Global Population

History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

Alison Bashford

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231519526
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the "population bomb" in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both "earth" and "life."

Global Population traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet's surface came deeply to shape the characterization of "civilizations" with different standards of living. It forged the very ideas of development, demographically defined three worlds, and, for some, an aspirational "one world."

Drawing on international conference transcripts and personal and organizational archives, this book reconstructs the twentieth-century population problem in terms of migration, colonial expansion, globalization, and world food plans. Population was a problem in which international relations and intimate relations were one. Global Population ultimately shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.

Part I

The Long Nineteenth Century

1

Confined in Room

A Spatial History of Malthusianism

Where is the fresh land to turn up?

THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS, AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION (1798)

Malthus liked writing about islands. They illustrated nicely how humans were always, one way or another, “confined in room.”¹ The multiple scenarios he offered about the great human predicament were often geographical spaces with limits: the Islands of the South Sea, for instance, or perhaps more pressingly for most of his contemporary readers, the British Isles. “Let us now take any spot of earth, this Island for instance,” he invited. If all restraints on population growth were absent, he speculated that in a few centuries, “every acre of land in the Island [would be] like a garden.”² But even this would be inadequate, because the population would have increased far beyond the capacity of the total island-garden to produce. Malthus hypothesized at a larger scale, a global scale, about “the whole earth, instead of one spot.” Indeed, not just one world but “millions of worlds” could theoretically be filled with fast-reproducing life, were it not for the restraining necessity for food and for land in which to grow it.³ From his rooms in Jesus College, Cambridge, from his garret in London, and later from his chair in political economy at the East India Company College, London, Malthus indulged a planetary imagination: “The whole earth is in this respect like an island.”⁴

The Essay has been scrutinized many ways,⁵ but it still invites a geographical reading as well as further inquiry within the intellectual history of ecology. In short, this famous English text, in its multiple editions, was all about space—“room” Malthus tended to term it—in which animals, plants, and humans struggled to live. “Want of room and nourishment” was a condition that affected all organisms in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. “The contest was a struggle for existence,” he wrote in the pages that immediately followed his famous postulata about sex and food in the first edition.⁶ Through Malthus’s core idea that more organisms reproduce than can survive, political economy and natural history came to be interwoven throughout the nineteenth century. As Charles Darwin and scores of others put it, Malthus was describing the “œconomy of nature.”⁷ Unsurprisingly, late nineteenth-century Malthusians (and Darwinians)—the “neo-Malthusians”—constantly drew attention to the conceptual link between political economy and natural history. They, too, saw the struggle for room and food as foundational, the economy of nature that became, in one version, ecology.⁸

Looking at the Malthusian line of thought spatially, the extent to which a planetary imaginary was in operation becomes apparent. From Malthus onward, indeed before him as we shall see, this economy of nature was comprehended as checking and balancing itself within the limits of the earth, literally the spherical globe. This was so even for those figures in the neo-Malthusian story who are rarely placed within the history of economic or ecological thought, those have come to most represent the “sex” not the “space” dimension of the population question: Annie Besant, for instance. As the nineteenth century progressed, a capacity to conceptualize a supranational globe was accompanied by an internationalist politics that was explicit among many of Malthus’s intellectual successors. Late-Victorian neo-Malthusians, as well as Malthusian economists on the eve of World War I, tended toward cosmopolitan politics and even espoused a grandiose global pacifism: they considered that their own methods would bring about world peace, before there was even such a thing as a world war.

Space and the Principle of Population

Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798. Too often remembered, defended, dismissed, or reduced to its stark claims about geometrically increasing population and arithmetically increasing food, the Essay held a thousand ideas within it, and more with each edition. It was written at a point when the political and economic relationship between the Old World and the New World had re-formed; when British political economy was emerging with expansive and hotly contested ideas about land, people, wealth, and labor; when the fallout from the French Revolution and the radical reconceptualizations of state, citizen, and liberty were taking strange turns, not least war on several continents; and when the Pacific world—the South Sea—was being explored and assertively colonized by the British and the French. All this, one way or another, is in Malthus’s Essay. Yet perhaps the most tantalizing feature only became apparent retrospectively; the first Essay was written on the cusp of a changing economy and of unprecedented population growth in Malthus’s own backyard, but without much awareness on his part of these imminent great changes in the modern world.⁹ In 1798, Malthus wrote about an old demographic regime, what he saw as centuries of more or less stationary balance between European births and deaths. He thought the increase of his own nation’s population since the Glorious Revolution was, if anything, very slow.¹⁰ In fact the population of England and Wales was already increasing, from about 5.7 million in 1750 to 8.6 million in 1800 to 16.5 million in 1850.¹¹ For the twentieth-century demographers analyzed in later chapters, it was the massive increase in domestic British population, even greater over the later nineteenth century, that was the accelerant in the global population story. But for Malthus, writing at the turn of the eighteenth century, the intriguing point was just how populations were kept as low and as stationary as they seemed to be.

Geopolitics and biopolitics—land, labor, food, and sex—were conceptually central from the Malthusian beginning. In the first anonymous edition, Malthus stated that basic needs underwrote all his arguments: “First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.”¹² The power of the earth to produce food, and the power of humans to reproduce, were unequal, however. Thus, the effects of these powers must be (and he claimed were) continually “kept equal” by various natural and human interventions. In later editions, he considered that the relative effects of food and sex might be kept more balanced by “moral restraint,” that is, by delaying both marriage and sex.¹³ So-called preventive checks were practices that limited fertility, and the Victorian Malthusians later advocated contraceptive practices or devices as the preferred means to check fertility; preferable, that is, over the celibacy theoretically required of “moral restraint” and the prostitution that they thought would result in practice, whatever Malthus himself thought. The balance between population and subsistence, was also kept equal over time by “positive checks” that increased mortality: starvation, disease, and war, as well as infanticide. Malthus’s assessment of the capacity of various restraints to ameliorate the conditions of those near subsistence levels differed over successive editions. His first edition doomed humans of the lower classes in various “stages of civilization” to perpetual suffering. By his sixth edition, this was largely modified, and early twentieth-century interpreters of Malthus understood him to argue that restraints could mitigate this suffering significantly.¹⁴

Malthus’s famous “checks” were bodily matters in the first instance, the stuff of biopolitics: sexual conduct, birth, health, illness, and death. But population determinants were also crucially about land and space. This made population, for Malthus, not just a domestic but also an intercontinental matter. Land available in the New World was important and he detailed its use, briefly in the first edition, extensively thereafter: for the Spanish in Mexico and Peru; for the Portuguese in Brazil; for the Dutch and the French in their multiple respective colonies. All these, despite variously questionable governance, he wrote, currently have plenty of room and food and therefore “have constantly increased with astonishing rapidity in their population.” But none had increased so quickly as the North American colonies, “now the powerful People of the United States of America.” It was the thirteen colonies and the new United States that were the important cases. There, in addition to a healthy measure of liberty and equality, the key factors were “plenty of good land” and social/legal systems that ensured its maximized cultivation. With all this in place, the population in the thirteen colonies had doubled in twenty-five years.¹⁵

Initially unwittingly, Malthus was reiterating Benjamin Franklin’s observations, though the latter had in fact claimed that American populations doubled by natural increase in twenty years.¹⁶ Malthus derived this fact from Richard Price’s Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771) via Yale president Ezra Stiles’s Discourse on the Christian Union (1761), whose own original source was Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 pamphlet, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” From his second edition (1803) onward, Malthus cited what was to become Franklin’s enduring instance of fennel, the single species that might overrun all else, if the circumstances were right: “were the face of the earth … vacant of other plants.” And Malthus quoted Franklin on humans: “were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished from one nation only; as, for instance with Englishmen.”¹⁷

From Franklin, through Malthus, and eventually to Charles Darwin, as historian Joyce Chaplin has elegantly shown, the doubling of human populations in twenty-five years as a maximum rate of growth was a critical reference point. It came to be a Malthusian mantra for Victorians such as John Stuart Mill and Annie Besant, for twentieth-century moderns like John Maynard Keynes, and well beyond.¹⁸ But critically, for Malthus, the capacity of a population to increase was dependent on geography—“fresh land”—that diminished the need for or effect of preventive checks. It was the availability of land in North America that encouraged people to marry younger and therefore to have more children. In this original moment of the political economy of population lay an intricate and even causal relationship, between sex and space, life and earth, bio and geo.

Over time, all kinds of demographic, geopolitical, and ecological arguments were to be made about the global significance of apparently empty land in North America, its seeming limitlessness, its opening and eventual closing, as Frederick Jackson Turner was famously to frame this geography and history in 1893.¹⁹ For Malthus almost a century earlier, the whole point of introducing the American case was to argue that limits theoretically applied even there. Ultimately, even the vast spaces of the North American continent ended, the famously fruitful soil could only yield so much. Even if the United States of America was “almost entirely vegetable,” he wrote, beyond that hypothetical state “where is the fresh land to turn up?”²⁰ For Malthus, the industry, happiness, and population of the Americans depended on their great plenty of land and their “superior degree of civil liberty.” But even civil liberty, he finished, “all powerful as it is, will not create fresh land.”²¹

Franklin’s and Malthus’s interest in numbers of people in the eighteenth century was a product of the more general project of political arithmetic. Beginning in the seventeenth century, modern states sought to reckon population trends with new statistical techniques and with new objectives. Malthus read and cited one of the foundational texts of this tradition, William Petty’s Several Essays on Political Arithmetick (1699).²² Enumerating a population, maximizing its aggregate health and longevity, and devising ways systematically to know and predict birthrates, mortality, and morbidity was the business of the modern state. It became “statistics” (“the science of the state”) or later “vital statistics,” with ever-growing links to insurance industries that traded in probability.²³ For Michel Foucault and subsequent scholars, this was the beginning of biopolitics.²⁴ Early political arithmetic also included occasional attempts to calculate and project total world populations, for example Gregory King’s 1682 projection of 630 million in 1695 that would reach 780 million in 2050.²⁵

It was received wisdom that populousness was an index of national wealth and strength, and, as David Hume put it, the happiness, virtue, and wisdom of a nation’s institutions.²⁶ But for Malthus and other late eighteenth-century political economists, the issue was not populousness per se, but the nature of the relation between land and people. Progressive wealth, wrote Adam Smith, was “in proportion to the improvement and cultivation of the territory or country.”²⁷ Theirs was a preindustrial world still based on organic production and conversion of energy. But there were limits. As Wrigley has put it: “Malthus, Smith, and Ricardo … shared the conviction that economic growth must be limited because the land (in a literal and narrow sense) was a necessary factor in almost all forms of material production, and the supply of land was virtually fixed.”²⁸ The Essay was thus concerned at various points not just with the availability of fresh land, but with the specifics of land use and land reform: the enclosure of commons, the reclamation of land, the use of fertilizers, the economic impact of growing food for animals rather than humans. Malthus thought, for example, that turning corn-growing land into pastureland to feed ani...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Life and Earth
• Part I. The Long Nineteenth Century
• Part II. The Politics of Earth, 1920s and 1930s
• Part III. The Politics of Life, 1920s and 1930s
• Part IV. Between One World and Three Worlds, 1940s to 1968
• Conclusion: The Population Bomb in the Space Age
• Notes
• Archival Collections
• Index