Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth by Alison Bashford (review)

This fascinating, deeply researched book is a history of thinking about world population from the 1920s to the 1960s. The thinkers are primarily Western scholars and public intellectuals of the time, though with ideas rooted in earlier writers— Malthus and Darwin, especially, but also Mill and Kant. Alison Bashford, a historian at Cambridge University, contrasts the population concerns dominant in the interwar years with those emerging after World War II. In her succinct phrasing, the book “traces the twentieth-century story of how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land gradually morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one’s person” (p. 3).

Territory was the central population interest in the earlier period, manifest in concepts of overpopulation and lebensraum, in pressures for migration, and in worries about soil conservation and food security. Cosmopolitan notions of global governance and visions of organized mass migrations into “vacant” lands—a favored position of the International Labour Organization in the 1920s—came up against the restrictive immigration laws of the settler societies (societies that themselves ignored the claims of indigenous peoples). Birth control was also on the agenda. It was an instrument to draw on in attaining a broad ecological balance and, for many, in seeking to regulate population “quality.” It had little to do with reproductive rights and health. Bashford’s chapters on the prewar decades offer an intricate account of these topics, skillfully separating out constituent themes amid a mass of detail that might otherwise be exhausting to read. Innumerable well-known and little-known figures populate the text, both through their conference roles (a major documentary source) and in the archival residues they have left. The book’s thematic organization means that those with broad spans of interests—Margaret Sanger, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells for instance—are met repeatedly in different guises or wearing different hats.

World War II is the main structural divide in the story. The case of eugenics best illustrates the break. It was not evident to the early social Darwinists that racial differences were surface phenomena or that dysgenic change was not a matter for major concern. By the 1930s, however, eugenics had become untenable on scientific as well as moral grounds. Eugenic policies lingered in a number of Western countries until tainted by association with Nazism. Postwar population science simply discarded that part of its history.

But continuities were important too. Bashford argues that the early postwar concern with global natural resources, seen in titles like Our Plundered Planet (1948) or in the kind of ecological cosmopolitanism of Huxley’s newly formed UNESCO, were part of the long history of Malthusianism and spatial geopolitics. Birth control was another continuity. First under the name of neo-Malthusianism, then as family planning, its early supporters included not only politically attuned feminists and other radical reformers but also persons with interests in medical, biological, economic, political, and ethical dimensions of the subject. A number of these separate strands of thinking were still evident in the 1960s, not least as combined in the person of the redoubtable Margaret Sanger. Gradually, however, partly through the strengthening of gender politics, the focus of birth control narrowed to a concern with individualized sexual practice. “The analytic of sex,” Bashford puts it, “consistently trumped the analytic of space” (p. 19). The resulting scholarship she finds wanting. “In terms of how ‘population’ has been problematized, folding the field retrospectively into a feminist bid for reproductive health is simply incomplete” (p. 19).

Bashford ends her story in 1968, the year of The Population Bomb, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and the anti-contraception encyclical Humanae Vitae. That may have been the peak year for her thesis of population’s rich political-cum-intellectual heritage. Thereafter, attention to global population steadily freed itself from geopolitics and eventually, under the sway of the “Cairo agenda” (the reproductive- health-centered program adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development), even...