Britain, France and Germany dealt with their booming population in the 19thC largely by industrialisation. Britain supplemented this with emigration and France with a revolution that changed agrarian patterns into a martial one. South and West of Germany William H. McNeill identifies the inability of industrialisation to "keep pace with population growth." McNeill argues that this political fault line or area of 'acute political distress' manifested itself in the Hapsburg Empire and the Balkans. It was the assassination of a Hapsburg Prince by a Slavic political revolutionary that started the mechanics of what would be World War I. (more)
