[azernik]

Yes it does. You think China having 1/6 of the world's population is just a factor of modern policy? That's probably (estimates are fairly fuzzy) lower than its proportion of the world population in 1600. See e.g. [1] which estimates world population in 1600 in a band centered at 550m, with estimated populations of late-Ming-dynasty China around 160m.

You seem to view the mid-19th to early-20th centuries, when Europe temporarily had about 1/3 of the world's population because it went into its demographic transition so early, as a good baseline. It is not.

The reason I mentioned Europe having gone into its explosive growth so early is that it was so early that it affects your assumptions, such as that Britain "should" have a quarter instead of a twentieth of the population of China.

[1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...