Alison Bashford

Global biopolitics and the history of world health

Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of play. This substantive history of world health and world population is analysed as sites for thinking about global bio-politics; and the article looks seriously at the interwar period as a point at which ‘the world’ (or Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’) was already challenging the idea of ‘inter/national’.

Asylum–Seekers and National Histories of Detention

The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum–seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia’s race–based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine–detention and the internment of “enemy aliens” in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum–seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non–criminal and often non–citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum–seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia’s histories of detention.

Global population : history, geopolitics, and life on earth

Acknowledgments Introduction: Life and EarthPart I. The Long Nineteenth Century1. Confined in Room: A Spatial History of Malthusianism Part II. The Politics of Earth, 1920s and 1930s2. War and Peace: Population, Territory, and Living Space3. Density: Universes with Definite Limits4. Migration: World Population and the Global Color Line5. Waste Lands: Sovereignty and the Anticolonial History of World PopulationPart III. The Politics of Life, 1920s and 1930s6. Life on Earth: Ecology and the Cosmopolitics of Population7. Soil and Food: Agriculture and the Fertility of the Earth8. Sex: The Geopolitics of Birth Control 9. The Species: Human Difference and Global EugenicsPart IV. Between One World and Three Worlds, 1940s to 196810. Food and Freedom: A New World of Plenty?11. Life and Death: The Biopolitical Solution to a Geopolitical Problem12. Universal Rights? Population Control and the Powers of Reproductive FreedomConclusion: The Population Bomb in the Space AgeNotesArchival CollectionsIndex

At the border contagion, immigration, nation

In recent publications and as an ongoing project I have been pursuing the idea that public health and infectious disease control have been part of the legal and technical constitution of ‘undesirable’ and prohibited entrants: an under‐recognised means by which individuals and certain populations have been specifically classified and excluded from the territory and body politic of Australia. This article surveys and summarises these ideas and points to some of the recent redirections. These include a growing interest in the legacy of twentieth‐century medico‐legal border control on current (highly discriminating) regulations governing entry; a concern to make admissions under immigration and health law and regulation conceptually central; and the more familiar focus on race‐based exclusions. Overall, my aim is to integrate the history of health and infectious disease control into the already extensive study of immigration and citizenship. Part of the effect of joint infectious disease and immigration regulation over the twentieth century has been the imagining, as well as the technical implementation of the island‐nation as ostensibly secure, racially and territorially.

Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation

This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a pathologized, contaminated and racialized other. That ‘whiteness’, ‘purity’ and ‘national hygiene’ which was actively sought in the early 20th century functioned through both public health and immigration regulations: the practice of quarantine was the point at which these came together. Quarantine assisted in the imagining of the new island-nation as an integrated whole, and in the imagining (and literal pursuit) of its ‘whiteness’.

Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years

There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the idea of demographic transitions and political economy, and subsequent links between aid, development, family planning, and various international agencies. A third is the history of reproductive and bodily rights, feminism, and birth control, which has been analyzed with respect to the history of technology, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the history of nationalism, and to some extent the history of internationalism. The political economy aspects of the population question tend chronologically to bookend the feminist narrative, with Malthus at the late eighteenth-century end and Cold War political economy of third world development at the twentieth-century end. A fourth strand is a burgeoning intellectual history of demography, social science, and economic theory.

Population, Geopolitics, and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century

In assessing population as an intergovernmental and world issue, historians have generally focused on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction. To expect the history of population to be solely or even primarily about reproduction and individual health, however, is to miss entirely other lines of thought within which population, and in particular world population, came to be a problem for international organizations of the twentieth century. The problematization of population often raised questions about and plans for migration, colonial expansion of territory, and the properties of land and soil—in other words, geopolitics. This article shows how the population problem was precisely a geopolitical problem for the late League of Nations and the early United Nations. The article discusses two institutional occasions on which population as a spatial and security problem came onto the agenda of international organizations. The fi rst case involved a series of meetings held by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, resulting in the document Peaceful Change (1937). The second case arose in the early years of UNESCO when Julian Huxley and others attempted to raise population as a major world issue.

Thinking historically about public health

This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, explaining public health policy of the past purely in medical or epidemiological terms ignores evidence that it was rarely, if ever, designed solely on medical grounds at the time.

Pacific Histories: ocean, land, people

Introducing the review forum on Nicholas Thomas’s Islanders: the Pacific in the age of empire in 2012, Doug Munro observed a turn from scarcity to abundance in general histories of the Pacific. One of the latest offerings, Pacific Histories: ocean, land, people, is billed as the ‘first comprehensive account to place the Pacific Islands, the Pacific Rim and the Pacific Ocean into the perspective of world history’. It follows on the heels of Matt Matsuda’s 2012 Pacific Worlds: a history of seas, people, and cultures – noted by its Journal of Pacific History (JPH) reviewer for its connection of Pacific Islands and Asian histories – as well as David Igler’s 2013 The Great Ocean: Pacific worlds from Captain Cook to the gold rush – noted for drawing on Matsuda’s ‘methodology of local/regional/global connection’ and for its own focus on an eastern, American Pacific. Outside the pages of JPH, readers will have noted the developing concern to bring Pacific history into dialogue with the ‘Atlantic world’ and with transnational/global/world history, as exemplified in essays by Katrina Gulliver and Damon Salesa. For helping to critically expand the dialogue concerning different models and perspectives, and different ways of focussing or practising Pacific histories, I thank all three reviewers and both editors, on behalf of JPH, for their thought-provoking contributions.

‘The Age of Universal Contagion’: History, Disease and Globalization

Medicine at the Border explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the ‘age of universal contagion’.1 This book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health. Together, the authors show how infectious disease has been central to the political, legal and commercial history of nationalism, colonialism, and internationalism, as well as to the twentieth-century invention of a newly imagined space for regulation called ‘the world’.