Suchergebnisse

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

Includes bibliographical references and index

AbstractThis article re‐reads Malthus'sEssay on the Principle of Populationfor his explicit discussion of men and women, masculinity and femininity. A feminist reading is possible, but not undertaken here. Rather, the purpose is simply to demonstrate how 'gender' was Malthus's own object of inquiry. Historical actors, perhaps especially economic thinkers, often considered gender far more fully and explicitly than almost all subsequent analysts of them. It therefore remains not just insufficient, but empirically erroneous not to inquire into how 'men' and 'women' were considered, constructed, instructed, symbolised or valued by the historical actors we study, including those in the political economy canon.

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.