Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

Abstract

In this insightful study, Alison Bashford analyzes and historicizes the concept of “freedom” at the heart of post-World War II projects of reproductive regulation. Scholars have generally emphasized a strong distinction between “population control”—a coercive system that national and international planners imposed to regulate the quantity and quality of populations—and “birth control”—a rights-based system that individual women voluntarily chose to mange their own lives and families. Yet as Bashford provocatively and convincingly shows, the histories of population control, eugenics, and birth control were in fact tightly intertwined as part of a common project: “the creation of the modern gendered and responsible citizen, with a voluntary principle, rights, freedoms, and liberties at her core” (351). More often than not, efforts to manage aggregate populations embraced the liberal tools of rights and freedoms over the authoritarian tools of coercion. In examining the connections between population control and birth control, Bashford adds greater nuance to our historical understandings of both. Instead of beginning with a focus on sex, reproduction, and feminism—the usual starting points in histories of population thought—she instead traces how the regulation of reproduction came to offer a biopolitical solution to problems that scientists and social scientists since the nineteenth century had primarily understood in geopolitical and economic, rather than sexual, terms. Thinkers from diverse and often overlapping fields, including economics, geography, biology, ecology, sociology, demography, and soil science, engaged in vigorous debates over the quantitative, qualitative, and distributive problems of global population. The intellectual interest in population intensified in the interwar period out of political preoccupations with international migration, environmental exhaustion, nutrition and hunger, and war and peace. The views of Margret Sanger exemplify the point. Even the heroine of the birth control movement advocated the practice, not only out of a concern with women's reproductive rights, but also as a necessity to ensure international food security.