During the seventeenth century, the population of Europe remained roughly the same. The complete devastation wrought in Central Europe by the armies of the Thirty Years’ War was one contributing factor, as were general famine, plague, and religious persecution.

The time period in question concerns the British Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, which led to a marked increase in Europe’s population in a relatively short period of time. Because the British Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions began in England and spread initially around Western Europe, the population growth was particularly dramatic in this part of the continent at first.

The French nobility of this time period had been dramatically weakened by the cost of fighting a long series of wars against the English. The finances of many members of the aristocracy were completely exhausted, so as the French kings consolidated power and centralized authority, they began to include the bourgeoise in the political process for the first time. The French rulers did this to keep power out of the hands of the nobility and also to raise funds from the bourgeoise, but the inclusion of the middle class in the affairs of government would have profound implications for the development of French political society.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) was fought by most of the powers of Europe at the time, but the vast majority of the actual fighting was done on German territory. The war featured horrific battles, deliberate massacres and genocides, famine, disease, and rampant destruction for three decades. By the time the Peace of Westphalia brought the conflict to an end, the population and economy of the German territories were devastated. The population fell by over a third, and by some historians estimates Germany did not recover until the twentieth century.

The relevant fact to know here is that the seventeenth century coincided with the Golden Age of French history: the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV. The French population at this time was close to twenty million, more than twice as much as England, Sweden, and the Netherlands and comfortably more than Spain. Roughly a quarter of Europe’s population lived in France during the seventeenth century.

The nineteenth century coincides with the Industrial Revolution, when the urban centers of Northern and Western Europe were exploding with productivity and relative opportunity. Vast numbers of people migrated from their longstanding homes in the rural countryside to urban areas and cities like London, Hamburg, Manchester, Glasgow, and Rotterdam.

The population of Europe grew dramatically during the Baby Boomer generation (generally thought to last from 1946 to 1965) that followed the end of World War Two; however, declining birth rates caused by the increasing availability of contraception and women entering the workforce in vast numbers have meant that Europe’s population has stagnated recently and in some places begun falling. Over the period of time from 1950 to 2000, the population of Europe grew slightly, but now appears to be beginning to decline.

England was a relatively small and insignificant island nation at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Dwarfed by Spain's colonial and continental power and massively eclipsed in population and wealth by France, the English population was a little less than four million, at a time when Spain’s population approached ten million and France’s exceeded fifteen million. England would dramatically grow in significance over the next two hundred years.

At their height, the Huguenots represented approximately ten percent of the French population. The Huguenots were French Calvinists and were routinely persecuted by the state, which was rigidly Catholic. The Huguenots' great influence came from the fact that they were disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy and the burgeoning middle class.

The population of Europe accelerated spectacularly in the eighteenth century in what is commonly referred to as the Agricultural Revolution, and sometimes called the British Agricultural Revolution to distinguish it from the much earlier Mesopotamian Agricultural Revolution. The introduction of foods from the New World improved nutrition, as did advances in agricultural science and biology. The abandonment of the “open field” system, which was replaced by the “enclosure” system, made agricultural work far more efficient. In addition, the almost complete eradication of the plague meant that far fewer people were dying of disease. All of the listed answer choices contributed to population growth in the eighteenth century, except for better sanitation in hospitals. This advancement would have to wait until the nineteenth century and the work of reformers like Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale.