Global population: history, geopolitics, and life on earth

Introduction: Life and earth -- Confined in room : a spatial history of malthusianism -- War and peace : population, territory, and living space -- Density : universes with definite limits -- Migration : world population and the global color line -- Waste lands : sovereignty and the anticolonial history of world population -- Life on earth : ecology and the cosmo-politics of population -- Soil and food : agriculture and the fertility of the earth -- Sex : the geopolitics of birth control -- The species : human difference and global eugenics -- Food and freedom : a new world of plenty? -- Life and death : the biopolitical solution to a geopolitical problem -- Universal rights? Population control and the powers of reproductive freedom -- Conclusion: Population in the space age

"Concern 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."--Provided by publisher

Concern 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 wi