Readings on population and army size?

[Sean Manning]

Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Penguin, 1978) has some handy figures from early censi but I would ignore their estimates of ancient populations. They have curious conclusions...

Theirs is the lowest count I know of, 44 million for the entire Roman Empire, but since they are also about the only ones who provide a breakdown by province, their figures are still used. Recently, Maddison has used them for calculating comparative wealth, with surprising results: Income and population distribution: Europe, Asia, Africa

Maddison's Contours of World Economy, 2007, pp. 32ff. offers a fairly detailed, yet concise discussion of Roman demography related to economic performance.

Yes, one reason that makes this so difficult is that estimates of population are tied into the question whether the Roman empire was an advanced preindustrial economy like Song China or 18th century England, or poor but showy due to greedy elites and a habit of working in stone and pottery. That is a hard debate too, but I note that Scheidel accepted Ian Morris' conclusions about the Iron Age economic boom in Greece in the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World. But Morris' conclusions about the rate of growth depend on the current chronology of the Early Iron Age being right, and it is rather shaky at present. So its all about interlocking systems of assumptions not all of which people spell out ...

I can't give much credence to any study which works on the basis of ancient figures in McEvedy and Jones. Their estimate for the Greek population of Anatolia in 400 BCE is ten times smaller than Mogens Hansen suggests, and its not based on much more than Pompey's boasts and the implicit assumption that population should rise exponentially from prehistory to 1800 ...