Population politics since 1750

ALISON BASHFORD

Why has “population” been political across time and place in world history? Perhaps because aggregations of humans, and the knowledge-systems that produce that aggregation, necessarily engage two fundamental human phe­nomena.

Political economy and world population, c. 1750-1850

In late eighteenth-century China and England two scholars were indepen­dently observing population trends and land use around them. Hong Liangji (1746-1809) and Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) were simultaneously thinking about their respective states, agrarian economies, and numbers of people over time.

Malthus made a similar observation, although population changes in his own part of the world were perhaps less clear. He was the recipient of enduring scholarly debate about whether populations in Europe had fallen, risen, or stayed stationary over the long term. The question was alive because most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers considered that wealth, the military, and state strength required large populations.^[135] Malthus wrote against this intellectual trend, making his ideas unwittingly more aligned with Hong's than his own European contemporaries. For European statesmen, high fertility was still generally deemed critical to offset high mortality. “Political arithmetic” was the calculation and analysis of births and deaths, comprehended through the method of “statistics,” endeavours aligned in etymology, as in fact to the interests of emerging states.^[136] The census, too, was a tool refined by population-aware nation states and utilized for commercial intelligence and emerging insurance industries. Censuses were initiated in the United States from 1790, in France from 1836, and in Brazil from 1872, for example.

Hong's context was the taxation system, famine relief systems, and agricultural development of bureaucratically centralized Imperial China. Malthus's local context was also an agricultural economy, not yet a manufacturing one. He was similarly concerned with the high politics of welfare and taxation, poor laws and corn laws. Land - its quality, extent, and diminishing returns - for him marked the limit to growth. His “principle of population” claimed that population numbers oscillated, con­tinuously, in relation to the availability of food (corresponding in large part to the amount of land). Malthus thought that even though the great expansions of land (especially in the New World) meant that populations could double, and quickly, there was ultimately and necessarily a diminish­ing return that would limit food production. At that point, population growth would be checked through human and natural regulation of the procreation and destruction of life. As a matter of regrettable fact, in his view, there would always be some part of any given population “in want.” Over the numerous editions of his famous Essay, Malthus came to insist that there were various ways in which the number of those in want of adequate food could and should be minimized, as matters of individual and family decisions and as matters of public policy.^[139]

If Hong wrote about China (large enough), his contemporary Malthus wrote about the world.

Several generations of nineteenth-century socialist (and later communist) thinkers considered population largely in opposition to Malthus's resignation that there would always be at least a small sector of any community in want. Early French utopians thought population growth would come under con­trol within a socialist polity. Karl Marx considered overpopulation relative, and a result of a capitalist system that required a surplus labor force. Engels recognized to some extent the labor on the part of women required for the reproduction of populations, and the politics that were therefore structurally always in play.

Colonialism, depopulation, and repopulation

Considered at a global level, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expan­sion of Europe was both demographic and geographic. Colonizers and colonized alike understood - and explicitly stated - that this process neces­sarily entailed the “extermination” or else the “assimilation” of indigenous peoples. Unless they were to become a labor pool, indigenous groups needed to be removed or incorporated, a spatial or a sexual solution to the phenomenon of settler-colonialism. In what some mid-twentieth­century demographers called early population transfers, US policy was to remove Indians across the natural borders of the Appalachian Mountains and then (in most cases) across the Mississippi River. In comparable and contemporary displacements, Aboriginal people in the British colonies in Australia (Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Queensland) were removed by colonial governors to protectorates or reserves.

The new world epidemics that had killed so many people in the early modern era continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Smallpox epidemics ravaged both colonists and natives, a defining part of North America's revolutionary era.1³ In the same year as another revolution - 1789 - Aboriginal people in what is now Sydney were decimated over one dreadful year, just after the British established their penal settlement. This colonial-demographic history was rarely if ever a one-off event: it was intergenerational and prolonged. Polynesians and Melanesians, for example, named venereal disease as the woe brought by Europeans from the 1760s. Strongly affecting women's fertility, when combined with diseases that killed outright - measles, influenza, smallpox - population decline in the Pacific islands began. In the Marquesas, for example, high mortality from respiratory diseases was still a major problem in the late nineteenth century. Combined with low fertility due to endemic sexually transmitted diseases, these islands suffered a major decline in population numbers until about the 1920s when fertility rates responded to new public health measures.^[145]

Thus, while population growth was a world problem, population decline was a Pacific problem. Addressing it was part of Islanders' politics, and “decrease” was integrated into colonizers' political agendas too. A formal commission of inquiry was held in Fiji, in 1896, for example.^[146] The Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Decrease of the Native Population was a fairly late expression of European concern about “disappearing” peoples, from Tasmanian Aborigines to the Beothuck in Newfoundland. The turn-of- the-century generation of colonizers worked hard to understand and prevent Melanesian and Polynesian decline, even as they actively cleared their land for new plantation economies.

There were two alternatives to the problem of depopulation. One was deportation of the colonizing populace (as happened over the long term in some decolonizing processes). The other was assimilation or incorporation of one population into another, involving sex, reproduction, and marriage between groups. In some contexts, mixed populations were more or less unproblematic, even a majority as in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Elsewhere they were more tenuously placed socially, for example in the Netherlands East Indies or in Portuguese India.^[147] In other contexts, a self- aware third ethnicity emerged - the Metis of the Canadian prairies, for example, a politically separate national group that resisted federal Canadian government forces in 1869 and 1885. Over the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, policymakers imagined “assimilation” in biological terms, and occasionally implemented as a formal policy the breeding of a minority population into a majority, so as to eliminate the former as a group.^[148] All of these processes involved states and juridical institutions, as well as cultural institutions, pronouncing and ruling on sex and sexuality as population policy. And all of the labor that created population - as states wanted it or regardless of official policy - was the reproductive labor done by women.

Reproductive politics, c. 1850-1950

Political economists addressed women's reproductive roles within their foun­dational intellectual traditions, in large part through the long legacy of stadial theory that turned into anthropology. This brought New World societies into canonical Old World theories. Thus, for example, Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was an extension of Lewis Morgan's anthropological work on the Iroquois. Engels, after Morgan, traced “ancient societies ” - human progress from so-called savagery to so-called civilization - actively considering relations between women, men, and reproduction.^[149] At least to this extent, this key Marxist text was far more of a piece with Malthus's Essay than Engels himself, or any political descendant, would want to admit.

Still, such studies fell well short of a thoroughgoing recognition of repro­ductive politics and the centrality of reproductive labor that was to revolu­tionize theory and practice on the relation between states and individuals in the century after 1850. It might fairly be claimed that a major element of global convergence over the modern period has been the rendering public - the business of state - what had previously been religiously, privately, or familially negotiated matters of reproduction, at least for most women and men. Sex became core business for all kinds of states, as both welfare and warfare slowly became massed and centralized endeavors.

While later twentieth-century feminists typically supported the publicizing and legalizing of birth control methods, this has not always been the case. Nineteenth-century feminists addressing an anglophone and francophone “woman question” tended to avoid the public discussion of birth control (even as most of them were likely practicing it, one way or another). However, an adjacent group of neo-Malthusian women and some socialist women, not incidentally aligned with secularist “freethought,” were actively folding feminism and birth control into political economy. And so were many men. It is no coincidence that John Stuart Mill was one of the more influential neo-Malthusians of the nineteenth century, and he is a reminder that, while “Neo-Malthusian” is often attenuated to mean simply an advocate of contra­ception, it is far more correctly understood within a political economy tradition.

There was, unsurprisingly, a spectrum of positions vis-a-vis gender and political economy. For late nineteenth-century neo-Malthusian women, the active prevention of conception and childbirth would efficiently achieve two “freedoms” simultaneously: women's autonomy and (they believed) the amelioration of poverty at familial, national, and global scales. For many neo-Malthusian men, interest in women's fertility and birth control was only ever expedient. Another group of men emerging broadly out of a Malthusian tradition fiercely promoted birth control, family planning, con­traception, and population control but without analyzing or sometimes even referencing women at all. For them - and ironically they are the least understood but arguably the most influential group in policy terms - birth control was a means by which food security was to be achieved and thereby political security. Any number of economists, ecologists, geographers, agriculturalists, plant geneticists, lawyers, and statesmen were major lobbyists for birth control, especially over the 1920s and 1930s. Geopolitics not gender politics drove their work, including the global geopolitics of migration.

That an economic rationale for birth control could and did function entirely outside of the feminist rationale for birth control explains the rise of neo-Malthusian organizations in many contexts, especially where stan­dards of living were high on national and nationalist agendas. Indian elites formed Malthusian societies from the 1880s, as did groups in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. By the end of the nineteenth century, this had acquired an explicitly internationalist politics. Neo-Malthusian thinkers linked population growth and differential densities across regions and con­tinents to war; and so they linked population limitation (and population redistribution) to peace, even world peace, some grandiosely proclaimed. Women's lobbying for birth control was not necessarily distinct from this tradition of political thought. Rather, they engaged in arguments about the limitation of population and the avoidance of war, economic argument about standards of living, and a redistribution of the world's people from densely to sparsely populated regions. Thus, for example, when lobbyist Viola Kaufman wrote to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations in 1930, she pressed that birth control should be on its agenda as an international issue precisely because of its connection to war: “The League of Nations ignores birth control - the only thing that can permanently abolish war.”^[150]

The long-term disagreement between socialism and Malthusianism over the distribution of wealth as a cause of and/or solution to overpopulation and poverty is often noted, and certainly fueled bitter disputes. Lenin entered the early twentieth-century fray, defending individual women's rights to abor­tion and medical knowledge of contraception, but dismissing neo-Malthusian economic rationales for this as a solution to working-class poverty.^[151] And yet there was a crossover between Malthusianism and anarchism-socialism that is frequently overlooked. Key neo-Malthusians such as Frenchman Paul Robin were members of the First International. And in a reversal of this connection, turn-of-the-century anarchist, Emma Goldman, attended the first meeting of the International Neo-Malthusians in Paris, 1900. This connection extended beyond an anglophone and francophone world. There was also a strong link between Malthusians and anarchists in Latin America. In Uruguay an anarchist group was established in 1907 that titled itself the Comite Neo-Malthusiano del Rio de la Plata. In the same year the Seccion neo- Malthusiana de Cuba was established, joining the now self-proclaimed International Neo-Malthusians. This counter-intuitive combination of Malthusianism and anarchism-socialism was the political tradition from which American Margaret Sanger's massively influential activism was born.^[152] This explains the political provenance of the “birth strikes” around the First World War: direct action fused with Malthusian ambition. “Birth strike to avert world famine,” Sanger cried in January 1920, a year in which many Europeans (for they were her target) were indeed hungry.^[153]

The term and the idea of birth strikes came originally from French syndicalists.^[154] It was also used then, as now, to refer to fertility decline that was going on from the 1880s entirely independently of public policy in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australasia, and parts of Eastern Europe, among other places: individuals and couples were clearly limiting reproduction, irrespective of clarion calls for national births (or, indeed, equally strident Malthusian calls to limit conception). Rather than policy shaping reproductive behavior, in this instance demographic trends themselves pro­duced political reaction. Statesmen in all of these locations sought to increase fertility rates with pro-natalist policy, continuing to understand population growth (too often simply equated with high fertility) as a source of national or imperial strength.^[155] Many Muslim nations were similarly pro-natalist.^[156] The broad trend of pro-natalist policy was deeply tied to the emergence of welfare structures of modern states, underwritten by modern military demands. These typically manifested as positive incentives for births (motherhood allowances, baby bonuses, tax breaks), but in some states official campaigns to promote births were conducted negatively: the banning of literature on contraception (in France in 1920 for example), or the strengthening of laws against abortion. The politics of such welfare activity was ambiguous. On the one hand, the recognition of women's labor contribution was both actively sought by fem­inists and women's groups, and welcomed when it was incorporated into state structures, as health measures for example. On the other hand, such “maternal citizenship” could, and did, constrain women to that labor - to motherhood, broadly speaking.^[157] Emphasizing the link between femininity and maternity has long been a double-edged sword, politically speaking. Modern, expert, state regulation of birth and child-rearing has diminished infant and maternal mortality. It has also brought women's fitness and unfitness, on any number of criteria, under direct scrutiny and intervention.

The politics of fertility decline as it played out in international and racial relations has received much historical analysis, and within many different national traditions. This does reflect late nineteenth-century anxieties about differential demographic trends across the world, in which “white” fertility decline was pitched against an apparent Asian fertility increase. Yet the debate then, and analysis of it now, have often been simplistic in demo­graphic terms and sensationalist in political terms: fertility decline has been read as “depopulation”; the significance of mortality has been ignored; and the number of economists, feminists, biologists, and others who in fact welcomed fertility decline, has been seriously under-recognized. Many econ­omists thought that the trend that was clearly underway in some nations both should and would become a worldwide phenomenon, over several generations. For better or worse, a “league of low birth rate nations” was imagined by an interwar cadre of population experts. They were at pains to explain this as an inclusive and aspirationally global “league,” not an exclusive one. But the presumption of Western leadership was understood, and subject to the critique of anti-colonial East and South Asian commentators.

Geopolitics: population and global space

Imperial German scholars and statesmen had been deeply interested in population density - overpopulation - before and during the First World War. But rather than systematize any program of population limitation, they argued for more land to inhabit. Spurious in population and political terms, the density argument, the push for Lebensraum, certainly became common as a mode through which to discuss international relations and foreign policy. Statesmen linked people and land again, especially with the rise of fascism. In Italy from 1922, Mussolini's “Battle for Land” was accompanied by a “Battle for Births,” a policy position that involved his own volte face from advocacy of, to bans on, birth control. Any number of pro-natalist policies were put in place, accompanied by land expansion strategies, from the reclaiming of domestic marshlands to the invasion and claiming of Ethiopia. In Japan, statesmen justified the invasion of Manchuria in the light of their own contained insular living space, the need to import rice for the first time, and population density. This contrasted with Manchurian space and bounty, wasted, they pronounced, by Chinese settlers. And in the Third Reich, the apparent vitality of Germans was bolstered by policies that twinned the promotion of reproduction with eastward territorial expansion. The “living space” argument was at one level particular to German Imperial, Weimar, and then Nazi regimes, and later picked up by Fascist Italy and ImperialJapan. At another level it was a twentieth-century expression of the linked demo­graphic and geographic expansion that had characterized earlier European colonialism as well as US Manifest Destiny arguments about expanding westward frontiers - space to be cleared, then cultivated and populated by vital Americans.^[158] The connections are not interpretive; they were made commonly enough at the time, if for many different political purposes. Indeed the Lebensraum argument that came to characterize German fascism was not dissimilar to positions commonly held by US, British, Indian, and Australasian demographers, economists, or geographers: that overpopulated countries did have a claim to land, a need for “territorial outlets,” and that a co-operative world population policy required the redistribution of people and land in the interests of peace. The same experts were likely to oppose the proliferation of immigration restriction acts. Especially South Asian demographers and economists argued that immigration laws hindered a healthy dispersal of people, especially into under-cultivated lands. What distinguished the fascist version was the justification of war as the means by which that redistribution might be achieved.^[159]

In the 1920s and 1930s population “quality” as well as quantity engaged a spectrum of states and non-governmental associations. Eugenics was a trans­national phenomenon whose aspiration to improve populations went to the core of the relationship between modern citizen and state. Most eugenic policies addressed mental and physical disability, enforcing or encouraging certain people's non-reproduction through segregation or sterilization or other methods of birth control. Experts typically rationalized such policies through both fitness and efficiency imperatives: especially in the Depression years, arguments for the sterilization of people with disabilities were framed increasingly in terms of public cost. States presented their pro-natalist policies often in eugenically inflected terms. Formally or informally favoring the reproduction of the “fit,” they adjudicated on criteria that ranged from racial qualification to mental and physical capacity, to intelligence and family pedigree. The ambitions and reach of eugenics were flexible enough to find expression in all kinds of polities: social democratic, liberal, fascist, commu­nist. It ranged from political groups that sought compulsory measures, to those for whom compulsion was anathema, and from societies dominated by peasant populations to those that were highly urbanized and industrialized. Eugenics programs proliferated across the world, from China to Japan to Eastern Europe to Switzerland.^[160] It was thus a phenomenon linked to a period - to high modernity - as much as to a particular polity.^[161]

Eugenics was certainly a nationalist endeavor, an applied science that found a natural home in national socialism. But it was also internationalist, anti-statist, and even cosmopolitan, a social and political project that easily incorporated and even stemmed from, the species-level and global scale tradition within Malthusian thought. A self-consciously international eugenics emerged. The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO) was anglophone and Protestant-dominated. Its counterpart was a transnational federation of Latin eugenics societies that linked southern Europe and Central and South America, including organizations and dele­gates from Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, and Mexico.^[162]

Opposition to eugenics was also transnational, especially in its Roman Catholic incarnation. The Latin International Federation of Eugenic Societies indicates how prevalent eugenics was in many Catholic- dominated countries, with the Vatican increasingly concerned. The 1930 papal Casti Connubii was a formal condemnation of sterilization as well as fertility control more generally, including the availability, promotion, and liberalization of information on contraception. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church's scriptural opposition to abortion, but in fact vanishingly few commentators - anywhere on the population continuum - advocated the legalization of abortion in these years. Birth control lobbyists tended to argue for contraception as a way of limiting what they tended to agree was a morally problematic act. States across the world almost unanimously agreed; that is, notwithstanding the clear evidence that abortion was practiced constantly, few policymakers, statesmen, or women advocated legalization until after the Second World War. The exception was the Soviet Union, which instituted free and legal abortion between 1920 and 1936, stricter medical indications coming into play between 1936 and 1955, and full legalization thereafter.^[163] After 1945 it was Japan's Diet that legalized abortion, part of a new Eugenics Law (1948).^[164] Counter-intuitively, then, the liberalizing trend of postwar abortion law so connected, discursively and legally, to liberal individualism in the West, had one origin in Japanese eugenics and another in Soviet population policy.

Three worlds, c. 1945-1968

Economists had long studied world trends in fertility and mortality, with census data that were good for some regions and poor or even non-existent for others. European demographic history was the main focus for European and non-European economists, both the massive population growth of the nineteenth century and the localized fertility declines. From the late 1920s demographers conceptualized changing patterns, globally and regionally, in terms of successive phases or cycles, from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality. This was, in many ways, updated stadial economic and social theorizing with fertility and mortality at its core. The four stages of eighteenth-century universal history, however, turned first into two, and then into three, worlds. The use of “occidental” and “oriental” world divisions remained common, even in mid-twentieth­century population studies. But the terms were morphing into the frcshcr “East” and “West,” still imagined as the quasi-stadial progression (development) toward “civilization” and, by implication, “Westernization.” Demographers and economists were fast coming to see the demographic state of low mortality and low fertility as the defining feature of civilization and Westernization. Another way of dividing the world into an economic two, common after the Second World War, was to describe one half as living in poverty and subject to the forces Malthus had described; and the other half, having industrialized or otherwise planned its way out of the Malthusian trap, with a controlled population and a higher living standard. Latterly, this version of a Cold War “East” and “West” became re-imagined as a Global South and North. Indeed it was largely via popula­tion thought that the antique cardinal directions became such a common way of delineating an economically divided world.

Perhaps more enduringly, the world came to be divided into the three main stages of “demographic transition”: first, those industrialized, modern­ized, populations/nations whose fertility rates had dropped, apparently a response to low mortality rates; second, those where mortality had declined but where high fertility persisted (resulting in significant population growth); and third, those countries in which there was little growth because both mortality and fertility remained high. By 1950 the idea had taken hold across many sectors that active government promotion of family planning would move countries from the third stage into the first stage, and quickly. It could, and, as key proponent Frank Notestein came to be believe, should, happen in advance of “modernization.”^[165] Notwithstanding a common critique of demographic transition, the idea was authoritative over such a long time because so many people wanted just this kind of progress (modernization). Yet even at the outset there were empirical puzzles that just did not align. Notestein himself observed nineteenth-century fertility decline in decidedly un-industrialized rural France, and demographic historians since have strongly questioned “natural” fertility (high fertility) for other pre­industrialized societies, China in particular.^[166] In any case, out of this intellec­tual and political genealogy of population thought came the enduring divi­sion of the world into three. In a 1952 article, “Three worlds, one planet,” French demographer Alfred Sauvy drew directly on the transition idea in creating a further idea: the “third world.” He wrote that the third world, like the Third Estate, “wants to be something too.”^[167]

Theories about demographic transition towards low fertility and low mortality rapidly came to frame nascent national and international popula­tion policy.^[168] If Europe's population had preoccupied many demographers before the Second World War, afterwards attention was directed mainly to China, Japan, Latin America, and India, each in completely different political and demographic circumstances. Japan was under US occupation, but a nominally independent and democratic Diet actively initiated and incorporated policies to contain population growth, the nature and extent of which would have been unacceptable in the United States itself: contra­ception education, legal sterilization, and legal abortion. The rationale was to stem food scarcity and grow an economic base, but women's health arguments that had been in abeyance in the Japanese public sphere since the 1920s returned, bolstered by the new female suffrage. Japan's fertility rate was declining with astonishing speed.^[169] At the same time, international population organizations, including the new United Nations Population Division headed by Princeton University's demographer Notestein, watched China carefully. Then in civil war, China's massive population had long been of interest but its demographic trends were nonetheless unclear. Just one of the international ramifications of the 1949 defeat of republican nationalists by Mao's communist forces, was the quite sudden shift from the idea of global population control having an internationalist agenda, to it having an anti-communist one. Steadily over the next two decades, First World lobbyists, economists, and politicians engaged with the long-standing arguments about population and peace, reshaped to fit a Cold War logic: fertility control would ensure food security, raise living standards, and head off further communist expansion. This was the begin­ning of a new generation of global demographic geopolitics.

China itself was now off-limits for a First World foray into Third World population control. This was part of the reason why India materialized as the main stage. A more significant reason was that prime minister Nehru's new government was strongly inclined to economic and social planning, part of which became “family planning.” It immediately incorporated population policy into its planned economy, written into India's first, and subsequent, five-year plans.^[170] Nehru was feted by sections of the international community (led by Swedes and Americans) for doing so, indeed for being the first government to implement a policy of population control.^[171] For the formal international sector - the United Nations - however, active endorsement of family planning was still blocked by the curious alliance of Catholicism and communism. Even minor World Health Organization (WHO) ventures into birth control research were closed down by the UN Assembly, and the bid for a World Population Conference was suppressed. In United Nations circles the politicizing of world population growth was most admissible within the Food and Agriculture Organization, where arguments about limited global food supply, famine, and world food policy kept the possibility of actively intervening alive as a vague possibility for the future. By contrast, non­governmental bodies - the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, as well as lobbyist and research coalitions like the International Planned Parenthood Federation (established in 1952 in Delhi) - pressed on with the idea that population control was the best prophylactic against a threatened communist global future.

The strong interwar link between the idea of population limitation, inter­nationalism, and pacifism (since differential population density was so strongly linked to war) thus turned inexorably into anti-communism. US millionaire Hugh Moore, whose Fund published the first “population bomb” pamphlet in 1954, advocated voluntary sterilization as the key means by which the spread of communism could be combated. Anti-communist after the Second World War, before it he had been an active internationalist in the Malthusian tradition. It was an easy transition, a common one in this milieu, and for a time, a successful one. In the late 1960s, population control as anti-communism was formally backed by the US government, in the form of aid for family planning. In the Reagan years this was shut down.^[172]

Accompanying this growing alignment of population control, aid, and foreign policy over the 1950s and 1960s was the so-called Green Revolution on the one hand, and an expansion of research on contraception on the other. The latter extended interwar (and prewar) feminism - the women's health and women's autonomy argument continued to be presented by Margaret Sanger, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Shidzue Kato, and others, but to a far more receptive international public sphere. And yet overall, groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation are best understood as coali­tions of people who together backed birth control, but for very different reasons: ecologists, economists, geographers, agricultural scientists, as well as feminists. This is why so many men were involved over the 1960s. Some embraced and promoted the idea of the need for reproductive control for the sake of women's autonomy, but many more were solely interested in food security related to anti-communist agendas. As in the 1920s and 1930s, for many leading men, birth control was a means, more than an end in itself.

The 1960 release of the much-anticipated “pill” from its controversial Puerto Rican trials onto the world market did represent a new reproductive freedom for many women.^[173] By the 1970s, its use and marketing in the West traded on a new kind of freedom: less married women's freedom to space births, and more young, single women's freedom to have sex without pregnancy. Outdated nineteenth-century “liberty” had turned into up-to- the-minute, even revolutionary, “liberation.” In the West, the very idea of family planning was becoming highly individualized, its connection with food security and political security cleaved into popular culture, though retaining this economic significance for national planners. In developing countries, however, some states were limiting individual freedoms to secure population-level changes, and the technology was not the new pill at all. As part of the Indian “emergency period” between 1975 and 1977, government intensified pre-existing infrastructures and laws for the sterilization of both men and women. The practice was never compulsory, though strong incen­tives and disincentives rendered it effectively a forced program for many Indian men and women. Sterilization in India came to be a highly contro­versial reference point across the world, and remains so.

At much the same time, the People's Republic of China officially instituted family planning in its One-Child Policy. Seeking to stabilize population growth, the Communist Party authorized its own interventions into reproductive conduct, without subscribing to, or being seen to subscribe to, long-rejected Malthusian economic theory. It rehabilitated the work of economist Ma Yinchu for the purpose, whose “New Population Theory” had been censored in the late 1950s, a period when Mao Zedong was strongly pushing pro-natalist policy. It was (and is) implemented mainly through fines and financial disincentives, in a way that varied across China in its formal and informal application. China's coercive one-child policy, peaking in the 1980s, manifested less as physical coercion - theoretically counter to Party-endorsed ethics, as Susan Greenhalgh explains - and more as extremely forceful propaganda and punishments for breaches of policy that ranged from loss of jobs and housing to loss of party membership.^[174] There were numerous exceptions to the policy (for rural families, if the first child was female, or for non-Han minorities).^[175] There has been a dramatic drop in Chinese fertility, unsurprisingly, alongside great international critique of the policy and of its spin-off effects, female infanticide in particular. Yet Lee and Wang argue that this is effectively the return of a long Chinese tradition of female infanticide, one of the leading means by which population was controlled in the eight­eenth century. Some historians argue that the current imbalance in sex ratio at birth is more standard than exceptional in modern Chinese demographic history.^[176]

The Indian and the Chinese instances cemented the connection between population control, illiberal politics, and unfreedom that had circulated since the rise of legally compelled eugenic sterilizations in the early twentieth century in some US states, two Canadian provinces, the Swiss canton of Vaud, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere.^[177] Eugenics advocates in other polities, notably the United Kingdom, while deeply interested in sterilization, in fact never proposed it to be legally practiced without the consent of the individ­ual: this cut across too many liberties. Indeed, the history of sterilization - eugenic and otherwise - is one key site where modern ideas about consent, freedom, and ethical medical practice have been worked out over the twentieth century. “Population control” became linked to coercive practice; “family planning” to an ethics of freedom and choice, although the clarity of such distinctions as matters of history, as opposed to matters of politics, has been questioned.^[178]

Global political ecology

By the late twentieth century, experts had politicized population growth and distribution as a global problem for many generations. They had explicitly framed the first World Population Conference held in Geneva in 1927 in terms of the limits of the Earth - meaning both spatial limits of the planet and the idea of diminishing agricultural return. This was countered and challenged, of course. Especially in the high modern mid-century, projects that constituted the so-called Green Revolution accompanied any number of development agendas premised on cornucopian nature and boundless energy production. But the argument about limits retained some purchase, not least in the technical work of ecologists that was strongly popularized after the Second World War, with a focus on the problem of soil erosion. A global political ecology of population peaked in 1968. The great reception and notoriety of Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, published that year, should thus be seen both as the culmination of many generations of problematizing population on planet Earth, specifically in relation to food supply, and as a sign that a newly receptive generation was active. For that generation, population growth, environmentalism, and energy politics were of a piece, at both grass-roots and corporate levels. This was the era when the Club of Rome formed as a transnational group of leaders in politics, business, and science, hoping to put the idea of limits to growth into global action. Their commissioned study, The Limits to Growth, modeled continual population growth alongside four other variables (industrialization, food production, resource depletion, and pollution).^[179] Its “world model” fueled discussion of anti-growth or no-growth economics and politics over the 1970s. Another manifestation of this moment of high popular concern about world population was the demographic ambition and later the political movement of “ZPG" - zero population growth. This was never achieved, but 1963 was the year that the acceleration of the rate of growth peaked (at 2.2 percent per annum). There has been a decline since then to around ι.ι percent per annum.

In difficult conversation with the reinvigorated politics of population limitation and environmentalism was a new generation of feminist lobbyists active in international politics. It was they who critiqued “population con­trol,” emphasizing coerced measures, and separating out the apparent indi­vidual choice of “family planning.” For complex reasons, partly, but not only, to do with the success of this lobbying, a feminist understanding of the need to limit births, or to be free to choose to do so, was endorsed by the UN. Secretary-General U Thant made widely publicized declarations in 1966 that the international community must accord to parents the right to determine the numbers of their children. The moment crystallized the polyvalence of population politics. U Thant was responding mainly to a Rockefeller initia­tive, whose Population Council had managed to persuade many national leaders to press a change in UN policy not for women's sake, but as a combination of pro-development and anti-communism. The idea of women’s autonomy was grafted onto the program, to some extent still a more expedient than authentic move for many in power. In other respects, long-standing feminist argument ultimately proved remarkably successful in UN circles, whose agencies increasingly affirmed and endorsed women’s reproductive rights, in theory if not always in policy and in practice.

The World Health Organization (WHO) integrated family planning into its primary health care platform in 1968. At the same time the principle and rubric of reproductive rights has become formally universal - that is to say a “human right" - and thus to a large extent part of the West’s self-definition. This proved conceptually and politically complex because the “right” at issue entailed both “freedom” to reproduce and “freedom” not to reproduce at all. Thus, for example, Article 16 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not assert a right to contraception, but its opposite - the right to “found a family.” The extent to which later twentieth-century reproductive freedoms were historically tied to the idea of “Freedom from Hunger,” itself derived from Roosevelt’s mid-twentieth-century “four freedoms,” also needs recognition.^[180]

It was feminist workers, scholars, and thinkers who were perhaps most active in thinking critically through the north-south, east-west politics of family planning, development, population control, gender, and ethnicity.^[181] It was a successful intellectual and political move, and a critical position on population control has become something like an orthodoxy. It is in large part due to this critique that historical memory of controversy looms large in public discussion of population matters. Commentators, politicians, and policymakers in liberal democracies know broadly that “population” is difficult political territory, a no-go zone linked - somehow - to a history of eugenics, racism, compulsory sterilization, and illiberal politics.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the multiple strands of world population politics have twisted again. One phenomenon of the twenty- first century relates to sharply changing demographics: aging populations on the one hand; and disproportionately young populations on the other. The latter has even been nominated as one of the “roots of terrorism.”^[182] While the marker of 7 billion people alerted the world to ongoing growth globally, national fertility decline below local replacement level is also a politicized problem: in Italy, in Japan, and in Eastern Europe.^[183] In the meantime, it is the accelerating population growth in Africa that focuses international and NGO attention. While public statements about popula­tion control have on the whole been difficult for policymakers to declare since the late 1970s, this seems to be turning around, for better or worse. It has taken an issue of the dimensions of global climate change to embolden policymakers to at least discuss population growth as a world problem, even if they fall short of suggesting policies to address it. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) calls for a complex understanding of population dynamics in the context of climate change, including age structure, rural/urban distributions, and household sizes. These axes of analysis should shape discussion of the population-climate nexus, alongside population size.^[184]

A final late modern marker of global economic inequity is the problema- tization of infertility and the new reproductive technologies that address this. To some extent class-defined - though this is moderated by refined health and welfare structures in many liberal democracies - there is a clear north-south division between women still seeking simple technologies to control fertility and those who have access to complex and expensive tech­nologies to overcome infertility. The highly individualized, but nonetheless nationally and internationally politicized field of inter-country adoption and surrogacy is an extension of the phenomenon of (largely) first world infertility. This is, perhaps, the bizarre unfolding of the league of low birth rate nations, a stage of global demographic transition that no one quite expected.

Further reading

Primary

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Sanger, Margaret. “A birth strike to avert world famine.” Birth Control Review 4 (1920). Sauvy, Alfred. “Trois mondes, une planete.” L'Observateur, August 14, 1952.

Secondary

Ahluwalia, Sanjam. Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947. Urbana and Chicago, ii: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Arnold, David. “Official attitudes to population, birth control and reproductive health in India, 1921-1946.” In Sarah Hodges, ed., Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006, pp. 22-50.

Bashford, Alison. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

“Malthus and colonial history.” Journal of Australian Studies 36:1 (2012), 99-110.

Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2002.

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Chandra, Shanta Kohli. The Family Planning Programme in India. Delhi: Mittal, 1987.

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Dowbiggin, Ian. The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Jolly, Margaret. “Other mothers: material ‘insouciance' and the depopulation debate in Fiji and Vanuatu, 1890-1930.” In Kalpana Ram and MargaretJolly, eds., Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific. Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 177-212.

Koven, Seth, and Sonya Michel, eds. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Lee, James Z., and Wang Feng. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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McNeill, William H. Population and Politics Since 1750. Charlottesville, va: University of Virginia Press, 1990.

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