Alison Bashford
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231147668
- eISBN:
- 9780231519526
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231147668.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
This chapter discusses the issue of migration and mass movement, as the regulation of territory and the global distribution of peoples fall into considerable debate, especially among staunch ...
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This chapter discusses the issue of migration and mass movement, as the regulation of territory and the global distribution of peoples fall into considerable debate, especially among staunch nationalists, liberal internationalists, and lebensraum theorists alike. Inevitably, a global movement of people would entail immigration and emigration restrictions, and more broadly, the problem of racial discrimination. Early legislations on immigration had been passed in several U.S., British, and Australasian nations in an effort to establish a “color line” at national borders, in response to a perceived rapid increase in population growth in Asian nations. Although reliable statistics to prove the latter notion were difficult to come by at the time, it nevertheless encapsulated the modern geopolitics of population, in establishing world population problems as being world migration problems, too.Less
This chapter discusses the issue of migration and mass movement, as the regulation of territory and the global distribution of peoples fall into considerable debate, especially among staunch nationalists, liberal internationalists, and lebensraum theorists alike. Inevitably, a global movement of people would entail immigration and emigration restrictions, and more broadly, the problem of racial discrimination. Early legislations on immigration had been passed in several U.S., British, and Australasian nations in an effort to establish a “color line” at national borders, in response to a perceived rapid increase in population growth in Asian nations. Although reliable statistics to prove the latter notion were difficult to come by at the time, it nevertheless encapsulated the modern geopolitics of population, in establishing world population problems as being world migration problems, too.
Alison Bashford
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231147668
- eISBN:
- 9780231519526
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231147668.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
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 ...
More
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.” This book 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. The text shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.Less
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.” This book 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. The text shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one's person.
