A Problem of Great Importance

Almost every aspect of imperial history, from migration to labour, race, coercion and development, concerns population. It is perhaps unsurprising that, as Karl Ittmann demonstrates in his fine book, the emergence of demography as a new social science was followed in Britain by the development of a sub-field of ‘colonial demography’. As they engaged with a wide variety of different imperial issues, a nexus of demographers, eugenicists and birth-controllers ‘helped define the problem of colonial population’ (p. 15). Ittmann’s book provides a compelling account of how, in the British context, an emerging social science was profoundly shaped by Britain’s imperial role, and informed by contemporary preoccupations with imperial decline. It also demonstrates how activists within the population movement regarded empire with an opportunistic eye to advancing their own causes and concerns. The central chapters of the book explore the traction this coalition had on imperial and colonial policy. Reading across vast areas of twentieth-century imperial history, Ittmann argues that the new social science of demography offered officials new ways of understanding and potentially managing colonial subjects, as well as a means to address perceived problems of colonial overpopulation. While this leads the author to traverse territory that will be familiar to most students of the twentieth-century British empire, and results in an accumulation of detail on different initiatives and concerns, he offers numerous insights along the way, recasting familiar subjects in novel ways. Notwithstanding Ittmann’s claim that population science played ‘a significant role in British colonial policy in the twentieth century’ (pp. 1–2), however, these chapters reveal a striking mismatch between the plethora of demographic issues that concerned both population activists and policy-makers, and what was actually done. For most of the period, Whitehall officials consistently failed to develop systematic policies or to improve the quality of their statistical data on colonial populations. The Colonial Office came closest to doing so in the 1940s, with the appointment, from 1941, of leading population expert Robert Kuczynski, as first an unofficial and later formal ‘demographic advisor’, corresponding to the wartime expansion of state machinery and the proliferation of initiatives in relation to colonial social and economic issues more generally. But, as with many such initiatives, momentum was lost in the post-war period in the face of more immediately pressing issues. This was compounded by Kuczynski’s death in 1947, although a posthumous three-volume Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire represented a culmination of his efforts. The limitations of the colonial state hindered efforts to develop policies across a range of population issues, as did the political sensitivities of using immigration controls and family planning to control non-white population growth. It nonetheless seems hard to avoid the conclusion that colonial demography was, at best, a secondary concern to the Colonial Office. Imperial population programmes hence ‘remained embryonic’ at the end of the 1950s (p. 146), and population work within the empire largely the preserve of non-governmental organisations

British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Eugenics · Political economy · Political science · Population · Population growth · Power (physics · Race (biology · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · Health and Conflict Studies · History · Law