Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

by Alison Bashford

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the "population bomb" in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both "earth" and "life."Global Population traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet's surface came deeply to shape the characterization of "civilizations" with different standards of living. It forged the very ideas of development, demographically defined three worlds, and, for some, an aspirational "one world."Drawing on international conference transcripts and personal and organizational archives, this book reconstructs the twentieth-century population problem in terms of migration, colonial expansion, globalization, and world food plans. Population was a problem in which international relations and intimate relations were one. Global Population ultimately shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.

Genres: History

480 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2014

About the author

Alison Bashford is Director of the Laureate Centre for the History of Population at the University of New South Wales.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not light reading by any means, but Alison Bashford's "Global Population" offers an insightful and dense intellectual history of the question of "global population" in the first half of the twentieth century. How did "global population" come to be theorized as a problem? What politics and geopolitics did it lead to among such individuals (sometimes in polar opposite ways), and how did those views shape global institutions?

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a dense intellectual history that traces influential thinkers and their views on overpopulation, mostly from the 1920s to 1968. Bashford challenges the historiography of population and shows how an idea that many people understand as fact under one type of analytical scope can actually transition between influences in politics, economics, and natural sciences.

[Shuhui Shen]

finish one chapter