Karl Ittmann's A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973 is an important study, impressive in its chronological range and geographical scope. Ittmann addresses the question of population control in the modern British Empire, reviewing both imperial strategies across a variety of colonial settings and domestic debates around Commonwealth immigration and integration. In doing so, his analysis reflects two now-established trends within the study of colonial history: an attempt to focus simultaneously on metropolitan and peripheral contexts, and an interest in the transition from the imperial to the postimperial. This book though will appeal not only to historians of Britain and the empire during the twentieth century but also to researchers interested in the relationship between pressure groups and scientists on the one hand, and government on the other. Ittmann's examination of the emergence of demography as a social science is an intellectual but above all an institutional history, one that traces the links between lobbyists, academics, nongovernmental organizations, charitable foundations, and national and international agencies. This is perhaps the book's greatest contribution.
In the first section of the book, Ittmann seeks to explain the marginality of demography within imperial policymaking and colonial practice before the 1940s. Ittmann observes how surprising this was, given that early modern Britain had developed the principles of political arithmetic in the settlement of Ireland, and, as the smallest of Europe's major powers, was intently aware of the significance of demographic trends. Even the South African War of 1899–1902, which raised concerns about the virility of the British population at home and abroad, failed to stimulate sustained investment targeted at affecting or even measuring demographic trends across the empire. Between the wars, however, population control did become a subject of intense debate in relation to colonial territories. Ittmann discusses the roles played by academic demographers, advocates of birth control, and eugenicists in this controversy, arguing that members of the Eugenics Society, well resourced and networked, played the key role in the development of the subdiscipline of colonial demography. Their conviction that growing colonial populations threatened both global prosperity and the international supremacy of the white race would survive, in diluted form, long after eugenics itself faded from public discourse.
The core of the study focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period when discussion of population control shifted from interest groups to the heart of government. Ittmann notes the ability of population control to appeal to a number of constituencies within the late colonial system, including a new generation of technocratic, socially progressive officials such as Andrew Cohen, head of the Africa Department within the Colonial Office. Population control for imperial reformers was above all about economic development. If colonial populations continued to expand rapidly, efforts to enhance living standards “would be pouring money down a bottomless sink” (102). There existed then support for the limitation of colonial population growth across the British political spectrum, yet colonial governments' impact on demographic trends was negligible. In part this was the consequence of earlier underinvestment in healthcare infrastructure and education, so that local administrations believed that a universal program of birth control provision would be impossible to implement. It reflected also the skepticism of central direction and expertise that characterized this decentralized empire to its end. Above all, though, it stemmed from nervousness about local opposition. British officials feared that indigenous elites would provoke mass anticolonial protest by claiming that population control was a racially motivated intervention, aimed at sustaining Western domination. As Ittmann shows, such claims would have been largely justified, even in the final days of empire. This then constituted one of the many paradoxes of late imperialism: population increase rendered colonial rule unsustainably expensive, but efforts to contain such growth were obstructed by fears of anticolonial nationalism. Enduring racism limited empire's power to persuade.
British rhetorical incapacity was highlighted by the growing body of American population scientists who came to dominate the field (thanks to superior funding and their influential development of demographic transition theory) after 1945; their universalism contrasted with the assumption within colonial demography that westerners' reproductive cultures were fundamentally different from non-Europeans'. American demographers condemned British imperialism for interfering with the natural progression of demographic transition, first by artificially reducing mortality rates through coercive systems of famine and epidemic control, and second by deliberately obstructing the industrialization and social modernization that would activate fertility limitation by personal choice. Their solution, the replacement of imperialism with new forms of international agency capable of stimulating and satisfying a demand for contraception among the poor of the developing world, won the day. As Ittmann shows, however, the entrenchment of population control within international aid was accompanied by the mass migration of former officials of empire to the United Nations, bilateral agencies such as the Ministry of Overseas Development, and a host of nongovernmental organizations, where colonial knowledge and contacts, freed from the racial overtones of imperialism, could now be used to maximum effect.
In sum, this is a fine book, based on extensive archival research, which draws out connections between British political culture at home and in the empire. Its dual perspective appears most clearly in its analysis of ethnically motivated migration policy. Just as British officials strove to avoid explicit statements of intent domestically, so the colonial office sought to quietly manage migration and resettlement in the Indian Ocean islands, Palestine, Kenya, and Malaya where, typically, policy aimed to control the ethnic balance by “restricting Chinese immigration … without saying so” (123).
Like all good books, this one should stimulate new research. Scholars interested in how local cultures of reproduction across the empire were shaped (or misshaped) by colonial and postcolonial interventions, the extent to which such cultures endured following migration to the United Kingdom, and the contrasts between the British experience and that of other imperial powers should all refer to this study.
