I can’t help thinking that any talk of the agricultural carrying capacity of Australia is a bit of a furphy. Australia right now is a net food exporter. The figure that’s bandied around, eg here is that we can feed about 60 million people on our current agricultural output - though obviously there are questions about long-term sustainability. I really doubt that “because we couldn’t feed them” is any sort of answer to “why don’t we have more people”
I suspect the answer is a combination of “because this is the population the growth rates we chose have lead to” and “just wait another forty years and see”. The actual nation of Australia has only existed a hundred and fifteen years, and we’ve been growing at a pretty fast clip for all that time, and are still doing so (faster than the US)
If you stop where you are, and let us keep going, on current growth rates we’ll catch you in (quick calculation) a couple of hundred years. Not that I think it would necessarily be a good idea to have 300 million people in the country. About a third of that would not be entirely insane though
Obviously, history played a large part. Looking at some quick stats from the Net, it looks like the population of the original 13 colonies really exploded in the 18th century.
In 1700, the population was 250,000 and was doubling every 25 years. By 1775, the population was 2.5 million.
The colonialists had large families, ate better than the common folk back in Britain, paid less in taxes and had more opportunities. With plenty of natural resources, there were many jobs in areas such as ship building in addition to farms.
Australia was just too far away, and Canada didn’t have the same critical mass in that same period. As others have noted, it didn’t have the same amount of farm land which fueled the growth in the 13 colonies, and the French really didn’t try to build it up.
Namibia is between the two. And for the same reasons: there are large portions of the country (e.g., the Skeleton Coast and the Namib Desert) where no one lives.
In Canada, aboriginal inhabitation varied wildly with geography and climate, just as you would expect. The west coast was inhabited by complex societies complete with impressive monumental art and villages with populations in the thousands; similarly, the fertile areas of the St. Lawrence and southern Ontario had complex societies with agricultural villages (though depopulated by plagues and war by the time Europeans showed up - for example, the Iroquois massacred the Huron and sent the survivors fleeing into what is now Quebec).
In contrast, the harsh northern interior was populated by bands of hunter-gatherers, very much less complex in society, not living in large villages, and not possessing a complex monumental art tradition - as they were mostly semi or fully nomadic. Population density was, naturally, a lot lower than in the places agriculture was the norm.
Down south in the US, some chieftainships approached early-state status, and some native cities grew to great size (pre-Columbian Cahokia in what is now Illinois, for example, was the largest city to have ever existed in North America north of Mexico until Philadelphia surpassed it in population, some time after the Revolution).
Places like Cahokia simply cannot be compared with (say) bands of Algonkians living a hunting/fishing/gathering lifestyle in the Canadian Shield country. They are both “native American”, but are quite unlike in every way that matters.
Canada has winter.
There are vast portions of the United States where people do not understand that going outside without the right clothing can leave you dead.
To go through a year in Canada you need to devote a lot more resources to basic necessities such as not freezing to death.
You also need to realize that as a northern country, a big chunk of that land you see on a map stays cold even in summer, and the ground is permanently locked in ice (permafrost).
The tradeoff is that Canada has water. Lots and lots of fresh water.
I think the Canadian Shield is probably a bigger problem for building up population density in what is now Ontario and Quebec than mere cold (though cold is a factor).
The problem is that it affects areas far to the south of permafrost-land.
Southern Ontario and Quebec has high population densities - as high as the US. What prevents it spreading northwards in the same way as the south is not mere cold, but geography.
The shied is bad for populations, not only because of lack of soil for agriculture, but also because it is just incredibly rugged and intractable. Want to build a road? You are faced with multiple lumps of bedrock to be blasted through, interspersed with multiple swamps to be filled in - for hundreds of miles.
The shield contains pockets of good soil covering bedrock, and where they exist, you find lots of people living.
I thought the answer to the OP was the huge quantities of immigrants that came to the US. Although folks migrated to or were exiled to Oz and Canada, the US was the destination of choice to a much greater degree for Europeans from the east and Asians from the west.
But that’s just what I’ve heard. I could be wrong.
Many of these answers seem to take it for granted that people think about the potential for population to expand when it’s time to get busy. Which conjures up the image of your lusty Canadian wench saying “Not tonight, honey. I’m ovulating and you know the taiga won’t support enough agriculture for additional population.”
I know that wild animals will limit their population growth according to the availability of food supplies, but generally human beings seem to breed somewhat indiscriminately, my cite being that the world population has just about tripled in the past 70 years. Even if there was no room for population expansion, it still doesn’t explain why, Toronto, for example, doesn’t have the population density of Hong Kong or Mumbai.
Well, yeah, but why? Before central air conditioning there was no reason anyone with options would want to live in much of the southern US. So you’d think that just as many people would go to Canada.
I think the answer is the Erie Canal. It made New York the most important port in North America overnight. Until then, most shipping went through Canada because it could be transhipped.
As for Australia, it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s not hard to guess why people didn’t want to go there really.
I’m sure 19th century migration is responsible for a great deal of US population growth. But large numbers of people immigrated to Quebec and English Canada too. One of the things I’m curious about is whether Canada and Australia had more restrictive immigration quotas at the time when the US would take just about anyone (as long as they were white) or whether it was just a simple matter of the US having more opportunity to attract larger numbers.
Canada strongly encouraged immigration from Europe once the CPR was built. Settlement on the Prairies exploded from 1890 to 1914. It gets back to my earlier comment, and Malthus’s similar comment: the route for expansion to western Canada was through the Shield, north of the Great Lakes. To do that, you needed a railway. You can’t have a pattern of generational leap-frogging settlements.
Immigration to the west was a key part of Macdonald’s National Policy: high tariffs to foster Canadian industry; a transcontinental railway to hold the new country together; and loads of settlement out west to firmly keep it in Canadian control and out of the hands of the grasping Yankees.
Just as a for instance, look at the population graph for Saskatchewan between 1901 and 1911: the provincial population almost quintupled in 10 years, from around 90,000 to close to 500,000. That was immigration, not natural reproduction.
This makes a huge difference in settlement. Most of Australia has “old soil” with a lot of the nutrients weathered out. The US has very large areas of fairly new soil that is reasonably to very fertile. Combine that with many of these areas being near rivers that can be dammed to provide water and you have a huge amount of farmland available.
The US had so much that they essentially gave most of it away via the Homestead act and similar programs. (Both of my grandfathers got cheap, newly irrigated land due to being WWI vets.) This attracted a lot of immigrants.
In doing genealogy, I have found many people who seem to have been serial homesteaders. Starting in Ohio and continuing west, moving at least a couple times per generation. Selling off the old homestead to go on to the next one.
Australia had no need to open the door to massive waves of immigrant farmers and such once the choice land on the coasts was taken.
Canada also had a homestead programme, modelled on the US.: a free quarter section of land to anyone who settled on it and farmed it, with an option to buy another quarter cheaply. That’s how my great-grandparents got started, and Mrs Piper’s grand-parents.
