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Aprajita Sarcar, Building the Population Bomb. Emily Klancher Merchant, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 78, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 227–229, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad002
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Building the Population Bomb by Emily Klancher Merchant analyzes the rise of demography in the United States at two levels. First, it throws light on the internal political developments that informed the discipline from the 1930s to the 1970s. At a secondary, somewhat subterranean level, it analyzes the sentiments that drove the international family planning movement in that period. By tracing the discipline’s foundational moments, Merchant shows how eugenics has been normalized in its ethical discourse. Through a meticulous description of funders, knowledge clusters, and experts, she examines how the discipline responded to the domestic policies of the US with new means of measurements and modes of documentation.
Merchant pries open the difference between population control and family planning, something Matthew Connelly hinted at in Fatal Misconception (2008). The two terms were conterminously constructed through demography. At the outset, she uses assemblage as a theoretical tool to understand the people involved in the population control debates. However, it is unclear how this theory translates into actual analysis in the rest of the book. The strength of the book is the exhaustive description of institutional players and their visions of the US. She draws clear connections between developments within the discipline and the immigration policies of the US. However, assemblage theory is broader and more complicated than such a form of analysis. For instance, the Office of Population Research (OPR) of Princeton University was a site on which the assemblage theory could be used to produce a thick reading of its circuit of power. But the book’s self-professed centering of the US limits this line of analysis. This national contouring had two consequences. On one hand, the book drives home the interlinkages between seemingly disparate events in the US and how they affected demographers; but on the other hand, it obfuscates some of its international linkages. There is hardly any mention of the international demographers OPR trained and how they became part of its constellation. Had she prodded the transnational dimension, Merchant would have found that the demographers from the former colonies were using the OPR’s methodologies in unique ways.1
