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THE HUMAN TIDE

How population shaped the modern world.

by Paul Morland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019

Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike.

The world is changing, dramatically and in large part because of shifts in population.

University of London demographer Morland ( Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict , 2014) considers population dynamics as a driving force in historical change—not just at the macro level, but in the lives of individuals. As he notes, only a few generations have passed since 1-in-6 British children died before their first birthdays, whereas “today, just over a century later, only one child in three hundred born in England does not reach the age of one.” At the same time, sub-Saharan African nations whose birth rates had once leveled off have grown in population but not in economic opportunity, propelling a wave of migrants northward to a Europe whose Indigenous populations have been steadily shrinking—in Italy, for example, by a projected 20 percent by the end of the century. This reiterates a historical trend in which exploding European populations led to migrations to the Americas and Australia, and even if European and European-descended—and especially British—peoples remain politically and economically more powerful than the rest of the world, “they have significantly retreated as an ethnic group within their own states .” Other nations have experienced patterns of growth and decline: Japan, for instance, whose population is rapidly falling, and Russia, which had a comparatively huge population in late czarist times but became the first state in the world to legalize abortion in the Soviet era—only to retract it in 1935, when “Stalin declared ‘man the most precious resource.’ ” Today, Putin’s Russia faces a decline in ethnic Russians. Demography is not necessarily destiny, but the trends Morland identifies are suggestive of broad political changes to come, including the prospect that a grayer world may also mean a greener one: “Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void.”

Pub Date: March 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5417-8836-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

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Review: The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland — 11 billion reasons why population size matters

The idea of history having a “motor” ceased to be fashionable after the fall of Marxism. After reading The Human Tide it is tempting to want to replace the rusty, broken-down motor of the class struggle with a shiny new turbo-charged machine called demography.

Paul Morland is too subtle a writer to claim that demography is destiny. However, over 300 closely argued pages he more or less persuades us that it is — that most significant events since 1800, from the Industrial Revolution, via the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eruption of the Arab Spring, have the growth, shrinkage or movement of populations at their heart.

This speed of demographic change is one of the defining features of

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Book Review: ‘The Human Tide’ – Paul Morland

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World , Paul Morland, John Murray (Publishers), London, 2019

Everybody has an opinion on the whys and wherefores of global demography – the trends and mathematics of fertility, mortality and mobility. That’s why the late Hans Rosling did us a great favour with his stunning and accessible videos which referenced the data, and causal factors. While Rosling’s videos mention watershed events and innovations as precursors of change, Dr Morland of Birkbeck College at the University of London goes much deeper.

He starts with the big social, industrial, economic and military factors, and the mathematics and momentum of the “demographic equation” whereby much of the future is already “baked in.” Economics, technology and organisation play their role, but also more autonomous cultural factors, such as “herd” decision-making, and policies toward migration and population growth. In Australia we can recall Peter Costello’s weak joke in response to the ageing of the population – “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”. Yet demography is only part – not all – of destiny because of contingencies: ‘people move’.

What’s the connection with refugees? Instead of wars between states, the dominant form since 1945 has been civil wars (a problematic term ), where ethnic or religious groups are locked in bitter struggles for control of territory or polity, and these are often repeated not resolved. So central government resettlement policies to influence local demography can promote the political marginalisation or diminution of identity of subordinate groups, which creates refugees. Examples include “transmigrasi” of landless peasants from Java and outer islands to Papua in Indonesia,  land transfers in the Tamil majority region of Sri Lanka to Sinhalese relocated from the south, and annexation of areas of the Palestinian territories by Israel which put Christians to flight as well as Muslims.

The latter situation is discussed in some detail, including relative procreation rates as a security and political factor in dominance.. Where citizenship and voting rights are an entitlement, the loss of a Jewish majority might explain Israel’s reluctance (up until now) to incorporate all parts of the Occupied Territories. Another demographic factor with political consequences is the ageing of the Palestinian population, suggesting a future with fewer young, disempowered men, the cohort most likely to fight back. The rest of the book is an account of the historical role of demography in place, Part Two being about Europe, and Part Three about Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. This effectively becomes a detailed “history of the world”, which I don’t opine on, but he provides a dense and integrated story, combining source material from many disciplines. There are short technical appendices on how life expectancy and Total Fertility Rates are calculated.

The book is presented as essentially a history not a policy guide, although he declares two operating principles as important. First, that we should regard the preservation and enhancement of the lives of others as being as important as our own, and second, that “when women have control over their own fertility, they collectively make wise decisions, with or without input from their male partners.”

But what about the future?  there is little speculation in this book about climate change or future wars and conflicts. In Australia, the drivers of forced migration have received recent attention, as well as the refugee effects of climate change . In the latter case, some advocates warn that this is counterproductive , having little effect on politicians but likely to increase the population’s fear of refugees. His predictions are for a world which is more “grey” (older), more “green” (with more sustainable population and resource-use) and “less white” (both globally and inside North America, Europe and Australia). He expects the relative increase of the sub-saharan African population (from ten percent of the world in 1950 to about a quarter in 2100) will propel their wider mobility after a tipping point of increased prosperity. Conventional wisdom believes investment in poor countries will reduce emigration by creating local jobs, but research suggests circumstances where an enabled and larger middle class will become footloose. Again, ‘people move.’

Kevin Bain reviews refugee books at  Independent Australia , and has compiled a Reading Guide for  Mornington Peninsula Human Rights  Group .

About Author/s

Kevin Bain is a retired economic analyst and university teacher.

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• Journal of Economic Literature
• December 2021
• The Human Tide: A Review Essay

The Human Tide : A Review Essay

• Timothy W. Guinnane
• Article Information

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JEL Classification

• N30 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: General, International, or Comparative

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The Human Tide

How Population Shaped the Modern World

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By Paul Morland

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 5, 2019. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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• Social Science
• "An illuminating perspective on the history and likely future of population trends." STARRED REVIEW,BOOKLIST
• "Morland's real skill is linking economic, political, military and cultural trends to the demographic story...lucid, jargon-free and full of neat observations...The future, Morland concludes, is grey (societies that grow old before they grow rich), green (as global population declines, humans will need less land and fewer resources) and much less white (because of more rapid growth of non-European populations and immigration into majority white countries)... this is an admirable introduction to a vital subject." THE TIMES
• "A global history that gallops from 1800 and Brexit to Donald Trump's wall, seen through the prism of births, deaths and migration... The Human Tide is packed with information...This is, deliberately, a book for those with little knowledge of demography...What are fascinating are the author's projections of where we are heading demographically. To an older population in the UK certainly: the number of people over 85 will treble in 30 years as the baby-boomers age. That means a more indebted nation, but it could also mean a more peacefully inclined one" SUNDAYTIMES
• "Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike." KIRKUS REVIEWS
• "Engrossing...How many people live in a place, how old they are and how hungry they are, explains a lot about how their rulers behave, he argues. Do you have a fast-growing young population like late-19th-century Germany? Your neighbours will fear you. An imploding birth rate, like modern Italy? Your economy will probably shrink too. It's not a new idea but Morland offers plenty of evidence to prove just how much it matters...This book adds to the debate about the basic causes of history." BOOK OF THE WEEK, EVENING STANDARD
• "Morland shows how history has been driven not only by science and economics, but by birth, sex, life, and death. An essential read for anyone seeking to understand not only the human tide, but the tide of history. Gripping, authoritative, and compelling." Richard V. Reeves, author of Dream Hoarders: How the American UpperMiddle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, andWhat to Do About It
• "Demographic change underlies most of the trends of our time, from controversies over immigration to the challenge of funding welfare states. In The Human Tide , Paul Morland provides an erudite and entertaining overview of the influence of population trends on history." Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of theUnited States
• "Paul Morland has rudely awakened us to the hidden hand of demography in shaping history and politics in the modern world. Morland's superb political-demographic history of the world alerts us not only to how manpower matters, but why the perception of population shifts may be even more consequential than the shifts themselves. If you want to understand our times, you must read this book." Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and theFuture of White Majorities
• "A fascinating account of how much sheer population numbers have mattered in human history---and why major demographic upheavals, happening now and over the next few decades, are going to affect us all." Alison Wolf, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management atKing's College London and author off The XX Factor: How the Rise of WorkingWomen Has Created a Far Less Equal World
• "Population has been historically one of the key factors that has defined the relations between states. As Paul Morland shows, it has now become the defining factor for the political dynamics within states. The Human Tide shows that we live in an age of hard and soft demographic engineering." Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia

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The Human Tide How Population Shaped the Modern World

About this book

A dazzling new history of the modern world, as told through the remarkable story of population change. Every phase since the advent of the industrial revolution – from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump – can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world. The Human Tide is the first popular history book to redress the underestimated influence of population as a crucial factor in almost all of the major global shifts and events of the last two centuries – revealing how such events are connected by the invisible mutually catalysing forces of population. This highly original history offers a brilliant and simple unifying theory for our understanding the last two hundred years: the power of sheer numbers. An ambitious, original, magisterial history of modernity, it taps into prominent preoccupations of our day and will transform our perception of history for many years to come.

Customer Reviews

Dr Paul Morland is associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London and a renowned authority on demography. A French speaker with dual German and British citizenship, Paul was educated at Oxford University, and was awarded his PhD from the University of London.

"Paul Morland has rudely awakened us to the hidden hand of demography in shaping history and politics in the modern world [...] If you want to understand our times, you must read this book." – Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck University of London, author of Whiteshift "Superbly explained" – Washington Post "Fascinating" – Sunday Times "Engrossing" – Evening Standard "what are fascinating are the author's projections of where we are heading demographically" – Rosamund Urwin, Sunday Times " An admirable introduction to a vital subject" – David Goodhart, The Times Weekend "A fascinating account of how much sheer population numbers have mattered in human history – and why major demographic upheavals, happening now and over the next few decades, are going to affect us all" – Alison Wolf "Population has been historically one of the key factors that has defined the relations between states. As Paul Morland shows in this nuanced, highly informative and rigorously argued book, it has now become the defining factor for the political dynamics within states. The Human Tide shows that we live in an age of hard and soft demographic engineering" – Ivan Krastev

London Tide review: A dirge – but what did you expect?

London Tide at the Lyttelton Theatre: ★★★★

“Every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage,” Charles Dickens announced in 1858. In the case of his particular style of fiction – lengthy, originally serialised novels crammed with characters and complex plots – this is especially fitting. 

But is it fitting to lob in avant garde blues punk? Well, yes, although Dickens would surely be a little aghast at this new adaptation of his last and least popular novel, Our Mutual Friend. It introduces the disquieting music of PJ Harvey to devastating effect. Her songs, always dour and atmospheric, help transform the text into something new, doing a spectacular job of conveying emotions that would have been difficult for the characters to express without stalling the pace of the story.

Focusing on the Thames is a vaguely compelling – though it ultimately misses any chance to satirise the dire state of the country’s waterways.

Dickens is perhaps the most famous chronicler of poverty and social inequality. In his novels, Victorian London is presented as a dark and dismal place where desperation and crime fester. This story takes place in the grim boarding houses and pubs frequented by the poor around Limehouse , Deptford Creek and north Lambeth. The Thames is a constant presence, brought to life through rails studded with lights that tilt up and down across the length of the ceiling, creating a sewer-like waterway in the sky. 

The story, in painfully brief summary, is thus. A rich man dies, having left his fortune to his long-lost son on the condition the younger man marries a poor woman, Bella, who his father liked the look of when he saw her in a park as a child. The son, John Harmon, returns to London but after a debacle in an opium den his inheritance is given to his father’s servants, the Boffins. Bella ends up living with the Boffins and John is hired to work for them – and guess what: there’s a mutual attraction! Wild, I know. A concurrent storyline involves the children of a boatman emerging from poverty. 

What is middle age? The melancholy of life’s middle years

London Tide washes a lot of the complexity out of Dickens’s novel. Part of this is inevitable (it has, after all, been repackaged to fit the constraints of a three-hour production, including 13 musical interludes), but part of it not. None of the book’s themes – money, free will, fate, education – are investigated in any real depth, and the biting satire of the author’s prose never threatens to emerge. But what it lacks in substance it makes up for in style and sound. Spooky, atmospheric and dark, it looks fantastic. Bunny Christie creates a sparse, ominous set adorned only with a simple table and chair, with a small space taken up by the shadowy band, leaving the edges of the stage shrouded in darkness. 

It’s also unexpectedly funny, albeit not always intentionally. Dickens’s characters are inevitably comical but the audience definitely laughed in the “wrong” places at points – at the declarations of love or requests for hand in marriage that come apropos of nothing, for instance. There’s a ridiculous moment when a schoolmaster character is lifted towards the ceiling during a blues-rock ode to “discipline”, which was hysterically funny but not at all threatening, which probably ought to have been the intention.

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is way duller than the estate it’s based on

The play lets itself down a little in the second half, although Dickens is partly to blame here. Love stories are the least interesting parts of his work and he’s a sucker for a happy ending, when a darker resolution wouldn’t have gone amiss. Still, these shortcomings are highlighted when translated to a theatre show set to song.

London Tide is ultimately a fun tribute to Our Mutual Friend rather than a faithful recreation, something to be enjoyed on the surface level but not subjected to too much scrutiny. Smashing together PJ Harvey and a Dickens novel is a bold move. Focusing on the Thames is a vaguely compelling – though it ultimately misses any chance to satirise the dire state of the country’s waterways. The result may not leave you with burning questions about the purpose of life but it’s undoubtedly entertaining – and sometimes that’s enough.

Underdog: The Other Other Bronte at the Dorfman Theatre review

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Books Bound in Human Skin: An Ethical Quandary at the Library

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

By Jennifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs

The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is the place to inspect some of the most exquisite rare books on the market. But at this year’s event in early April, some browsers may have been unprepared for a small, grayish item on view: a book bound in human skin.

The book, which measures about 3 by 5 inches, came with a price tag of $45,000 — and a colorful back story. According to a statement by its owner, the binding was commissioned in 1682 by an Italian doctor and anatomist identified as Jacopo X, and has been kept by his descendants ever since.

Family lore held that during a dissection, Jacopo recognized the woman on the slab as an actress he had seen in Corneille’s comedy “Le Baron d’Albikrac.” He knew that unclaimed bodies sold to medical schools for dissection were rarely, if ever, given a proper burial. So he removed a piece of skin, and used it to bind a copy of the play.

“There was a sense that this was a tribute,” Ian Kahn, a dealer, explained to onlookers gathered at the counter of his booth before pulling out the book to offer a closer look.

Books bound in human skin — and the sometimes sensational stories surrounding them — have long occupied an odd place in the annals of the rare book world. Over the years, they have been whispered, bragged and joked about.

But over the past decade, the conversation has shifted. Many institutions whose collections include these books have sharply restricted access, as they have found themselves unexpectedly embroiled in the same debates about displaying — or even owning — human remains that have swept across museums .

The conversation was jolted anew last month when Harvard University announced that it had removed the skin binding from a notorious book in its collections, and that it would be seeking “a final, respectful disposition.” The university also apologized for “past failures in its stewardship,” which it said had “further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used” for the binding.

The announcement drew headlines around the world. But so far, the reaction from rare book experts has been muted — and mixed.

“It was a bold move to put out a press release not just about the presence of human skin books, but about a potentially controversial way of dealing with the issue,” said Allie Alvis, a curator at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware. Too many institutions, Alvis says, are unwilling to say much about them at all.

But others are troubled by what they see as the destruction of a historical artifact, and the imposition of 21st-century sensibilities onto objects from different times and contexts.

Megan Rosenbloom, a former medical librarian and the author of “Dark Archives,” a study of the history and science of anthropodermic (or skin-bound) books, said that destroying or disposing of these objects would close off future scholarship and fresh understandings.

“We should treat these books as respectfully as possible, but try not to bury literally and figuratively what happened to these people,” she said. “It’s hubris to think we’ve come to the end of our evolution of how we think about human remains.”

And moves like Harvard’s, Rosenbloom added, could backfire.

“If all anthropodermic books are taken out of institutions,” she said, “the rest of these books on the private market will probably go further underground, where they might be treated less respectfully.”

Rumors and Innuendo

Claims of books bound in human skin have circulated for centuries. But the ability to confirm them scientifically — using a technique called peptide mass fingerprinting — is only about a decade old.

In 2015, Rosenbloom and others started the Anthropodermic Book Project , with the goal of uncovering “the historical truths behind the innuendo.” So far, the project has identified 51 purported examples worldwide, 18 of which have been confirmed as bound in human skin. Another 14 have been debunked.

An unknown number of others sit in private libraries. Kahn, whose firm, Lux Mentis , handles a lot of “challenging material,” as he put it, said he knows of several collectors in Paris who have skin-bound books.

The oldest reputed examples are three 13th-century Bibles held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in France. The largest number date from the Victorian era, the heyday of anatomical collecting , when doctors sometimes had medical treatises and other texts bound in skin from patients or cadavers.

Other examples relate to criminals or prisoners. At the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in Scotland, a display about the 19th-century growth of the medical profession includes a small notebook purportedly bound in the skin of William Burke, part of a duo of notorious serial killers who sold their victims’ bodies for dissection. The Boston Athenaeum owns one bound in the skin of a man who, before he died in prison , had asked that two copies of his memoir and deathbed confession be bound in his skin.

While most known skin bindings are from Europe or North America, some involve wild claims, like a book at the Newberry Library in Chicago said to have been “found in the palace of the King of Delhi” during the 1857 mutiny against British rule. (Lab examination, according to the library, concluded it was actually “highly burnished goat.” )

“There’s often a sense of othering of these books,” said Alvis, the curator of Winterthur Museum, who posts about rare books on social media as @book_historia. “They don’t come from the noble white person, but this strange person from foreign climes.”

Current testing cannot identify race or sex of the skin. But at least a half-dozen 19th-century examples involve skin purportedly taken from female patients or cadavers by male doctors, with several used to cover books about female biology or sexuality (like a treatise on virginity held at the Wellcome Collection in London).

And a few examples, both rumored and confirmed, have racial connections that, whatever the intentions behind the bindings, may play uncomfortably today.

Two volumes of poems by Phillis Wheatley , the first person of African descent to publish a book in the United States, have been confirmed as bound in human skin. But a pocket-size notebook at the Wellcome Collection, long claimed to have been bound in the skin of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race Black and Native man recognized as the first person to die for American independence, is likely bound in camel, horse or goat skin, according to the museum.

A ‘Violated Woman’?

The volume at Harvard, an 1879 philosophical treatise called “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” was bound by a French doctor named Ludovic Bouland, who inserted a note saying that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” It was placed at Harvard’s Houghton Library in 1934 by John Stetson, an heir to the hat fortune, along with another note saying that the skin came from a woman who died in a psychiatric hospital.

According to Harvard, library lore holds that “decades ago” the book was sometimes used to haze unsuspecting student workers. But questions about the library’s recent stewardship emerged in 2014, after the library published a jokey blog post describing the confirmation of the skin binding as “good news for cannibals.”

Paul Needham, a prominent rare book expert who retired from Princeton in 2020, was deeply offended, and began calling on Harvard to remove the skin and give it a “respectful burial.”

“I think that the way the Houghton Library treated this was a disservice to the world of rare book collecting,” he said.

The library imposed some restrictions on access in 2015. Winds shifted further in 2021, when Harvard formed a Steering Committee on Human Remains to examine all of its collections, as an outgrowth of its efforts to reckon with its historic entanglements with slavery.

A single skin-bound book from 19th-century France may seem like a small thing amid the more than 20,000 human remains in Harvard’s collections, including 6,500 from Native Americans, which critics say are not being researched and repatriated quickly enough.

But to Needham, who was involved in starting an affinity group to pressure Harvard into burying the skin of what the group called “the violated woman trapped in the binding,” the moral imperative is clear: The proper disposition of human remains should take ethical precedence, particularly where the person has not given consent.

“What 100 years from now would be the potential new research that would be done?” Needham said. “I just can’t imagine it.”

Harvard’s decision is drawing heightened attention to skin-bound volumes elsewhere, including one at the Cleveland Public Library: an 1867 edition of the Quran, acquired in 1941 from a dealer who had described it as “formerly the property of the East Arab chief Bushiri ibn Salim who revolted against the Germans in 1888.”

For decades, the book typically received a handful of requests a year for access, said John Skrtic, the library’s chief of collections. But earlier this year, the library made it off-limits, pending testing.

“The library has long believed the undocumented claim in the dealer’s catalog, regarding its binding, to be false and finds the claim sensationalistic and deeply offensive,” the Cleveland Public Library said in a statement. The library will “engage leaders in the local Muslim community to chart an ethical path forward.”

Harvard’s approach is also generating strong criticism. Eric Holzenberg, a book scholar who recently retired as director of the Grolier Club in Manhattan, said that the destruction of the binding “accomplishes nothing,” beyond expressing disapproval of “the acts of people long dead.”

“Harvard, it seems to me, has taken the easy way out,” Holzenberg said. “No doubt the proper, cautious, committee-generated, risk-averse approach, but ultimately I fear at the expense of sound scholarship and responsible stewardship.”

Rosenbloom, the author of “Dark Archives,” said she questioned the tendency to pull these objects, which were generally not created or collected in a context of colonialism, into models developed to address those injustices. And she wondered why Harvard had removed the binding before finishing full provenance research.

In response to emailed questions, Thomas Hyry, the director of Houghton Library, and Anne-Marie Eze, its associate librarian, said they did not believe dismantling of the binding would limit future scholarship.

“The decisions we have made to remove the human remains from our volume will not erase what we know about this practice for those studying the history of the book,” they said.

Balancing Research and Respect

Some libraries that have undertaken an ethical review of their anthropodermic books have reached different conclusions.

Brown University’s John Hay Library has four books confirmed as bound in human skin, including an edition of Vesalius’s landmark 1543 anatomical atlas, “On the Structure of the Human Body.” In the past, they were promoted on campus tours and sometimes brought out for Halloween and other events.

But in 2019, the library’s new director, Amanda Strauss, paused any showing of the books, while developing policies that balanced respect for human remains with the library’s research mandate.

“We don’t want to censor access to controversial or disturbing material,” she said. “And we don’t want to shame anyone for their interest.”

Today, images of the books’ pages (but not the bindings) are available online , while access to the physical books is limited to people conducting research on medical ethics or anthropodermic bindings.

Strauss said she would be uncomfortable with any alteration or destruction of the bindings, which she said amounted to “erasure.”

“We can’t pretend this wasn’t a practice and this didn’t happen,” she said. “Because it did, and we have the evidence.”

With any macabre object, the line between morbid curiosity and the pursuit of understanding may be hard to draw.

Kahn, the dealer, said he wanted to “demystify” books bound in skin, which he said can prompt conversations about ethics, knowledge and our own status as animals. At the book fair, many seemed open to those questions and curious, however queasily, to touch the Corneille volume.

One browser, Helen Lukievics, a retired lawyer, said she had read about the Harvard book and shuddered. But she was persuaded, she said, by the idea that this particular binding had been meant as a “tribute” to the actress.

“It’s fabulously appalling,” she said. She paused. “It’s a piece of history.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs

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The human tide: how population shaped the modern world audible audiobook – unabridged.

A dazzling new history of the irrepressible demographic changes and mass migrations that have made and unmade nations, continents, and empires

The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played.

The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition - a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe - shaped the course of world history. Demography - the study of population - is the key to unlocking an understanding of the world we live in and how we got here.

Demographic changes explain why the Arab Spring came and went, how China rose so meteorically, and why Britain voted for Brexit and America for Donald Trump. Sweeping from Europe to the Americas, China, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, The Human Tide is a panoramic view of the sheer power of numbers.

• Listening Length 10 hours and 40 minutes
• Author Paul Morland
• Narrator Zeb Soanes
• Audible release date March 5, 2019
• Language English
• Publisher Hachette Audio
• ASIN B07P6RW2S2
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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