ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how Malthusian forms of practical reasoning activate the United States and a host of other institutions as agents responsible for disarming the population bomb. It focuses on how the population crisis as a governing apparatus was assembled as a particular form of Malthusian rationality. The book shows how the bourgeois body becomes the effect of regulating the Malthusian couple and how the working class and racialized colonial subjects find themselves included as part of the population that makes up the Malthusian couple. It traces how the discourse strategy of containment provided a mechanism for the United States to evaluate how population dynamics related to a series of social pathologies. The book analyzes the intersection of demography and developmental economics. It describes how containment contributes to building the population crisis.
