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.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Life and Earth
• Part I The Long Nineteenth Century
• 1 Confined in Room: A Spatial History of Malthusianism
• Part II The Politics of Earth, 1920s and 1930s
• 2 War and Peace: Population, Territory, and Living Space
• 3 Density: Universes with Definite Limits
• 4 Migration: World Population and the Global Color Line
• 5 Waste Lands: Sovereignty and the Anticolonial History
of World Population
• Part III The Politics of Life, 1920s and 1930s
• 6 Life on Earth: Ecology and the Cosmopolitics 
of Population
• 7 Soil and Food: Agriculture and the Fertility of the Earth
• 8 Sex: The Geopolitics of Birth Control
• 9 The Species: Human Difference and Global Eugenics
• Part IV Between One World and Three Worlds, 1940s to 1968
• 10 Food and Freedom: A New World of Plenty?
• 11 Life and Death: The Biopolitical Solution to a 
Geopolitical Problem
• 12 Universal Rights? Population Control and the Powers 
of Reproductive Freedom
• Conclusion: The Population Bomb in the Space Age
• Notes
• Archival Collections