ABSTRACT

Until about ten thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution began, the global population of human beings probably numbered a few million. Settled agriculture allowed population to start rising steadily, but very slowly, so that by AD1 it probably numbered 200-300 million. It reached one billion around 1800, and two billion some time before the outbreak of the Second World War. The four billion mark was reached in 1960 and global population is currently around 6.7 billion (Livi-Bacci 2001).1 It has perhaps always been possible to imagine a global population of human beings, to describe it, albeit in such rudimentary terms, and even attribute different qualities and behaviour to it. The concept of the human species is a very old one, of course, and one which contemporary biology gives an ever more specific understanding and meaning to. However a specifically demographic understanding of the global human population, understood as an integrated population system, has until very recently never been more than a strictly theoretical proposition. For a start, it was simply not possible to study global population, as there were no good

sources of data about it. The figures cited above are intelligent guesswork based on extrapolation from limited sources. Moreover, until the efforts of the United Nations (UN) began at the end of the 1940s, there had been little interest in it. Demography is a relatively recent science, born out of the information and surveillance needs of the modern nation state. Being a statistical discipline in the true sense of the word (MacKenzie 1981) it only developed with the appearance and consolidation of national statistical systems in the most advanced states towards the end of the nineteenth century (Dupâqier and Dupâqier 1985). Accordingly, as a discipline, its concept of population has almost always been banally nationalist (Billig 1995) in the strongest possible sense. It treated each state as comprising a population in its own right, and thus to the twin basic components of the ‘demographic equation’ – fertility (births) and mortality (deaths) were added those of in-and out-migration defined in terms of state boundaries. Until the issue of global population growth first became a concern in the late 1940s,

virtually the entire corpus of scientific literature addressed national state interests, or the application of such interests to lower-level territorial administrative units – cities, counties,

provinces, and so on. This continues to be true. Indeed it is the territorial unit within which people live that has become demography’s object of study, rather than population as a reproductive system. One result of this theoretical weakness, combined with its institutional dependence on the state, has been a tendency for demography to be driven by the prevailing fears and obsessions of the governing classes, concentrating on the proximate causes of any alarming trend in demographic phenomena (Foucault 1989; Teitelbaum and Winter 1985). There has rarely been any shortage of these. Its birth as a modern discipline was closely bound up with eugenics (MacKenzie 1976;

Soloway 1990) and in the early decades of the twentieth century many national demographies joined in the battle for higher fertility in the professional or ‘fitter’ classes, or for stronger population growth than that of rival states (Szreter 1996). There has also been a tendency to understand demographic behaviour in moral terms, resulting either in variants of catastrophism, a tradition well established by Malthus’s original Essay (1970), continued by Spengler’s Decline of the West (1926) and culminating in Ehrlich’s predictions of mass global famine in The Population Bomb (1968). The establishment of what might be thought of as global demography both continued and

challenged this tradition. Reliable statistical knowledge about global population had to wait until the creation of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the development of censuses across the entire planet by its Population Division (UNPD) established in 1946 (Caldwell and Caldwell 1986), although what was to become the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) held its first world conference in 1927, and the Milbank Memorial Fund had later established the Office of Population Research at Princeton. The United Nations’ activities can be seen as the institutional embryo of a global demography, but originally in a highly ambiguous way. Its origin and early fortunes lay less in the material globalization of population processes than in the world superpower status of the post-war United States of America, and the apprehension of its governing class over the geopolitical consequences of population growth in the developing ThirdWorld. In part via the United Nations, but also through the activities of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the US State Department, global demography became a ColdWar weapon. The early statistical work of the UN suggested that population growth in the ThirdWorld was much faster than had been expected (in turn the early data itself proved to be an underestimate). Not only was such global population growth seen as unsustainable, and likely to impede economic, political and social development, but in the context of the Cold War it was also seen as likely to create, literally, a breeding ground for the spread of communism. This was the backdrop to the publication of The Population Bomb in which Ehrlich asserted that global overpopulation was about to make Malthus’ prediction a reality: ‘[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death’ (1968: xi). The fact that Ehrlich was a biologist rather than a demographer did not stop his views having a substantial impact. The answer was seen to lie in encouraging family planning and access to cheap

contraception with the UN’s role shifting from one of data collection and analysis to policy intervention to support family-planning programmes under the auspices of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) established in 1967 with million-dollar funding from the United States. As Demeny notes, from the 1960s to 1980s ‘population policy in the developing world became essentially synonymous with family planning programs’ (2003: 13). The UN established a series ofWorld Population conferences which became intergovernmental conferences from the time of the 1974 Bucharest meeting as demography became more relevant to states’ geopolitical interests.