sandetigerrr:
metamatar-deactivated20250401:
communistkenobi:
I know this isn’t a novel observation but I’ve been reading a lot of articles about colonial and imperial policy (specifically demography history papers) & one pattern that keeps coming up is that colonial/imperial governments try to institute what can reasonably be described as “good” social policies in colonised places (like vaccine programs, funding for schools, etc, things that are associated with the smooth functioning of a state), and these are often rejected by local colonised governments and people because like obviously they don’t trust colonial/imperial administrators wanting to become involved with their healthcare or education. And what often ends up happening is this backlash against “progressive” policies because they’re being pushed by colonial governments, so you get shit like the Catholic Church running all the primary schools in Ireland because they refuse to open British-funded state schools, or people refusing to immunize their children because those “public goods” are (rationally & understandably) associated with things like US imperial population management programs. And then these colonial & imperial administrators turn around and say look! These people won’t even accept money for schools and vaccines! Look how backwards they are! And paint colonised populations as Great Rejectors of Democracy which western populations then readily eat up. Just a really horrendous feedback loop of misery that generates a lot of ‘secondary’ death and violence on top direct colonial oppression and plunder
the vaccine thing is insidious even now. the us government using healthcare workers to gather intelligence for directing drone strikes in afghanistan led to a suspension of the polio vaccine campaign in taliban controlled areas. afghanistan was the polio capital of the world in 2018. they’ve resumed polio vaccination campaigns now under the taliban, but the death and misery of those infected was completely avoidable.
Hey OP do you have any papers that you especially like on the subject that you’d be willing to share? I’m interested in this topic and would enjoy some more academic reading on the subject.
Yes! Hopefully all the links work, if not you can search the title online (all of these are technically open access, although you may need to create a JSTOR/academia.edu account to access them, sorry!)
Pro-birth policies, missions and fertility: historical evidence from Congo by Catherine Guirkinger & Paola Villar (2022)
A paper detailing how the Belgian Empire sent missionaries into the Congo in the 1920s to increase fertility by evangelizing Christian gender roles. This is technically a “population management” policy, as many European colonial powers were obsessed with managing the population of their colonies on the logic that more people = greater colonial labour capacity. You can see how the church functions as an organ of the colonial state, operating to achieve ends “unrelated” to the church, such as population control, through evangelizing against birth control and encouraging people to think of themselves as components of the cis-heterosexual christian nuclear family (this is not exactly the process I was talking about above, but is still related to how colonial domination influences social beliefs in colonized populations)
From population control to ‘reproductive rights’: ideological influences in population policy by Seamus Grimes (1998)
A paper talking about the use of “reproductive rights” as a population management tool by imperial powers, most notably the mass subsidizing of birth control, particularly in African countries that have been colonized. It talks about how some of the foundations/organizations used by the US government (such as USAID) act as a front for these imperial population management programs, particularly in Latin America, describing it as “a willing conduit for US government funding through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), thereby shielding the USA from accusations of direct involvement in promoting the control of Third World population.” (375).
There is also discussion of how World Bank loans are used to enforce population control on colonized countries - “There is a strong suspicion that the timing of the Nigerian government’s population policy in 1988 was related to the acceptance of a $78.5 million loan from the World Bank. The imposition of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) has resulted in reduced spending on primary health care, so that treatment for malaria and the provision of clean drinking water is being ignored, while contraceptives have become widely available.” (387)
I particularly like this paper because it also gives historical context to the eugenicist strains within the US reproductive rights movement (most notably from Margaret Sanger); this history is not an unfortunate, misguided 'whoopsie’ on the part of an otherwise progressive movement, but rather, was/is embedded in the deep racial anxieties of Western states around the supposed decline of the white race.
Colonial Population and the Idea of Development by Samantha Iyer (2013)
An intellectual history of the idea of development and population growth. There is a lengthy case study of British colonial rule in India and how that informed the development of sanitation practices as a result of mass death under said rule, both from British troops and colonized Indian populations
Medical experimentation and the roots of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among Indigenous Peoples in Canada by Ian Mosby (2021)
I can’t find the other article I was reading about vaccine hesitancy, but this is an open-access article talking about the history of Canadian colonial medical violence towards Indigenous peoples and how that contributes to vaccine hesitancy. A lot of people in the notes have also brought up the US-backed anti-vaccination campaign in the Philippines during the early COVID-19 pandemic
