how did Malthusian trap work on islands in South Pacific?

Factual Questions
1

a small island where people depend on tropical wild fruit for a chunk of their diet sounds like a place that can get population beyond sustainable limit pretty quickly. And even if they can expand fishing industry “infinitely”, eventually nearby fisheries would be overtaxed, so everybody would have to sail bigger distances and become generally unhappy.

Those armchair musings aside, how did this actually work for Polynesians and whatever other groups on the Pacific islands? Was their population balanced by huge infant mortality? Or did they in fact have classical Malthusian population booms and war and epidemics based busts?

By way of tangentially related question, what sort of wars did they have over there, if any?

2

I can’t speak to the rest of the Pacific, but Easter Island is a case made famous by Jared Diamond. Extremely isolated, there was no habitable land within thousands of miles of it. Once it was settled, the people there were completely dependent on the island and it’s surrounding waters. Based on archeology, the island has been lushly wooded before the arrival of settlers. Supposedly a tipping point was reached when the island was deforested to the point that there weren’t trees large enough to build a decent dugout canoe. IIRC, the settlers were unusual in that they did not have hogs, which not only would have provided food but might have harbored disease organisms which would have limited the human population before it could overexpand beyond the island’s carrying capacity.

3

The Polynesians have been agricultural people far longer than the English. With a couple of tiny exceptions they were less dependent on wild fruit than the English. Just because someone lives outside Europe doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to be successful farmers.

The only Polynesian group that I know of that was entirely dependent on wild resources were the Mori Ori and some of the other New of New Zealanders of south. Of course the reasons why they were dependent on wild foods was because they were well outside the tropics so their crops wouldn’t grow. So naturally they never saw much tropical wild fruit, or any tropical fruit at all.

New Zealand itself was temporarily as you describe. When people first arrived the prey was so numerous and so naive that they could feed themselves without resource to agriculture. As a result all domestic animals except dogs and several domestic plants were allowed to become extinct. After a period of between 200 and 500 years the prey had been exterminated and at the time of European discovery the population had crashed, probably to less than 20% of its peak, and people in the North were struggling to cultivate tropical crops such as sweet potato, while people in the south were cultivating bracken to try to survive. Warfare was constant and territorial defence fierce, with frequent raids being carried out to obtain human flesh, since this and dogs were the only source of readily available protein remaining. SO in the case of the NZ Moari there had definitely been a period of exponential increase followed by a crash, but that was as a result of colonisation of new lands and quite unrelated to normal practice. The same seems to have occurred when people entered Northern Europe, Australia. Madagascar and the Americas as well.

There are some groups of people in various tropical locales who do derive a great deal of their food from wild resources. Most of them, like the inhabitants of the Amazon, are still agriculturalists and their population density is limited ultimately by agricultural yield. However in practical terms warfare and murder accounts for a massive number of deaths. Homicide is the most likely way for young men to die in these societies. This seems to be caused by year-round food production devaluing co-operative social systems and placing a premium on military and sexual aggression.

A few are hunter-gatherers, and their population is limited exactly as is the population if every hunter-gatherer group, chiefly infanticide with a small portion of starvation. Living in the tropics or the arctic doesn’t make much difference to those practices. Resources are limited and can’t be bolstered and are unpredictable. Population has to be kept below median carrying capacity.

Try to keep in mind that Polynesia is much larger than Europe, and much more diverse. Your question is akin to asking what kind of wars people had in neolithic Europe: it ranged from cavalry battles to bands of ten hunter gathers throwing stone axes at each other, right? Well Polyneisa was the same.

The North Isalnd of NZ was the most extreme in terms of warfare, with everybody on the living within or near walled towns with a central fort, raids being conducted against neighbouring tribes every few weeks, battles and sieges lasting for days and wars being fought for anything up to two months at a time, all casualties and captives being either enslaved or eaten, often both. Imagine something between Mad Max and the worst of Medieval Europe and you’ve probably got a pretty good view of North Island warfare.

In many of the smaller islands warfare was often ritualised. One of the islands groups, I can’t remember where, the men would attempt to burst into the enemy village by surprise. If they did so the enemy warriors were expected to stand back and yell defiance, but actual physical aggression at that point was
bad form. The raiders then took what they could before the enemy could regroup and sailed off. If the enemy could form up a large enough force to surround them then they had to give it back. If the enemy spotted them before they got to the village they had to go home. There were also the standard war games that most cultures had for young men to prove themselves. While real wars and real raids occurred they seem to have been rare.

The most extreme example of passive people were the Mori Ori who lived on an island group just off New Zealand. There were HGs who appeared to practice no warfare at all and had no concept of it. Europeans took a msall group of Maori to the islands, and they promptly killed and ate or enslaved then entire population, which outnumbered them at least 10 to one and had the same technology level. It was even more bizarre than the conquest of the Aztecs.

And of course you had anything in between those tow extremes. Generally speaking the Polynesians were a pretty warlike people, but most people are.

4

Jared Diamond covers quite a few examples in greater Polynesia in one of his books.

5

I’ve seen documentaries on Hawaii. The battles and killings between Polynesian groups was pretty shocking. As the OP suggested it was largely based on sustainable resources. The killings and wars kept the population levels in check. This was long before the Europeans showed up.

6

I wouldn’t say it was made famous by diamond. Most people who had any interest in these things were well aware of Easter’s history before Diamond wrote his interpretation of it. And most people who aren’t interested probably don’t read Diamond.

The interesting thing about Easter is that there is no evidence at all that this had anything to do with population. In fact deforestation occured most rapidly well *after *the population peaked, a point that Diamond for some reason failed to mention. As far as anyone can tell, deforestation was primarily carried out for religious reasons.

It seems to have been a cycle, where a popultaion decline, probably caused initially by soil depletion, caused a population decline leading to religious fervour leading to deforestation leading to a shortage of food leading to population decline and increased religious fervour.

People are funny creatures.

Of course this overloooks two facts

Firstly that the settlers of NZ had both dogs and chickens and hence, presumably, pigs. They let them die out because there was far too much food available to make it worthwhile to keep them. The dogs of course survived because they also had far too much food available. There’s no reason to assume the Easter Islanders didn’t also have pigs. Why bother to feed pigs when you can walk up and kill a wild seal any time you want one?

Secondly the Easter Islanders had both rats and chickens as sources of disease. I don’t what population limiting disease pigs might have carried that can’t be readily contracted from chickens and rats. In reality such an isolated island wasn’t going to be routinely exposed to novel zoonoses, except perhaps influenza from seabirds, which would spread to both chickens and people. I can;t imagine where these population controlling pig zoonoses would originate.

7

However in direct contradiction of the OP it had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the availability of wild foods. Hawaiians were accomplished farmers.

Wars everywhere are fought over resources. Very few wars are ever fought over wild food resources.

8

this is not directly related to OP, but nevertheless. So, were basically all South Pacific island peoples outside New Zealand farmers + fishers, as opposed to gatherers + fishers? Me mentioning Polynesians is probably too specific since there are other groups like Micronesians or Melanesians or whatever.

And why exactly did Europeans think that these islands were “tropical paradise”? Did they find some odd non agriculturalist group or did they figure that the South Pacific agriculture is a lot less labor intensive than European one?

9

As with every other culture in the agricultural world, yes.

It varied with environment of course. Inland peoples couldn’t fish effectively and were more dependent on foraging/hunting. Even in coastal areas people still hunted birds and other game and they still collected wild foods. But once again, this is identical to the pattern in the rest of the world. People in Europe or China or North America also obtained a significant portion of their diet from wild foods prior to the industrial revolution.

If wild food is available, people don’t just ignore it completely because they have crops.

They were basically the same as the Polynesians. The vast majority were agriculturalists, with some tiny isolated pockets of HGs in NG and a few very remote islands.

A few reasons.

Firstly it’s the tropics. If you’re a barefoot sailor who had been living in Europe at the tail end of the Little Ice Age you’[d think it was pretty damn nice too, just because the weather wasn’t able to kill you half of every year. As uncomfortable as a tropical summer maybe, it’s never fatal to a healthy person. The same can not be said of a London spring at the same time, much less the winters where healthy people froze to death because they left for home too late in the afternoon.

A lot of it is based on the Tahitian island group, helped by some very romantic depictions in literature. The natives of Tahiti did have very liberal sexual mores when it came to foreigners and a tradition of hospitality to anyone who wasn’t a declared enemy.

So sailors could get plenty or really mind blowing sex. After 12 months at sea such places would seem pretty heavenly to most men.

Added to that in Tahiti the natives were initially pretty damn friendly, providing free food and drink to travellers. The European travellers then acted like pigs, but custom dictated that they be given what they wanted. Of course Europeans never saw the amount of work that went into providing the food and clothes they were given so freely, so they kind of assumed it was a land of plenty where anything anybody wanted was available with minimal work. It wasn’t true, but that’s how it appeared.

In later years the introduction of European diseases, especially venereal diseases, had decimated a lot of populations. The surviving population had resettled in the most productive land, so life really was easier for a period. The same of course was true for much Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death, with former serfs wandering the countryside and taking up residence in the best lands and living a fairly pleasant life, or at they would have if the nobility had allowed them. Of course once the population reached carrying capacity again life became a grind.

I can’t think of any examples anywhere in the world of where Europeans made contact with HG groups and were particularly impressed by their lifestyle.

10

Is that just because populations living on wild food resources are so scattered (i.e. non-dense) that their fights are just ‘tribal skirmishes’ rather than ‘wars’? Because I’m pretty sure hunter-gatherers fought over wild food resources.

11

It’s not that, it’s rather that wild food per se is not all that rare and is rarely limiting. HGs were all in a state of perpetual warfare, but the wars were over territory, payback for past crimes and sundry other reasons. Even the territorial wars were fought primarily over resources such as shelter and especially water, rather than over food.

Humans, like any other animals, will really only fight over resources that are limiting on reproduction, and food rarely meets that criteria for humans. Because HGs, with one exception, had no technology to store food, they were forced to maintain their population at the carrying capacity of the worst year in 20. That worst year in 20 was invariably brought on by unusual conditions such as severe drought, prolonged winter etc., and during such periods food simply isn’t to be had by anyone in any nearby territory. So the practical upshot was that HGs rarely fought wars over food, because in average years food was abundant due to low population, and in bad years everybody in all the neighbouring territories were starving as well. It was only after people started storing food for the dry season and winter that it became profitable to fight wars over food.

It’s actually kind of hard to imagine a situation where HGS could fight over food. The only thing I can imagine is if somehow an adjacent groups had absolutely no access to the coast, which might provide food resources during drought or bad winters. But it’s kind of hard to imagine how such a boundary arrangement could occur in the first place.