Population Politics in the Tropics Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola Global Health Histories Series

Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuël Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policies were conceived, implemented and contested. He analyses why and how doctors, administrators, missionaries and other colonial actors tried to grasp and quantify demographic change and 'improve' the health conditions, reproductive regimes and migration patterns of Angola's 'native' population. Coghe argues that these interventions were inextricably linked to pervasive fears of depopulation and underpopulation, but that their implementation was often hampered by weak state structures, internal conflicts and multiple forms of African agency. Coghe's fresh analysis of demography, health and migration in colonial Angola challenges common ideas of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism.

Introduction; 1. Sleeping sickness, depopulation anxieties and the emergence of population politics; 2. Tropical medicine and sleeping sickness control before 1918; 3. Introducing social medicine: Inter-imperial learning and the Assistência Médica aos Indígenas in the interwar period; 4. Re-assessing population decline: Medical demography and the tensions of statistical knowledge; 5. Saving the children: Infant mortality and the politics of motherhood; 6. The problem of migration: Depopulation anxieties, border politics and the tensions of empire; Conclusion; Epilogue: Demography and population politics, 1945-1975; Bibliography; Index.

Samuël Coghe is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin.