Attila Melegh
Population control and global inequality[1]
Massive population control on a global scale was a new policy problem in the 18th century and it never occurred before in the long history of mankind. It came with the arrival of colonial-capitalism and its inherent logic of a competitive fight over resources locally and globally and the subsequent creation of a hierarchical, largely unequal world economy and society.
These three issues (colonial capitalism, population control and global hierarchies) cannot be separated from each other and this can be also the clue for understanding the internationalism of population control with its 18th century origin and its rise from the late 19th century. It is also important to note that the fight over resources and its links to a hierarchical world economy was worked out through a hierarchical imaginary structured by ideas of racism, and civilizational hierarchies coupled with an understanding of social development based on balances between social and environmental resources and population size. This imaginary is the actual structure on the basis of which actors position(ed) themselves within this movement (or against it) and this explains the politics of population control internationally.
But before we start our analysis it is important to clarify that in this paper population control movement is understood as a broad and complex intellectual movement partially institutionalized, which came into existence after the works of Thomas Malthus around the turn of the 1800s. From the very beginning with its major tenet of balancing population development and social and economic resources Malthusianism has a long history of influencing international and national political decisions from the 19th century (Irish famine, Indian famines in the 1870s, charity regulations). At the end of the 19th century this intellectual movement aiming at reforming societies worldwide, already combined discursively very different strands of thoughts on population development, birth control, eugenics, feminism and immigration and became institutionalized in terms of societies, conferences and journals. At the end of this period, which can be called neo-Malthusianism led to the establishment of international organizations with international political agendas (including United Nations entities) with some international power. This was the peak period of the reform movements on controlling "overpopulation", which then led to some decline during the 1980s and the rather substantial reformulation of the political goals and agendas. In this paper this broad international intellectual movement with varying institutional backgrounds is understood as population control reform movement as it would be misleading to understand the international population control movement as being reduced to international organizations. The relevant international organizations were always in the discursive milieu of a broad intellectual concern on differential "overpopulation" by social groups and the regions of the world. Without the power of these discourses none of them would have come into existence. On the other hand it has to be acknowledged that large-scale research shall be made on the practical "internationalism" of the population control movement which research has been just partially completed and mainly done with regard to the politics of these movements and organizations in Europe and the United States. Thus much has been ignored with regard to the history of these "international" concerns outside this region and especially the interconnections of these developments. This means that this paper is also just a first step toward this aim.
The origin
It would be extremely misleading to claim that the origin of the population control movement was a person and his ideas. The person who, in response to the rise of colonialism and capitalism together, happened to develop ideas of controlling the fertility of "lower" classes locally and globally, was Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). He was strongly embedded into colonial thinking (he was an instructor of colonial administrations) and into the debate over providing social relief to local social classes. (Malthus 1798, 1826, 1960, 1966) His main argument was that without ownership the lower classes have an inherent tendency to populate beyond the demand for their labor and thus endangering the overall social fabric and the position of the upper classes. This was the basis on which he opposed the Poor Law and any kind of social charity improving the situation of the poorer segments of the society:
But whatever steps may be taken on this subject [the poor law, A. M.], it will be allowed that with any prospect of legislating for the poor with success, it is necessary to be fully aware of the natural tendency of the labouring classes of society to increase beyond the demand for their labour or the means of their adequate support, and the effect of this tendency to throw the greatest difficulties in the way of permanently improving their conditions. (Malthus 1960, [1830], 58)
The discourse of the hierarchical value of categories of people locally and around the globe was already there well before Malthus. It then had to be just linked to population statistics, which new area of interest was related to military competition and the creation of "imperial" states within and outside Europe throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries. This combination of hierarchical categories and population statistics on the basis of "checks" and "balances" (checks on population growth and balances with resources) was the "originality" of Malthus who worked out the links not only locally, but as a good instructor of colonial administration also globally. It is just difficult to ignore that Malthus saw the originally English debate only as a step in drawing the map of global population development, which analysis is largely ignored in the history of demography. (Caldwell, 1998)
There are two important interrelated features of Malthusian thinking which have not received much attention and which are important in understanding the globalization of his ideas and the later international reform movement referring to him. One background of his ideas was the awareness of the spread of colonial capitalism throughout the world. This system of dominance destroyed or more precisely subordinated all agrarian systems on the basis of an unequal relationship between industrial capitalism and agrarian economies. This was due to a gap between agrarian and industrial prices, which economic relationship was embedded into larger colonial frameworks and larger and smaller imperialisms (Chayanov, 1986; Levine, 1977, O'Rourke, 1999). The key result of this expansion was not only the creation of large "poor" "delinquent" "'laboring" classes throughout the world (from Latin America to the huge states of Asia) and the subsequent "social-hygenic" problems as perceived by the local colonial or upper classes, but also global, Eurocentric networks enhancing the spread of ideas and information as science (Stepan 1991). The most important factor in the successful globalization of Malthusian ideas was that it was able to combine social and global inequalities into a unified framework via folding social and global classes into a joint hierarchical system on the basis of whose demographic behavior is to be supported. (Melegh 2005, 2006).
As early as 1803 Malthus started developing ideas on global population development and most importantly on folding different societies into a single scale of global hierarchy. The classification of different societies was based on the inverse relationship between the so-called "preventive" brakes (delayed marriage, sexual abstinence) and "positive brakes (wars, epidemics and increased mortality) in view of a balance between resources and an ever-growing population. The hierarchical global scale was not a neutral description, but set up an evaluative differentiation between "naturally healthy" and "naturally unhealthy" countries:
The sum of all these preventive and positive checks, taken together, forms the immediate check to population; and it is evident that, in every country where the whole of the procreative power cannot be called into action, the preventive and the positive checks must vary inversely as each other; that is, in countries either naturally unhealthy, or subject to a great mortality, from whatever cause it may arise, the preventive check will prevail very little. In those countries, on the contrary, which are naturally healthy, and where the preventive check is found to prevail with considerable force, the positive check will prevail very little, or the mortality be very small. (Malthus 1826, I. II. 14.)
In the beginning Malthus basically relied on historical examples, but later he made an attempt to map the populations of the world. Here he "globalized" the British social differentiation between "morally" behaving middle classes and the "overpopulating" labouring classes onto a world scale via setting up a combined historical (temporal) and civilizational scale with an unreachable endpoint of social happiness, which technique of power is another major "invention" of the eighteenth century. (Wolff 1994, Melegh 2006, Böröcz 2003) Malthus made this liberal understanding of the world most clear in the sixth edition (1826) of his essay on the principle of population.
"in modern Europe the positive checks to population growth prevail less, and the preventive checks more than in past times, and in the more uncivilized parts of the world". (Malthus, 1926 Bk.II,Ch.XIII in paragraph II.XIII.41)
This scale is then presented fully in the 1826 edition (Malthus 1826). Under the heading “Of the Checks to Population in the lowest Stage of Human Society” Malthus explains:
The wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have been placed, by the general consent of voyagers, at the bottom of the scale of human beings. Of their domestic habits and manners, however, we have few accounts. Their barren country, and the miserable state in which they live, have prevented any intercourse with them that might give such information; but we cannot be at a loss to conceive the checks to population among a race of savages, whose very appearance indicates them to be half starved, and who, shivering with cold, and covered with filth and vermin, live in one of the most inhospitable climates in the world, without having sagacity enough to provide themselves with such conveniences as might mitigate its severities, and render life in some measure more comfortable. …
On American Indians Malthus has to say the following:
If we do not then consider this apathy of the Americans as a natural defect in their bodily frame, but merely as a general coldness, and an infrequency of the calls of the sexual appetite, we shall not be inclined to give much weight to it as affecting the number of children to a marriage; but shall be disposed to look for the cause of this unfruitfulness in the condition and customs of the women in a savage state.
This is how a form of a liberal social utopia on the need to practice voluntary control over population growth is combined with a civilizational scale and colonial thinking. Though Malthus was not a particularly inventive thinker in this extremely massive cognitive structure Malthus, he nonetheless became an extremely successful thinker due to later developments of world capitalism and some of its intellectual products and due to the simplicity of interventionist, liberal reformist ideas. The latter could be easily based on his biopolitical equations (i.e. the need to intervene to balance resources and population growth) and the impossibility of handling social inequalities on a local and world scale in a capitalist framework. The liberal reformist population policy movement based on Malthusian ideals and emerging in the late 19th and early 20th century then can be divided into five epochs all of which can be characterized by different combinations of political considerations and, reactions, which can be linked into a "success" story of setting up a massive global liberal social movement to achieve effective control over "unnecessary" population growth. This story seems to get to its end nowadays. So it is the right time to look back and analyze the neo-Malthusian internationalism and the reactions to it in the framework of global hierarchies and inequalities.
The five epochs are the following: colonial epoch; establishment of national reform movements from the late 19th century to the 1930s; transformation and internationalization in the 1940s; the rise of an international population control movement from the late 1940s till the early 1980s; loosing the grip since the 1980s. These periods are set up with a special focus on the British and US developments but it is clearly not my intention to understand the movement as simply the globalization of a basically American movement, but to look at the interplay between different actors in different regions and to understand internationalism in the framework of global hierarchies.[2]
The colonial epoch
The international reform movement on global population control merging by the mid 20th century did not reinvent Malthus. Malthus after his death remained on the political and social arena. This was true in British and American political thinking where the issue of the "overpopulating" poor segments of the society was repeated and repeated again (e.g. Thornton, 1846) "Misery", "Pauperism" and very importantly urban social conditions including sanitation, hygiene became more and more important in political discussions. These discussions were coupled with the advance of social analysis based on preset hierarchies (social Darwinism, evolution) and eugenics, which are important links between the Malthusian biopolitics and the later international reform movement. These issues have been widely discussed in historiography of ideas on population control (e.g. Stepan 1991, Quine 1996, Caldwell, 1998; Hodgson, 1991; Szreter, 1993; Greenhalgh, 1996).
What has been raised only very recently however is the Malthusian aspects of politics in a colonial framework. In this period there are "international" interventions, but there was no international movement in the sense of setting up and operating international governmental and non-governmental committees and societies to achieve international goals. There were only colonial powers which dominating vast territories of the world made (sometimes experimenting) decisions on population development.
The most important example can be liberal British political thinking on population development in colonial India. The idea of Malthus on the need to balance population growth of the poor and resources comes back again and again in handling issues of population development in India. Very importantly John Stuart Mill, the liberal philosopher with colonial background made the following argument in his book on the principles of political economy
"Everyone has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people" (Mill 1848: 252 cited by Caldwell 1998, 679 o.)
This argument was radicalized in relation to the colonies where not only the right to give birth to children was debated, but there was also the idea of letting people die in case they cannot support themselves.
This was eloquently clear in the case of the two huge famines in India in the 1860s and 1870s, when the colonial administration came to the conclusion (after several surveys) that there was no need to provide further relief for starving people, because that would just increase the dependency of people and thus the social and political burden. In 1877 Lord Edward Lytton, the governor general of India (and a student of Haileybury, the place where Malthus taught for a longer period training colonial administration) argued that the famine should be solved by the help of the market. The starving population should not be directly helped, because "interestingly" most of the victims came from the poorest segment of the society, which
"has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil" (quoted in Ambirajan 1976: 6 and cited by Caldwell 1998, 683.)
These arguments were replications of the arguments of Malthus with regard to the Poor Law. But there are two other important points. One is that the above described policy is not only a simple Malthusian equation as here the Indian population as a whole is also rejected on racist grounds, which is an important point in the internationalization of the idea of population control. This globally racist rejection of vast populations gives a certain twist in the hierarchical imagination of social and demographic differences as seen originally by Malthus. The British media and civil servants not only wanted to avoid the "burden" of any Indian "Poor Law" but actually they refrained to spend British money on "poor India" and her "black fellows". This can be called then the rejection of a "global Poor Law". According to them it was "a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows" (Davis 2002, 15) Not only relief was rejected (also for the sake of paying the costs of the war against Afghanistan in 1878-1880), but "able" people were pushed into labor camps providing a food ratio with lower calorie then in the Nazi labor camps. Furthermore the camps were located at such a distance from he residence of the starving people that too weak people could not reach these places of "relief" (Davis 2002). So extermination of impoverished and racially excluded people on a massive scale was also a part of the neo-Malthusian colonial policy of the British in India.