Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on EarthConcern about the size of the world’s population did not begin with the Baby Boomers. Overpopulation as a conceptual problem originated after World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. This study traces the idea of a world population problem as it developed from the 1920s through the 1950s, long before the late-1960s notion of a postwar “population bomb.” Drawing on international conference transcripts, the volume reconstructs the twentieth-century discourse on population as an international issue concerned with migration, colonial expansion, sovereignty, and globalization. It connects the genealogy of population discourse to the rise of economically and demographically defined global regions, the characterization of “civilizations” with different standards of living, global attitudes toward “development,” and first- and third-world designations. |
Contents
Life and Earth
| 1 |
The Long Nineteenth Century
| 27 |
A Spatial History of Malthusianism
| 29 |
The Politics of Earth 1920s and 1930s
| 53 |
Population Territory and Living Space
| 55 |
Iniverses with Definite Limits
| 81 |
World Population and the Global Color Line
| 107 |
Sovereignty and the Anticolonial History of World Population
| 133 |
The Geoplitics of Birth Control
| 211 |
Human Difference and Global Eugenics
| 239 |
Part IV Between One World and Three Worlds 1940s to 1968
| 265 |
A New World of Plenty?
| 267 |
The Biopolitical Solution to a Geopolitical Problem
| 305 |
12 Universal Rights? Population Control and the Powers of Reproductive Freedom
| 328 |
The Population Bomb in the Space Age
| 355 |
Notes
| 365 |
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Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth Alison Bashford No preview available - 2016 |
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1927 Proceedings agricultural alexander Carr-Saunders anglophone anticolonial argued argument asia australia biological biopolitics birth control birthrates blacker british Cambridge colonial contraception cosmopolitan darwin demographic transition density drysdale earth East ecology economic economists energy Essay European family planning fertility Folder freedom Geneva Geographical geopolitics George Knibbs global globe human population ibid idea immigration restriction increase indian intellectual internationalism Japan Japanese JdR3 John boyd orr Julian Huxley Keynes Kingsley davis land league of nations limits london Malthus Malthus’s Malthusian man’s Margaret Sanger migration mortality neo-Malthusian nutrition organization overpopulation Pacific Papers Peace planet political economy population control population growth population question postwar race racial Radhakamal Mukerjee rates Raymond Pearl relation reproductive Science scientific social soil space SPlC Sripati Chandrasekhar sterilization territory thought tion twentieth century unESCo Warren Thompson Wellcome library women World Population Conference world population problem World’s Future wrote