Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century

2015
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan

The twentieth century was an exceptional period in the history of world population: it grew faster than it had before or has since, and became the subject of a new science --- demography --- and a critical arena of intervention for states, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations. This dissertation examines how population became a subject of expertise for scientists in North America and Western Europe between the world wars, and how that expertise both supported and challenged postwar programs that aimed to shape the world's population by limiting fertility, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists and policy makers in North America and Western Europe increasingly understood social, political, and economic issues in biological terms, and viewed population engineering --- through the control of fertility and immigration --- as a key tool of governance. Between the world wars, scientists in a variety of fields began to analyze population dynamics, including both the quantity of individuals and the socioeconomic, racial, and national composition of populations (their "quality"). After World War II, governments and international and nongovernmental agencies increasingly sought demographic expertise to assist with planning both for population --- to accommodate expected changes in population size and/or composition --- and of population --- to engineer changes in population size and/or composition. Policy makers, philanthropists, and business leaders in the U.S. developed two new overpopulation discourses, each linking population growth to global disaster. The first was economic, attributing global poverty and inequality to rapid population growth in the global south. The second was environmental, attributing pollution and resource depletion directly to population growth. The proponents of these discourses called on demography for support, and raised substantial funds for demographic and biomedical research aimed at stemming fertility, particularly in the global south. Yet demographic research consistently failed to provide conclusive support for these overpopulation discourses. The dissertation concludes in 1984, when the postwar overpopulation discourses dissolved under political pressure from both the left --- which called for structural solutions to poverty and environmental degradation --- and the right --- which called for neoliberal market-based solutions.