In 1944, when Princeton demographer Frank Notestein presented the concept of the “demographic transition,” he unwittingly anticipated the assumptions of modernization theorists. The transition that the theory bore in its name, that is, the great historical shift from tradition to modernity, would become a central object of inquiry for American social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 1 At a conference of development planners held in advance of the establishment of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, Notestein explained that the rise and decline of population growth in any society mapped onto the story of modernity's emergence and maturation.Footnote 2
The developmental framework he offered turned away from the Malthusian interpretation of population that had reigned in the nineteenth century. First writing in 1798, Malthus had identified certain peoples and places as morally and culturally inferior to others, but he never thought to plot different regions of the world onto a linear narrative of development. He pointed to population growth as an elemental human dilemma across time and place. By the mid-twentieth century, however, demographers came to see overpopulation quite differently: it resulted from the historically distinct conditions of colonial rule. This article narrates the story of this intellectual change.
It is worth paying attention to ideas about population because they offered the foundation for various Cold War-era theories of development. Since the 1980s, when both neoliberal and post-Marxist, post-development critics pronounced its death, development has become a lively subject of scholarly enquiry.Footnote 3 One post-development critic described it as an “illusion” from which we were, by the 1990s, at last escaping. “The ‘Third World,’” Arturo Escobar provocatively proclaimed, “has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post-World War II period.”Footnote 4 These discourses bore such weight that they convinced many in the Third World of their own underdevelopment. Later scholars have taken the intellectual and political history of development more seriously, examining how it influenced policy and what it meant for theorists and practitioners.Footnote 5 Most recent work has turned away from a preoccupation with the intellectual foundations of development and has instead focused on the ways in which actors in aid-recipient countries have contested the meaning and objectives of development in the context of their local political and intellectual histories.Footnote 6
Our understanding of development has thus acquired much nuance since the days of Escobar and company. Yet in the literature on American development thought, in particular, there remains a tendency to assume that, if not an outright illusion, then development was a paradigm disembodied from the places it sought to explain: the underdeveloped, traditional, or Third World. When we seek to understand how American development theorists formulated their abstract conceptions of social change—beginning with their dichotomy between the traditional and the modern—the scholarship merely refers us back to preexisting abstractions and ideologies, like the American political tradition or a legacy rooted in the Enlightenment. Ironically, by ignoring the global interconnections out of which ideas like modernization and development emerged, scholars reinforce rather than undermine the dichotomy between developed and developing worlds.Footnote 7 Furthermore, while offering a strong sense of the unsettling consequences of U.S.-sponsored development projects, they sanitize the processes that gave rise to the idea of development based on the assumption that theory precedes practice.Footnote 8
Social scientific concepts do not, of course, offer a precise map of the social world, but the ideas development theorists devised did have something to do with global conditions of their time. The narrative of development was no doubt a historical product of power and the human imagination. But I think we should be careful not to trivialize the violent economic, environmental, and political circumstances or the stark disparities in the material conditions of humanity from the nineteenth century onwards, which made the concept of development a plausible lens of interpretation.Footnote 9 I draw this point into focus here by looking closely at the relationship between British colonial and U.S. development theory.
Existing historiography has offered us feeble tools to account for the coincidence of the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act and Truman's call for U.S. investment in development during his Point Four address; the two moments bookend the same decade of the Second World War. Because scholars have either failed or refused to connect American development theory to colonial precedents, we get the impression that they emerged independently as a simple matter of course, during the era of decolonization, from the shared belief that history is progressive or certain peoples are more civilized than others. Focusing on demographic ideas about India—an exemplar of Malthus’ principle of population in the nineteenth century and of a land in demographic transition by the mid-twentieth—this story instead shows how different development concepts arose out of a dialogue between British colonial, Indian nationalist, and American thinkers. The particular economic and political moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both motivated and enabled this exchange.
I trace here how social scientists came to argue that colonial rule induced an unprecedented decline in mortality rates in densely populated regions of the colonial world, igniting a population boom.Footnote 10 Notestein and his Princeton colleague Kingsley Davis saw the decline of mortality as the first of two transitions in demographic history. In brief, they proposed a three-phased process of population change. In the first, premodern stage, people produced many children, but they also died rapidly, leading to long-term stability in population size. But with the advance of “the whole process of modernization,” as Notestein put it, a decline in mortality led to a transitional population boom. Indirect or direct Western influence in the form of colonialism enabled this decline in the death rate through improved governance and the transmission of medical and communication technologies. Fertility remained high, however, because it was rooted in a culture resistant to change. As transitional societies moved further along the path of modernization, Notestein and Davis predicted, they would repeat the experience of Europe and its settler colonies. Demographic stability would then return under the modern stage of low fertility and low mortality.Footnote 11
The story was far too elegant. In fact, the effects of colonial rule on mortality were mixed. In India, from the establishment of the census in the 1870s until the 1920s, mortality was egregiously high, and population grew at only .4 percent a year. This resulted in part from the transmission of disease linked to irrigation projects and the expansion of transport systems under colonial rule, in addition to factors like poor living standards and ineffective village sanitation.Footnote 12 Historical demographers estimate high death rates in the period before the census as a result of recurrent famines and epidemics.Footnote 13 As for fertility, in India as well as China and Japan, averages varied over time and locality, but they were generally moderate, not high, before the twentieth century.Footnote 14
Recognizing these contradictions does not mean we should smugly dismiss demographic or development theories as mere illusions of big minds, as ideas so powerful that they captivated the objects of Western paternalism. In what follows, I consider how debates about the problems of disease and famine in British colonial India stimulated a reinterpretation of ideas about demographic change among social scientists. These debates arose in the context of a heightened fear of colonial revolt and against an anti-colonial critique of British political economic policy. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw a series of global economic crises. The push for immigration restriction within the United States, like the Indian nationalist attack on colonial political economy, responded to the social dislocations that liberal economic policy in this era had engendered.Footnote 15 With India as an influential point of reference, American writers explained the dangers of immigration with the premise of a demographic transition. Thus while the concept of demographic development did not represent anything intrinsic to the non-Western world, it did emerge in dialogue with material and political conditions, out of an actual encounter with nature and the Other.
DISEASE AND SANITATION
The model of India has long played a central role in the shaping of demographic thought. Several prominent theorists of population maintained close connections with the British colonial project there. Malthus himself taught colonial bureaucrats as a professor of political economy at the East India Company College in Haileybury.Footnote 16 Not only a proverbial land of famine, since the early nineteenth century India was seen as a major world exporter of disease, another of Malthus’ principal “positive checks.”Footnote 17
In this period, attitudes towards disease were distant from those that would reign in the era of development. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British writers tended to associate the colonial encounter with the spread of mortality from disease, not its amelioration.Footnote 18 European medical observers in India and elsewhere made sense of the miserable health conditions of Europeans—and often the cultural inferiority of Indians—based on the assumption that climate was a fundamental determinant of human health and behavior. The significance they attributed to geographic differences encouraged European medical experts to draw upon indigenous medical practices to facilitate the assimilation of Europeans to local climatic conditions.Footnote 19
If Britain and its colonies were basically unalike, different places requiring the adoption of different medical principles, then the two could not so simply occupy succeeding moments in the same story of development. But increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, environmentalist understandings of disease, while persisting to some degree, came into disrepute. Within institutions of sanitary improvement, administrators tended to emphasize the significance of social practices, which could be learned through instruction, in encouraging the spread or suppression of disease.Footnote 20 This revised way of thinking made it possible to imagine the sanitary states of India and England as different moments on a common continuum.
It was an intellectual shift intimately tied to a preoccupation with the health of the British army in India and military health statistics. In the aftermath of the 1857–1858 Rebellion, the fear of indigenous uprising led colonial authorities, now under the direction of the crown, to rely more heavily on British troops, despite the fact that they were more expensive and died at higher rates than Indian soldiers. Nearly a quarter of the entire British army—between fifty-five and seventy thousand soldiers—would be stationed in India until the end of the century.Footnote 21 In 1859, at the instigation of Florence Nightingale, the British colonial government established the investigatory Royal Commission on the State of the Army, which created a set of foundational institutions for sanitary improvement in India. The Commission's members readily admitted that “Apart therefore from the question of humanity, the introduction of an efficient system of hygiène in India is of essential importance to the interests of the empire.”Footnote 22
The Royal Commission insisted that the imperial quandary of army mortality could be solved, sharply challenging the attitude of climatic determinism. They drew attention to the fact that mortality rates varied highly among different social groups. Ordinary soldiers fared the worst, while European civilians were the best off, and army officers stood in between. Meanwhile, native troops experienced mortality rates nearly equal to those of English civil servants when they lived in their own homes, but suffered from disease when stationed elsewhere. They argued that only differences in social habits and living conditions—not skin color or a lack of physical and cultural adaption to the environment—could explain the data.Footnote 23 “It is natural to us to seek a scape-goat for every neglect, and climate has been made to play this part ever since we set foot in India…” as Florence Nightingale put it in her praise of the report. “One most important result of the inquiry of the Royal Commission has been to destroy this bugbear….”Footnote 24
What is significant for this story is how the model of the army encouraged investigators and administrators to see India's demographic predicament and future differently than before. “[I]t is not for the soldier alone we speak,” as Nightingale would add in her commentary on results of the Royal Commission's inquiry. “The report has a much deeper meaning and intent than this: it aims at nothing less than to bring the appliances of a higher civilization to the natives of India.”Footnote 25 Practically speaking, the colonial state would not intervene aggressively in civilian sanitary practices until the end of the nineteenth century, with the severe response to the plague epidemic of 1896–1897.Footnote 26 What the Royal Commission did do was establish a system of civilian data collection within the provinces.
If, John Caldwell has pointed out, “Generations of British administrators and generations of reports ensured that India was known to Western researchers in a way that no other agrarian civilization was,” the project of sanitary improvement contributed to this fact.Footnote 27 Recognizing that poor hygiene among civilians affected the health of the soldiers who necessarily interacted with them, the Royal Commission established a system of provincial sanitary commissions.Footnote 28 Staffed by members of the Indian Medical Service, the commissions, which held only advisory powers, conducted regular tours and collected vital statistics for the provinces.Footnote 29 While the data were usually crude, they nonetheless provided information and analyses unavailable in the census returns. Census report writers, as well as later demographers like Kingsley Davis, relied on them in their work.Footnote 30 Given, however, that “the main object of registration” was not knowledge in itself but “to obtain data for sanitary procedure,” as Lord Salisbury, the director of the Statistics and Commerce Department insisted, the system was a failure.Footnote 31 The Army Sanitary Commission (ASC) frequently complained that the provincial commissioners it oversaw did nothing more than collect data.Footnote 32
As mortality rates within the native and European armies declined, the ASC repeatedly pointed to its successes as evidence that concerted efforts to improve civilian sanitation—not just data collection—would pay off. Between the early nineteenth century and beginning of the First World War, mortality rates dropped by nearly 90 percent among European soldiers in the tropics, including those in India.Footnote 33 By the late 1870s, sanitation administrators were able to argue that improving the dismal civilian health rates simply required applying the regime already enacted within the army, including “discipline and medical supervision, with moderate supply of food” along with adequate sanitary arrangements, like proper drainage and the “trench system of latrines.”Footnote 34 “The contrast between the former and present death-rates of British and native troops in Bengal,” the commissioners asserted in an 1879 annual memorandum “is proof sufficient of what would be the result of sanitary improvement in the dwellings and surroundings of the civil population.”Footnote 35
Comparing the vital statistical data of different social groups offered further evidence for the benefits of applying the army sanitation regimen among civilians. While death rates of native troops in India declined far more slowly than those of European troops, mortality data from the period of the Great Famine in Madras suggested that native troops were much better off than the civilian population. Thus racial constitution was not the question, and sanitary improvement could mitigate the human devastation from inadequate food supply.Footnote 36 The ASC sometimes drew attention as well to the example of the prisons, where authorities offered inmates proper shelter and forbade them from sleeping on the damp, “malaria-producing,” and snake-infested ground. Expanding these regulations beyond the prisons, the commissioners suggested, could lead to an improvement in civilian mortality rates.Footnote 37
The model of the army revealed that India's sanitary future did not have to diverge from that of England, as Colonel Henry Yule argued in an 1888 report to Government of India. He called for the restructuring of the country's ineffective system of public health, and as a member of the Council of India who had sat for several years on the ASC, Yule commanded the confidence of the secretary of state.Footnote 38 “Disease, the blame of which was laid chiefly upon climate,” he argued, pointing to the statistical data on the European and native armies, “has been shown by the greatly improved health of the educated Anglo-Indian population to have been really a matter most largely dependent on evil personal habits and evil sanitary conditions.” By downplaying the importance of geographic locality to mortality rates, Yule could envision England's present state of public health as India's future. “As a matter of fact, the health of the population, when measures of sanitation such as have now become usual in England are carried out, has usually become very much the same as England.”Footnote 39
To be sure, not everyone within the Indian sanitary administration was optimistic about the prospect of reducing mortality rates, and the ASC made efforts to police against such dissent. “It is an easy thing to write down fever as a preventable cause of death,” Mr. Planck, the sanitary commissioner for the Northwest Provinces and Oude, wrote in his 1877 report, “and I do it more as an expression of quality generally accepted as true, than from any ardent belief that life as ordered, or suffered, or passed by the mankind of the province can usually escape the evils of fever disease.” He insisted that the volatility of temperature, the variable levels of moisture, the abundance of malaria-producing localities, in addition to unfavorable habits of life in the province were “too powerful, permanent, and real as hurtful agents to permit any hope of preventing fever prevalence.” For the ASC's commentators, Plank's climatic determinism was terribly outmoded. “Now all this might have been written by a medical author in the dark ages regarding Europe of his time,” they chastised, “and it might have been written in regard to London itself at a much more recent date.” It did not, however, belong within India's present administration.Footnote 40
Nonetheless, for sanitation administrators, reducing mortality from disease was no trivial matter; it required a total social transformation, the creation of a fundamentally different, more civilized sort of person. Given that the spread of disease was linked, not only to public, but also to private practices in private space, sanitation efforts could only be effective if the populace internalized scientific values and reconfigured the interior of their homes.Footnote 41 This necessity was not a problem peculiar to India, however. “Whatever advance has taken place in sanitary improvement in England within the last 40 years has … been accomplished in the teeth not only of apathy, ignorance, and prejudice, but of resistance to change of habits, and to expenditure of money,” members of the ASC stressed in their commentary on 1878 Madras sanitation report. “And so in India,” or anywhere else, “similar difficulties must be encountered and overcome in improving public health….”Footnote 42
At least this was the idea. We should not, of course, mistake the imagination of sanitary administrators for what they actually did. In fact, the hope of cultivating sanitary discipline confronted a range of obstacles. Scholars of Indian public health have disagreed about the character of political relations between colonial administrators and the indigenous population. However, they have collectively shown that the subordination of medicine to military imperatives and demands of the European civil population, along with a reluctance to make financial commitments, tended to limit sanitation efforts. In addition, popular opposition to various sanitation schemes and their costs curbed ambitions to interfere too aggressively in indigenous practices.Footnote 43 Nonetheless, we can reasonably see the second half of the century as a period in which, with the decline in levels of European mortality and the expansion of demographic data collection, colonial medical observers increasingly devalued the significance of both locality and local medical knowledge. This shift in relations of power and geographic thinking was a precondition for the rise of a linear narrative of demographic development.
The actual decline of mortality rates in India, however, which were abysmal until the 1920s, was not a precondition.Footnote 44 In fact, as Kingsley Davis’ work showed, between the 1880s and the 1910s, the annual death rate increased from forty per thousand to nearly fifty per thousand.Footnote 45 While the ASC was thus rarely upbeat in its discussions of civilian sanitation, writers more distant from the mundane details of sanitary administration tended to offer a story of progressive change. The authors of an 1889 India Office report, commissioned by Secretary of State Cross, insisted, “In 1858 nothing had been done for sanitary reform outside of a very few large cities and cantonments; and no attempt had been made to ascertain the facts regarding death and disease over the country.” But since then, the registration of vital statistics, which had been gradually extended over nearly the whole of India, was becoming more accurate. While admitting there was much work to be done, the report writers claimed that towns and cities had enacted sanitary reform, “and even in villages the observance of simple sanitary rules has been inculcated.”Footnote 46
In his 1891 census report, J. A. Baines suggested that India was in a period of demographic “probation.” He projected a decline in mortality, noting that medical dispensaries were “growing in popular favour against the rivalry of the herbalist and exorciser,” and that advances were being made as a result of the colonial administration's efforts to vaccinate against smallpox, prevent the spread of cholera, and prohibit religious gatherings where disease frequently spread. On the other hand, Baines observed, the persistence of long-standing attitudes towards marriage suggested that fertility rates would not decline soon. “But can there be any doubt as to the result towards which all these provisions tend?” he asked rhetorically. The answer of course was massive population growth.Footnote 47 This was a story that many others would repeat.Footnote 48
FAMINE
Like the thinking about climate and constitution in early-nineteenth-century medical thought, Malthus’ ideas highlighted the constraints that nature imposed on humanity. For Malthus, the principle of population and the problem of scarcity that it implied were unchanging aspects of the human condition. But by the early twentieth century, the predominant way of thinking had changed. “Many contemporary writers who are somewhat dubious about the applicability of the Malthusian scheme to the Western world of today,” as American demographer E. F. Penrose explained in the 1930s, “believe that it represents the situation in many Asiatic countries.”Footnote 49 Humanity's struggle against nature for survival was not, in other words, a trans-historical law; it represented a particular moment in the past of the West and the present of the underdeveloped regions of the world.
This shift in thinking was enabled by two material transformations in the late nineteenth century: first, the precipitous decline of fertility rates across Western Europe, which further undermined Malthus’ increasingly discredited theory,Footnote 50 and second, most relevant to this story, the rise of famine as a problem peculiar to the colonial world.Footnote 51
During the famines in India and other parts of the colonial world in the late nineteenth century, the massive devastation to human life followed from the increasingly rigid adherence among many officials to the policy of laissez-faire, which, at best, could only alleviate famine in those regions able to compete in the international market.Footnote 52 As Beverly Silver and Giovanni Arrighi have argued, following Karl Polanyi, the political and economic subordination of the colonies in this period constrained the power of local actors to protect society from the ravages of impossible efforts to create a self-regulating market.Footnote 53 However, the local response to the famines was not passive. Both peasants and townspeople engaged in a range of famine-related crimes in various parts of British India, such as looting as well as food riots, often along the railways that exported grain.Footnote 54 And among intellectuals, the famines helped inspire the now familiar critique of British economic policy, which highlighted India's historically specific, subordinate position as a colony.Footnote 55
What I want to highlight is how a dialogue that followed from this challenge to British economic policy encouraged a new way of thinking about population, the discovery of which, as Foucault pointed out, enabled the discovery of the economy.Footnote 56 Social scientists came to believe that the plight of overpopulation and famine from which India was suffering was not rooted in an unchanging law of nature; it resulted from the particular historical experience of nations first embarking on the path toward civilization under the guidance of a colonial state.
Malthus famously argued that humanity, like all “animated life,” tended to produce children far faster than it produced food. Scarcity was hence an inexorable aspect of the human condition, and only sexual restraint, vice, misery, and famine ensured the balance between population and food supply.Footnote 57 His theory deeply informed the thinking of the colonial bureaucrats and social scientists who observed and oversaw the famines that killed millions, while devastating the rural economy, in the first decades of crown rule.Footnote 58 For the 1880 Famine Commission, for example, which turned into a mouthpiece for the administration of the Viceroy Lord Lytton, completely avoiding famine-related deaths was “untenable.”Footnote 59 “There must always be suffering and want which will escape notice,” the commissioners noted in their analysis of the famines that took place in southern and western India at the end of the 1870s. The famines under the British Raj, like those that blighted India under Company Rule and in precolonial times, they claimed, resulted from the whims of nature and the backwardness of the country's own people.Footnote 60
The practical rejection of this argument was not new. Despite their increasing rhetorical submission to the doctrine of laissez-faire in the early nineteenth century, during earlier famines and subsistence crises, colonial officials under the East India Company had offered famine relief and imposed both indirect and direct regulations of the grain market.Footnote 61 During the 1837–1838 famine in north India, the famine-affected engaged in crime and collective mobilizations; in this context, colonial officials assumed responsibility, seeking to affirm their legitimacy, avoid disorder, and preserve state revenues.Footnote 62
What was innovative in the late nineteenth century was the rise, alongside the familiar food riots and famine-related crime, of a social scientific critique of famine that mobilized the extensive state statistical data on India.Footnote 63 In 1876, the Indian nationalist leader Dadabhai Naoroji read his “Poverty of India” before the Bombay Branch of the East India Association. “It is not the pitiless operations of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless actions of British policy … that is destroying India,” Naoroji charged, drawing on state statistics to prove his point. He highlighted the perversity of proclaiming the benefits of government non-intervention under the wasteful and exploitive administrative system of the colonial state. In Britain, Naoroji's “drain theory” helped shape the thinking of colonial critics like William Digby and Henry Hyndman who, like Naoroji, insisted that India's famines resulted from a historically specific condition under the political economic structures of colonialism.Footnote 64
Defenders of British rule objected, arguing that the real cause of India's famines was not colonial misrule but population growth, an expression of benevolent colonial governance. W. W. Hunter, the director general of statistics for India and editor of the Imperial Gazetter, put forward this alternative narrative in his 1881 work of economic history, England's Work in India. Opening with the line “British rule is again upon its trial,” he left no doubt that he sought to challenge those “who dispute whether our supremacy in the East is a gain either to ourselves or the peoples over whom we rule.” Chiding Hyndman in particular, he remarked, “We cannot but wonder that patriotic Englishmen who have never been in India … should head their essays with such titles as “Bleeding to Death.”Footnote 65
While Hunter acknowledged the unsavory economic consequences of British rule, he insisted that these resulted, not from misrule but from enlightened British efforts to reduce mortality. “By degrees, as the English conscience awoke more fully to its responsibilities in India, it has endeavoured to combat the other two ancient devastators” in addition to war: pestilence and famine. As a result, “One by one, the old checks on an Asiatic population have been removed.” The reduction of mortality coupled with a traditional lack of restraint on marriage led to high population growth, increasing the cost of rent and the problem of rural debt. While the colonial government held a responsibility to temporarily alleviate the fatal problem of population pressure that it had created, “The permanent cure for overpopulation,” he maintained, “rests with the people themselves, and consists in those restraints upon marriage, to which all nations of small husbandmen have sooner or later to submit.”Footnote 66 The ultimate answer to the problem of overpopulation, Hunter explained in a later letter to the Duke of Argyll, was education, which would encourage the people to submit to “prudential restraints.”Footnote 67
Hunter inhabited a common social circle with the supporters of Indian nationalism, occasionally offering political advice to Digby and his political ally in Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh; Digby and Bradlaugh worked to advance measures that would increase Indian political representation.Footnote 68 While somewhat sympathetic to their goals, Hunter saw himself as more moderate and thoughtful than them and cautioned against hasty actions that would embarrass the Government of India and hurt the cause of reform.Footnote 69 For their part, Digby and Bradlaugh tolerated Hunter's condescension for the sake of politics. “Does it not occur to your acute mind that it is far better for Sir W. Hunter to think that he is ‘bossing’ me?” as Bradlaugh told Digby during their exchange of letters over the India Councils Amendment Bills that Bradlaugh had sponsored. “It can do us no harm that he should think so; the only harm would be if he did so.”Footnote 70
Hunter was, in any case, receptive to the cause of Indian self-representation. “We had created and fostered the aspiration which animated the Congress, and it would be both churlish and unwise to refuse now to those aspirations both our sympathy and our respectful consideration,” he proclaimed in a statement that the editor of an 1895 anthology of Indian National Congress speeches decided to quote on the cover.Footnote 71 He nonetheless distanced himself from the views of Naoroji. “What you say about some of the extreme doings of our Indian friends is most true,” he told his political confidant, the naturalist and India Office official George Birdwood, during their exchange about the invitations they had both received, and ultimately declined, for a banquet during Naoroji's 1889 campaign for MP of Finsbury.Footnote 72 Hunter found Naoroji's economic critique of colonialism far too extreme. “If you reply to your friend [Naoroji] about your and my views: please take care to make it clear that while I cordially support the claims of the responsible leaders for cautious progress and well-considered development of political institutions, I do not express any opinion in favour of Mr. Dadabhai's economic theories of the poverty of India,” he told Birdwood. He suggested that his own well-researched England's Work in India offered a more reasonable interpretation. Footnote 73
While further to the left than Hunter, Annie Besant offered a similar account of India's demographic history in the 1880s. Even in this early period, before she began to invest in the Indian nationalist cause, Besant maintained political relationships with the British supporters of the movement. She was a friend of Henry Hyndman, and in 1877, she went on trial with her fellow neo-Malthusian, Charles Bradlaugh, for reprinting Charles Knowlton's birth control propaganda. (By the early twentieth century, social scientists decided that this event had increased awareness of contraception, triggering Britain's fertility decline).Footnote 74 For Besant, India's demographic history served as a cautionary tale that highlighted the necessity of birth control. “Hitherto we have seen Nature—apart from man—going her own way, producing and destroying without let or hindrance,” she explained in her 1886 pamphlet, The Law of Population. “But when we examine civilized nations we find a new agent at work.… Men, women, and children, who would be doomed to death in the savage state, have their lives prolonged by civilization.” Like the writers of later census reports, J. A. Baines and J. T. Marten, in her discussion of India, Besant especially emphasized the mortality-reducing effects of improved medicine and sanitation, along with better security and intercommunications to facilitate the response to famine. But there was a dark side to this progress. “It appears that our civilization in India is taking away the ordinary natural checks to population, and, introducing no others in their stead, brings about a famine which has already destroyed more than 500,000 people in one Presidency alone.…”Footnote 75
In a circular way, the proclaimed reduction of famine and disease under colonialism thus became an explanation for famine, the expression of a Malthusian crisis. This story was a common one, found in the census reports of the 1870s and the writings of various social scientists and administrators such as Robert Giffen and Evelyn Baring.Footnote 76 “The true accusation against the English Government is not that it has lessened the safety of this precarious population,” as the writers at the Economist put it, rejecting the Indian nationalist explanation of famine, “but that it has brought that population into existence.… A more startling result of the sudden application of an exotic civilized Government to an Oriental nation has never been seen before.”Footnote 77
This understanding of India's demography, while rooted in Malthusian thought, expressed a markedly different historical sensibility and understanding of government than Malthus’ original model. To be fair, Malthus’ ideas became less dour by the second edition of his essay in 1803 and allowed for some change over time. He came to admit that “the evils resulting from the principle of population had diminished rather than increased” since the last century, and he observed a decline in famine and disease within Europe. But given that “The structure of society, in its great features, will probably always remain unchanged,” he insisted, “we shall never be able to throw down the ladder by which we have risen to this eminence” but only “rise higher by the same means.”Footnote 78 Consistently for Malthus, only fear of nature's laws could enable the betterment of the human condition.Footnote 79 On the other hand, an “important truth flowing from the principle of population” was that “the principal and most permanent cause of poverty has little or no direct relation to forms of government.”Footnote 80
The perspectives that both criticized and defended British policy in the late nineteenth century rejected both of these claims. Famine and misery, they underscored, resulted from a fundamental political and economic transformation under the historically distinct conditions of colonial rule.
IMMIGRATION
During the same moment in which famines ravaged various parts of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States turned from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. In this period, the professional social sciences emerged in the United States out of the struggle to make sense of and respond to the structural transformations and social dislocations under industrial capitalism.Footnote 81 By the 1890s, conflicts between labor and capital had come to challenge the notion that the United States was an exceptional land, free of class conflict and the contingencies of history. A prominent group of American social scientists, Dorothy Ross has argued, attempted to reconcile historicism with American exceptionalism, claiming that, while change was inevitable, it could be controlled—particularly with the aid of social science—so as to protect American institutions.Footnote 82
One of these thinkers was the economist and sociologist Edward A. Ross, who inherited the post of his mentor, socialist-leaning Richard Ely, as secretary of the American Economics Association in 1894. Ross became a symbol of the struggle for academic freedom when, in 1900, his incendiary denunciation of Asian immigration as a labor threat, along with his outspoken opposition to the gold standard, brought Jane Stanford to dismiss him from Stanford University. His exceptional status notwithstanding, Ross’ view of science as a solution to social ills, his approval of an expanded role for the state, and his racism were not untypical among social scientists of the Progressive Era.Footnote 83 Through Ross’ work, I want to explore how the colonial demographic thinking discussed above informed the social scientific understanding of immigration in the United States, a political issue central to the growth of American intellectual interest in demography.Footnote 84
Ross’ ideas about population changed over time, and his research in India encouraged the shift. Consider the difference between Ross’ 1911 study, The Changing Chinese, and his 1927 work, Standing Room Only? In the first book, Ross offered a sociological analysis of China, based on months of research in the country, to explain the problem of Chinese immigration to the United States. Like earlier labor critics such as Henry George, Ross viewed low-wage Chinese labor as a major threat to the white working-class in the United States.Footnote 85 During his travels, Ross remarked upon the great industriousness of Chinese laborers, concluding that their remarkable sturdiness resulted from a centuries-long struggle for existence, which followed from China's overpopulation. Giving shape to Chinese character and society, this Darwinian contest made them more resistant to disease and blood poising than whites and encouraged their highly efficient use of land. He warned of the “swamping of the slow-multiplying, high-wage, white societies” by the overflowing, fantastically efficient Chinese, and his analysis ultimately pointed to nature's laws as the source of the problem.Footnote 86
In his 1927 study, on the other hand, Ross put forward a different narrative, emphasizing the role of the colonial state in instigating demographic change. This time, Ross conducted research for his book in India. In this far more ambitious work, Ross endeavored to put forward a revised, modern theory of population. “I want to be the Malthus of the twentieth century,” he told his friend, Indian sociologist R. K. Mukerjee, “so I am taking great pains to make the book convincing and unanswerable.”Footnote 87 “Insist relentlessly on 2 points,” Ross wrote in his India travel diaries, “(a) natural fertility and (b) the new low death rate.”Footnote 88 In chapters entitled, “The Muzzling of Famine,” “The Conquest of Disease,” “The Throttling of Pestilence,” and “Public Health Promotion,” Ross explained how this new low death rate followed from the civilizing efforts of whites, leading to the numerical “increase of non-whites under the rule of whites.”Footnote 89 His readings and discussions with social scientists in India enabled him to work out the mechanisms of this story.Footnote 90 Like British social scientists and bureaucrats in the late nineteenth century, Ross noted that the comprehensive reduction of mortality required a complete societal transformation that abandoned custom and religion. However, he jotted alongside his notes on the 1921 Census of India (extensively quoted in his bookFootnote 91), “It is likely that most of [Indians’] unhygienic ways will yield to cultural percolation long before they abandon their customs of universal marriage, early marriage, and uncontrolled marital relations which keep high their birth rate.” The result would be a demographic explosion.Footnote 92 Extending this argument beyond India to the Orient as whole, he suggested that this phenomenon explained the growing threat of Asian immigration, the main political target of his analysis.Footnote 93
In the interwar period, with the conceptual hardening of racial boundaries, the dialogue about population expanded among activists and experts across the Atlantic. The brutal casualty rate in Europe from the Great War, the rise of Japan as a major military and imperial power, and anxieties about anti-colonialism and the fate of the European empires all heightened existing concerns about the declining quantitative and qualitative integrity of white populations.Footnote 94 This political context facilitated the formation of a general narrative of demographic history, one in which the same abstract terms could help make sense of the political problems—including both immigration and anti-colonial revolt—in a variety of places. The concept of a Western-induced demographic boom among non-whites performed great work, explaining troubling contemporary events while echoing the familiar view of the Orient as a timeless land in which only the West, a distinct and autonomous region, could induce change.
Despite their different political objectives, interwar writers in the United States, France, and England adopted similar explanations of the racial threats before them. “[N]one of the colored races shows perceptible signs of a declining birth-rate…,” Harvard Ph.D. and Islamic scholar Lothrop Stoddard wrote in his popular nativist tract, The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy. “But by a curious irony of fate, the white man has long been busy removing these checks to colored multiplication,” namely famine, disease, and tribal warfare. Along with exposure to white ideas, this demographic phenomenon, which extended to independent China and Japan, “combined to produce a widespread ferment which has been visible for the past two decades, and which is destined to grow more acute in the near future.” Extensively citing the work of E. A. Ross, Stoddard called for rigorous efforts to protect whites from the colored perils of militarism, economic growth, and immigration; however, sympathetic to certain anti-colonial struggles, he also argued that whites must give Asiatics control over their own lands.Footnote 95 Harvard geneticist Edward East similarly observed that, thanks to “white brains and initiative,” the peoples of Dutch Java and British India, as well as Afro-Americans, more frequently passed “over the bridge of life than otherwise would have been possible” and lived more comfortably and peacefully. While equally strident about the dangers of immigration, for East in contrast to Stoddard, this observation offered evidence of the benefits of colonialism and the illegitimacy of nationalism.Footnote 96
In France, population change in the colonies drew less interest than demography within the French metropole, where the low fertility rate, which began to decline over a century earlier than in other parts of Europe, began eliciting fears of national decline and emasculation in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 97 However, in the interwar period, when population began to grow faster in North Africa and Indochina, alongside the rise of anti-colonial movements, colonial demography incited great political concern.Footnote 98 French political scientist Etienney Dennery argued that population growth “during the centuries of transition” in Asia led to poverty and unemployment, which nationalists like Sun Yat-Sen and Mahatma Gandhi exploited to advance their political agendas. Even worse, Dennery claimed, as the subversive Chinese overflowed into Indochina, they forged seditious alliances with Vietnamese revolutionaries.Footnote 99 Social scientist G. Mesnard looked to demography to explain the rise of anti-colonial opposition and other forms of social unrest in North Africa. Nationalist movements seemed to gain power, Mesnard observed in 1936, just as the growth rate of the Arab population in Algeria sharply rose, “thanks to the social progress introduced by us among them.” A resolution to the problem of excess population in Algeria, he concluded, would “ipso facto resolve” North Africa's disparate political problems.Footnote 100
The sense of a direct relationship between population growth and anti-colonial conflict also inspired the work of Alexander Carr-Saunders, an important link in this story. As Britain's foremost scholar in the field of population studies and director of the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1955, Carr-Saunders enjoyed a permanent working relationship with bureaucrats at the Colonial Office—serving, for example, on the Commission on Higher Education in the Colonies—and eventually became an official advisor to the agency.Footnote 101 This was a period in which political unrest and economic crisis in the colonies (especially Africa) were encouraging the Colonial Office toward an activist policy of development and welfare.Footnote 102 Along with figures like John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, Carr-Saunders was also a central member of the Eugenics Society, which supported social welfare policies that would reduce the economic deterrents to child rearing.Footnote 103 He typified the connections in late colonial Britain, as Karl Ittman has discussed, between eugenics, colonial and domestic social welfare, and interest in population change.Footnote 104
Carr-Saunders much admired the work of Edward A. Ross. While the American social scientist was preparing Standing Room Only?, Carr-Saunders corresponded with him concerning his ideas about the relationship between civilization and population change.Footnote 105 At the same time, Carr-Saunders’ work would significantly inform post-World War II American demography. Within the United States, demographer Warren Thompson presented a clear precedent for demographic transition theory in a 1929 article in the American Journal of Sociology.Footnote 106 But, from outside the United States, Carr-Saunders’ work represented a more direct link to the ideas of Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, who shared with Carr-Saunders an interest in the question of colonial population. In their original statements of demographic transition theory in the 1940s, the Princeton demographers drew upon Carr-Saunders’ historical population estimates as their principal empirical support. In doing so, they adopted his mode of aggregating demographic data by continent, which, more than Thompson's 1929 work, amplified the sense of demographic congruity within continents and demographic competition between continents.Footnote 107
Carr-Saunders’ 1936 publication, World Population—which Walt Rostow retrospectively described “an exercise in the analysis of the demographic transition”—was indebted to the statistical surveys for various British, French, Dutch, Japanese, and American colonies, along with the ideas in the Indian census.Footnote 108 In his study, Carr-Saunders told the story of the unparalleled growth in world population in recent centuries, the result of a decline in mortality. The demographic phenomenon began in Europe, Carr-Saunders argued, then spread with European influence to other continents. He expressed confidence that, as they converged culturally with Europe, regions with high growth rates would eventually repeat Europe's experience of fertility decline. But in the meantime, Carr-Saunders worried, “The contrast, which already exists between these countries and those of Europe or of European origin, will be sharpened in the near future. Europe and its overseas derivatives will be entangled in the difficulties which arise from excessive numbers.”Footnote 109 International conflict would follow from the Malthusian dilemma instigated by the spread of European civilization.
POPULATION AND THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT
Ideas about population would become central to the various ways in which theorists defined development during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. Consider the work of the early development economists, who would most influence post-colonial leaders in non-aligned states like India and Egypt.Footnote 110 They considered surplus labor the major problematic of development. Arthur Lewis, the most prominent of this group, served as a professor of economics at Princeton beginning in the early 1960s. Prior to his appointment in the United States, he worked for the British Colonial Office, and from 1938 to 1948, he served at the London School of Economics under the directorship of none other than Alexander Carr-Saunders (who took part in the controversial decision to hire him as the first black faculty member). In the 1954 article that won him the Nobel Prize in 1979, Lewis drew a contrast between John Maynard Keynes’ characterization of the depression economies of Western Europe—in which there was high unemployment of both labor and other factors of production—and the state of underdevelopment—in which only labor was in excess and other factors scarce. Development, Lewis argued, required mobilizing the cheap labor of the unemployed and underemployed rural population in the service of industrialization. And he pointed to the transitional period of high fertility and low mortality as one major source of the surplus labor supply.Footnote 111 It was demographic patterns that distinguished developed from underdeveloped economies.
Modernization theorists followed a different intellectual path from the development economists, drawing more inspiration from Talcott Parsons than John Maynard Keynes. Yet they also benefited from the precedent of demographic transition theory. Both assumed a dichotomy between tradition and modernity and understood social change as the linear path from the first state to the second. Both displayed a strong sense of American exceptionalism and shared a common anti-colonial critique. And both understood modernization as an integrated process that encompassed not only economic industrialization but also a related set of social and cultural transformations. Politically, the two theories were descriptive as well as prescriptive, aiming to serve the needs of Cold War policymakers without sacrificing scientific rigor. In addition, demographic transition theorists crossed institutional paths with the modernization theorists. Kingsley Davis studied at Harvard under Parsons, whose theory of the “social system” provided the intellectual foundations for later theories of modernization. Two of Notestein's colleagues at Princeton, Wilbert Moore and Marion Levy, were also key characters in the formation of the modernization school.Footnote 112
As historian Nils Gilman has shown, modernization theorists drew inspiration from David Riesman's 1951 work, The Lonely Crowd, which, pointing to a seminal social-psychological transformation underway within the United States, utilized demographic transition theory as its narrative substructure.Footnote 113 “The theory of the curve of population,” Riesman explained, “provides me with a kind of shorthand for referring to the myriad institutional elements that are also—though usually more heatedly—symbolized by such words as ‘industrialism,’ ‘folk society,’ ‘monopoly capitalism,’ ‘urbanization,’ ‘rationalization,’ and so on.” Demographic statistics could also reveal much about the social and psychological characteristics of a society, like its class structure or its attitudes toward the family, sex, and sanitation (and hence science).Footnote 114 Population was thus the natural expression of a variety of other variables, like social practices, cultural values, climate, or economic conditions.Footnote 115
I have been suggesting that the experience of colonialism was formative in shaping the concept of demographic change that we find in the work of theorists like Riesman, and the narrative of modernization implicit in it. While the terms “traditional” and “modern” that modernization theorists employed in a sense negated the significance of colonialism,Footnote 116 the colonial experience could provide a reference point for social scientists as they formulated their generic models of and prescriptions for what they called “traditional” societies. Notestein thus described not only countries like India, Java, and Egypt, but also China as “regions with rather highly developed economies of the colonial type.” The other generic term of post-World War II social science, “Third World,” was coined, or at least popularized, by the eminent French demographer, Alfred Sauvy, who defined it in demographic terms. “These countries,” he wrote in his famous 1952 article, “have our mortality from 1914 and our fertility from the 18th century.” In the absence of concomitant economic investment, this demographic pattern led to the perpetual misery that characterized the Third World. Not coincidentally, Sauvy looked to French Algeria—where, he noted, D.D.T. protected against malaria for only 68 francs a person—as his first case in point.Footnote 117
If their original theory of demographic change was rooted in the history of colonialism, Notestein and Davis did add a crucial innovation. Not only did they decisively turn away from the biological racism of interwar social scientists;Footnote 118 as several scholars have highlighted, they also rejected apologies for colonialism, turning their narrative into a trenchant critique of it.Footnote 119 As we have seen, colonial social scientists believed that the crisis of overpopulation in the colonies would subside under colonial rule. With guidance, colonized peoples would move further along the path toward civilization and learn to value small families. The Princeton demographers, however, turned this prediction on its head. They argued that the European colonies failed to reach modernity precisely because Western exploitation inhibited their development. “The modern nations of the West,” Notestein charged, “have imposed on the world's nonindustrial peoples that part of their culture which reduces mortality sufficiently to permit growth, while withholding, or at least failing to foster, those changes in the social setting out of which the reduction of fertility eventually developed in the West. The result is large and congested populations living little above the margin of subsistence.”Footnote 120 High population growth in transitional societies thus exposed the failure of the European colonial powers to live up to their claims to be civilizers.
Implicit here was the belief—a legacy of the anti-colonial origins of the republic—that the United States would serve as a better guide, despite its own history of colonization.Footnote 121 What most distinguished demographic transition theory from earlier narratives of demographic change, then, was its deep sense of American difference. But whether or not they knew it, the claims of transition theorists were closely linked to an old colonial story, one rooted, not in a time-honored Orientalist instinct, but in the particularities of colonial and international politics over nearly a century.
