list – the kingdoms & Grand duchies are right around 1% (and their armies are mostly a little bigger than their assessments), while the dwarf states mostly run .5-.8%. And situation matters – how dangerous is the international picture, how willing is the population to sacrifice, how hard can the government squeeze, etc. But 1% is about what can be maintained long-term without any particular trouble politically or economically. An armed camp like Prussia can absolutely do better… but there's going to be a cost *somewhere* in terms of lowered productivity, higher repression, shaky finances and so forth.

I'm with Peachy rex on this. I think you're piling a lot of unnecessary work on yourself. Remember that at NO time in the 18th century was population really a factor as a "field" form which soldiers could be harvested. Prussia for example had the highest number of soldiers to population than any other European state, but a huge proportion of them were mercenaries. That is individuals recruited across Europe for the Prussian regiments. Many were not Prussian. A quick turn in Duffy's Instrument of War about the Austrian army shows a huge foreign element, as does the "Army of France at the time of the Duc De Choiseul." Also, in all states there were exempted classes for people who had to stay on the farm and produce food and stay in the shops to produce everything else.

But if that's what you like doing then bash on.

Otto

I hadn't really been thinking about the mercenary angle on this, but that's absolutely a way to goose the numbers. The key "problem" with a soldier is that he's non-productive in an economic sense – he's strictly a consumer. But at least with foreigners you're not sacrificing a productive worker when you stick a guy in uniform. As Louis XIV said, hiring a mercenary meant one more soldier for France, one fewer soldier for the enemy, and one more Frenchman for productive work. (And, he could have added, one more Frenchman who would live long enough to reproduce.)

Another major confounding factor in the 18th century is subsidies and "state mercenaries", so to speak. You can support a much bigger army than "normal" if someone else is footing the bill. And if your soldiers are also all mercenaries in the usual sense…

(None of this is to say that it isn't worthwhile to reality-proof your setting, because it absolutely is – imaginations with impossible militaries are something of a sore spot with me. It's just that you're in a time and place where the connection between population size and military size is much fuzzier than usual.)

Dear Peachy Rex

Agreed, agreed, agreed. All of the monarchs, even the alleged incompetents were no fools when it came to knowing who it was who made the food and tooled the goods to make life pleasant with. They might have been absolutist monarchs but they all depended on a nobility whose people they were going to purloin in case of war and the aristocracy didn't like it at all as they were the first to feel the loss of such people as the local blacksmith, corn factor or guy who bangs the tin into pots and pans.

Mercenaries or "natives" they all had to be paid and there was a very real finite limit as to how much money you got from your estates. If you got subsidies from another one had the luxury like he Hessians or Brunswickers of renting your soldiers out to get a little extra cash, but as event he rulers of these mercenary minded states learned, the money they got never went far enough especially when the mercenaries rented OUT came BACK. There was often far fewer of them and those that did get back were human wrecks and the whole regiment would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Second the finances of 18th century states were virtually universal in one item, it was deficit spending and borrowing from money lenders to finance anything at extortionate rates. Only ONE sovereign I have ever met so far could finance a war "out of pocket" and that was Frederick William I, Frederick the Greats father who often did not make war, but when it came the one or two times that he let his precious soldiers to fight it, it was financed by barrels of specie in his wine cellars. This huge treasury Frederick spent by the second year of the First Silesian War, and it was go-a-begging and credit from then on. In a real sense then the number of men your state could provide with soldiers was never even close to those who could serve, and the sovereign was beholden to the loan sharks (often the Jews) to finance his wars. The end of war came most often not because they were running out of men, but because no one would loan them money at any rate of interest even at the fantastical rates of 30 to 60%.

One other counter-productive factor was the eagerness that most of the monarchs, high and low wanted to convert these mercenaries to "natives" by offering grants of land for farming or emoluments for trade/ Apparently event he well populated states like France had a lot of empty land around they would dearly love to see populated and made productive. Once the merecenary too the bargain the sovereigns were extremely unwilling to dip in and put him back in uniform. So were the local authorities. When for example in Prussia the recruitment quotas had to be filled, the local junkers in the "draft boards" emptied the prisons and scoured the highways and byways for the beggars, outlaws, vagrants, and barely fit (and even some of the congenitally unfit would up sent to wear the gloried coat of blue. It's only human nature. no one's going to take someone who's a productive member of the state, an aid to the local countryside and so forth. There was a case in Bohemia where the local authorities would not let one peasant be drafted because if he went to the army, it was said, his wife would go with him and the wife was an excellent midwife and the only one around within a days ride.

Quite often the recruit would be sent off with several scrolls and letters around his neck asking him to be let off from duty because some skill or the other that he possessed. Quite often he would be sent back several days later with an "excused duty" scrawled on the letter by the Sovereign themselves around his neck.

I agree with you on impossible militaries.

Most people get into Imaginations to try and make "killer" armies.

I got over that by the use of "strategic units." Strategic units are two in number, armies, and brigades. Armies however are not made up of brigades, nor can they break down into brigades. they are simply two clumps of units, one large (an army has 25 table top units and 10 officers and a brigade 7 table top units and three officers. In any battle you can have only two strategic units. The legal combinations are.

A brigade, two brigades, one army, one army and one brigade.

There is only ONE type of army and all armies are identical across countries. There are about 9 types of brigade, infantry, elite, cavalry, artillery, wagon, and so forth, but all brigades in type are identical across all armies.

All table top units are identical across all armies. Thus a grenadier unit in Brobdignag is identical to one in Lillliput, and so forth.

Thus there can't be a killer army as all are in essence equal at most points. The only difference can be when say an army faces an army and a brigade, or an army and an Elite Brigade Face an Army and a Cavalry brigade.

This saves tremendously on record keeping.

I appreciate the information and feedback. Especially, the transcription of the numbers from Gill.

I intend to have the armies easily tracked, and will abstract most of the tedious processes and calculations that go along with the logistics tails of armies. I've already created a detailed system for logistics, but it would only be useful if the system were coded into an app. I am not about to do it all by hand.

I will have mercenary units, but these will act similarly to the condottiere or Swiss units. Otherwise, recruitment of mercenaries within a nation's own units is abstracted into the army building mechanism under the Maurice rules.

My record keeping is going to be relatively simple, it's all on an excel sheet, with pertinent information being transferred to army rosters when someone else helps out with fighting a battle.

I am already adapting your strategic unit system, Otto. I am now working on a way that I can generate the location of battles, including the distribution of strategic units for attacker and defender.

Ultimately, as I progress the story, each spring I will roll a die or a number of dice, which will determine if there is to be a war, if so between whom, which level of war it will be (these I have a brief description on my blog at link ), what allies they can call upon for assistance, and what the consequences of success or failure in the war will entail. Maurice already provides a way to determine if a war in a campaign will end, and and I am going to modify that for my purposes.

I am merely looking to create the foundation of a campaign where the first reaction from a reader of the stories, battle reports, and national information is "this sounds interesting," as opposed to "this doesn't sound right at all."