1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910789147003321

Autore

Bashford Alison <1963->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Columbia University Press, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

1-78539-272-7

0-231-51952-4

Descrizione fisica

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

Collana

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

Columbia studies in international and global history

Classificazione

QU 300

Disciplina

304.6

Soggetti

Population - Social aspects

Population - Economic aspects

Population - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.