Alison Bashford

• University of Cambridge

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 particul...

In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world hist...

Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites en...

There is no doubt that the historical geographies of quarantine and racial nationalism overlapped at Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station. To conflate these practices into a single narrative of immigration restriction, however, obscures other stories and agendas. Drawing upon inscriptions left in the Sydney sandstone by those detained at North He...

From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context...

Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immig...

This reflective piece asks whether there is a particular Australian connection to recent discussion of an Anthropocene. Australian historians are perhaps predisposed to ‘deep time’; at the very least they are more accustomed to thinking about great time-scales than historians writing from and about other national history traditions.

In the wave of transnational scholarship on the modern regulation of global human movement, the famous immigration restriction acts in Anglophone settler colonies hold centre stage. ‘Drawing the global colour line’, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently put it, was a core element of the great modern aspiration to produce nations out of h...

Twenty-four centuries have passed since the doctrine of AirsWaters Places was articulated in the Hippocratic corpus, promoting a mutually constitutive vision of humankind and climate. Yet the "airs, waters, places tradition" has proved remarkably resilient and adaptable as a framing device for relations among nations, natural and human resources, a...

Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian...

The passing of the Aliens Act of 1905 was a defining moment in British immigration law and history. This article investigates the influence of settler-colonial immigration restriction laws on the passing of the Act, and questions the current historiographical inclination to focus solely on the influence of American immigration restriction laws. By...

It is rarely recognised—either by scholars of Australian history or of Thomas Robert Malthus—that the famous political economist wrote about New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in later editions of Essay on the Principle of Population. This occasional lecture examines just what he said about Aboriginal people in 1803, at a time when native people...

This chapter illustrates the complicated relations between colonialism, medicine, and the production of knowledge about gender, through the specific problem of inoculation versus vaccination, an ongoing medical and governmental problem throughout the 18th and 20th centuries.

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 particul...

The connection between infectious disease control and national security is now firmly entrenched. This article takes a historical look at another security issue once prominent in debate on foreign policy and international relations, but now more or less absent: overpopulation. It explores the nature of the debate on population as a security questio...

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 t...

While much Australian historiography focuses on the declining national birth rate, this article demonstrates the extent of concern about world overpopulation. Analysing the work of three internationally significant demographers, it argues that Australian land—Australian ‘emptiness'—was closely scrutinised in an intellectual and political milieu mor...

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 overpopul...

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 he...

Journal of the History of Sexuality 13.1 (2004) 71-99 Questioning the relationship between medium and message has long exercised media and communications theorists, but historians have devoted comparatively little attention to the issue. The historiography of sexology confirms this: rather than approaching the history of sexual knowledge as the com...

During the 1890s, the childhood infectious disease of diphtheria became closely identified with the emerging science of bacteriology and the new laboratory-based public health.(1) Along with the organisms causing typhoid fever and tuberculosis, the Klebs-Loeflier bacillus was one of the earliest to be clearly isolated (in 1883) and causally linked...

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 p...

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 t...

This article analyzes the ways in which the process of modernization in the early twentieth century was gendered by examining the work and subjectivities of Australian nurses and the writings of two feminists, Frances Gillam Holden and Rose Scott. Located firmly in the institutional and cultural field of medicine--a field that emphasized modern, ra...

This article investigates the early twentieth century discourse of tropical medicine as a site in which "whiteness" became the object of biomedical scrutiny. Australian tropical medicine is notable in that it reversed the usual raced and gendered dynamics of Western medico-scientific research. Rather than studying the black body, it studied the whi...

This article interprets a smallpox epidemic which took place in Sydney in 1881, in the light of Michel Foucault's work on health, populations and the development of administrative government. It is a local and historical study informed by, and written in response to, a critical sociological literature which traces the development of public health s...

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...

The mid-nineteenth-century movement for sanitary reform has long been of interest to medical historians. The ways in which this movement was shaped by a gendered politics of health, however, has been little discussed. Given the sheer frequency with which women’s place in sanitary reform was articulated in the widest possible range of nineteenth-cen...

‘Discipline’ was a concept and a word commonly employed during the nineteenth-century reforms in the administration of institutional health. In this modernising process, doctors, matrons and managers argued over changing modes of organisation of patients, medical students and probationer nurses. The discipline of nurses, it can be argued, was one o...