This book, written in Japanese, was compiled from a series of the author's published papers on population in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. It consists of seven chapters. The Smallness of Population in Southeast Asia; Population Growth; Births and Deaths; Colonization and Settling Down; Cities and Migrants; Sparse Population Distribution and Small States; and Continuity and Discontinuity. Tsubouchi presents a demographic examination of information related directly or indirectly to population growth from different parts of Southeast Asia, including remote villages and major cities. Besides evaluating the classical data on population collected by Raffles for all Java and by Crawfurd for Yogyakarta, both during the 1810s, he develops interesting demographic interpretations of genealogy, changing patterns of agricultural land use, colonization of river deltas, urban ethnic compositions, and others. The main theme of the book is the various steps toward population growth in the region during the last century, starting the generally sparsely populated situations of the early period. The author's central interest seems to lie in understanding the fundamental characteristics of population growth in premodern Southeast Asia. And his book has successfully built up a basis for future research in this field.
