Global Population - Alison Bashford

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Résumé :
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.

Biographie:
Alison Bashford is a historian whose many books connect imperial and world history with medical and environmental histories. She is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, and has taught at Harvard University, the Australian National University, and, for many years, at the University of Sydney. In 2011, she won the Cantemir Prize with Philippa Levine for The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics.

Sommaire:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Life and EarthPart I. The Long Nineteenth Century1. Confined in Room: A Spatial History of Malthusianism Part II. The Politics of Earth, 1920s and 1930s2. War and Peace: Population, Territory, and Living Space3. Density: Universes with Definite Limits4. Migration: World Population and the Global Color Line5. Waste Lands: Sovereignty and the Anticolonial History of World PopulationPart III. The Politics of Life, 1920s and 1930s6. Life on Earth: Ecology and the Cosmopolitics of Population7. Soil and Food: Agriculture and the Fertility of the Earth8. Sex: The Geopolitics of Birth Control 9. The Species: Human Difference and Global EugenicsPart IV. Between One World and Three Worlds, 1940s to 196810. Food and Freedom: A New World of Plenty?11. Life and Death: The Biopolitical Solution to a Geopolitical Problem12. Universal Rights? Population Control and the Powers of Reproductive FreedomConclusion: The Population Bomb in the Space AgeNotesArchival CollectionsIndex

With this engaging, wide-ranging, and impressively researched book that tracks the global history of the 'world population problem' - including fascinating forays into debates on eugenics, birth control, colonization, soil, food, agriculture, and the carrying capacity of the earth - Bashford joins a very select group of historians who have recently taken the familiar narratives of world-history in an entirely new direction: towards the historical origins of modern 'planetary consciousness.' A timely and brilliant piece of work. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Professor, University of Chicago