Suchergebnisse

In assessing population as an intergovernmental and world issue, historians have generally focused on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction. To expect the history of population to be solely or even primarily about reproduction and individual health, however, is to miss entirely other lines of thought within which population, and in particular world population, came to be a problem for international organizations of the twentieth century. The problematization of population often raised questions about and plans for migration, colonial expansion of territory, and the properties of land and soil—in other words, geopolitics. This article shows how the population problem was precisely a geopolitical problem for the late League of Nations and the early United Nations. The article discusses two institutional occasions on which population as a spatial and security problem came onto the agenda of international organizations. The fi rst case involved a series of meetings held by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, resulting in the document Peaceful Change (1937). The second case arose in the early years of UNESCO when Julian Huxley and others attempted to raise population as a major world issue.

There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the idea of demographic transitions and political economy, and subsequent links between aid, development, family planning, and various international agencies. A third is the history of reproductive and bodily rights, feminism, and birth control, which has been analyzed with respect to the history of technology, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the history of nationalism, and to some extent the history of internationalism. The political economy aspects of the population question tend chronologically to bookend the feminist narrative, with Malthus at the late eighteenth-century end and Cold War political economy of third world development at the twentieth-century end. A fourth strand is a burgeoning intellectual history of demography, social science, and economic theory.

This article analyzes the ways in which the process of
modernization in the early twentieth century was gendered by examining
the work and subjectivities of Australian nurses and the writings of two
feminists, Frances Gillam Holden and Rose Scott. Located firmly in
the institutional and cultural field of medicine--a field that
emphasized modern, rational, and scientific values--nurses negotiated
many of the changes modernizing culture brought. Bashford examines
the implications for nurses of the shift from morally defined
interpretations of health and illness to biological understandings, and
the related change from a philanthropic, charitable model of health care
to one more scientific, professional, and state based. Historians
generally have concluded that a scientific, professional paradigm
displaced a moral, charitable one. But the historical picture was far
more complicated. Both modes were problematic for nurses, as women, and
explicit discussions proliferated about the place of science in nursing
knowledge and practice. The cultural institution of "domestic science"
offered one way in which nurses could reconceptualize their work as
modern and scientific, while retaining its basis in the feminine
world of domesticity.

This book examines the coercive and legally sanctioned strategies of exclusion and segregation undertaken over the last two centuries in a wide range of contexts. The political and cultural history of this period raises a number of questions about coercive exclusion. The essays in this collection examine why isolation has been such a persistent strategy in liberal and non-liberal nations, in colonial and post-colonial states and why practices of exclusion proliferated over the modern period, precisely when legal and political concepts of 'freedom' were invented. In addition to offering new per

The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum–seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia's race–based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine–detention and the internment of "enemy aliens" in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum–seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non–criminal and often non–citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum–seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia's histories of detention.