From Sink to Source: Demographic Change and Early Health Transition in Bogotá, 1878-1938

This paper identifies Bogotá as a demographic sink during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The almost permanent contraction of its natural population resulted from low birth rates and heightened death rates. After the Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902), this condition was reversed. Rapid population growth ensued for over a century, as the city added, to the regular flows of immigrants, annual surpluses of its own natural population. Bogotá thus turned into a demographic source. This historical shift from sink to source was closely linked to changes in health. This research demonstrates that three traits of the early health transition (EHT) were present during this transformation: death-rate stabilization, improvements in life expectancy, and structural changes in the causes of death. It reconstructs historical statistics for crude death, birth, marriage, and natural-increase rates, and develops life tables, including survival rates based on abridged and period data from largely unpublished or unexplored archival sources. These empirical findings substantiate the contributions made to the literature on the city’s social and demographic past and broaden the perspectives for other scholars to apply the EHT and naturalpopulation frameworks to the historical evolution of cities in Latin America and beyond.