To inherit the Earth. Imagining world population, from the yellow peril to the population bomb

@article{Connelly2006ToIT,  title={To inherit the Earth. Imagining world population, from the yellow peril to the population bomb},  author={Matthew Connelly},  journal={Journal of Global History},  year={2006},  volume={1},  pages={299 - 319},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:154909241}}
This article narrates the development of a set of ideas and provocative imagery about population growth and movement that has shaped the way people think about world politics. It represented humanity in terms of populations that could and should be controlled to prevent degeneration and preserve civilization. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this discursive tradition supported a series of political projects that aimed to either exclude those deemed able to subsist on less and… 

30 Citations

Colonial Population and the Idea of Development

Abstract This article traces the shift in demographic thought from the Malthusian framework that predominated in English-language political economic writings of the nineteenth century to demographic

Population, Geopolitics, and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century

In assessing population as an intergovernmental and world issue, historians have generally focused on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction. To expect the history of population to be solely

Catastrophic Populations and the Fear of the Future: Malthus and the Genealogy of Liberal Economy

This article argues that Foucault’s account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of

The "World Migration Congress" of 1926 and the Limits of Socialist Internationalism

Abstract:In recent years, scholars doing research on the anticommunist and social democratic tradition developed an interpretation in which socialist internationalism is portrayed not as opposed to

The Cold War in the longue durée : global migration, public health, and population control

The period coinciding with the Cold War can be shown to have witnessed changes that were comparable to the impact of global nuclear war, only these changes unfolded over decades and had nearly the opposite demographic effects.

Between the West and Asia: “Humanistic” Japanese Family Planning in the Cold War

The article shows that visions of Japanese actors were directly informed by Japan's delicate position in Cold War geopolitics, between the imagined West represented by the United States and “underdeveloped” Asia, at a time when Japan was striving to (re)establish its position in world politics and economics.

Not Just Against Overpopulation: White Supremacy in Population Control Initiatives

Despite extensive scholarship on mid‐twentieth‐century global family planning, the motivations of American elites in launching these initiatives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa remain debated.

Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

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:

THE LAW OF GROWTH

This paper addresses the conditions and implications of aggregating humans into ‘populations’ through statistical means. Engaging with statistical constructions of world population and population

World population growth over millennia: Ancient and present phases with a temporary halt in-between

Enormous growth of the world population during the last two centuries and its present slowing down pose questions about precedents in history and broader forces shaping the population size.

20 References

Rise and Demise of the Territorial State

Students and practitioners of international politics are at present in a strange predicament. Complex though their problems have been in the past, there was then at least some certainty about the

Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America

After World War II, U.S. policy experts-convinced that unchecked population growth threatened global disaster-successfully lobbied bipartisan policy-makers in Washington to initiate federally-funded

The myth of population control : family, caste, and class in an Indian village

human population planning wikipedia human population planning is the practice of intentionally controlling the rate of growth of a human population historically human population planning has been

Hygiene, Population Sciences and Population Policy: a Totalitarian Menace?

Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860–1945. Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 348 pp., £19.95, ISBN 0–521–57434 X.

By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age by Paul Boyer (review)

Originally published in 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to explore the cultural 'fallout' in America during the early years of the atomic age. Paul Boyer argues that the major

The Social and Political Context of Population Forecasting

The subject of forecasting abounds in paradoxes. All statistical data refer to the past, yet for purposes of action only the future counts, and there is no necessary connection between past and

Limiting Population Growth and the Ford Foundation Contribution

This book provides a comprehensive historical review of the Ford Foundations investment in the development of graduate education in the field of population. Academic population programs were

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers