Global population : history, geopolitics, and life on earth / Alison Bashford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bashford, Alison, 1963-

Series:

Columbia studies in international and global history.

Columbia studies in international and global history

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Population--Social aspects.

Population.

Population--Economic aspects.

Population--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 466 pages) : illustrations, maps

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2014]

Summary:

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 1920's through the 1960's. 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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781785392726

1785392727

9780231519526

0231519524

OCLC:

870835614