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DEMOGRAPHIC fears run deep in western society. In the early days of the industrial revolution, Thomas Malthus was feted for warning that war, pestilence and famine were the inevitable consequences of a “natural law” that unchecked populations grow geometrically, while food supply could only grow arithmetically.

Half a century ago, similar fears about the impact of a global “population bomb” on ecosystems lay behind the emergence of the modern environment movement. Today we hear its echoes in the framing of concerns about rising food prices, migration, civil wars and climate change. Malthus was right, we are told. It’s overpopulation, stupid.

But Malthus’s “natural law” has always been politically toxic and often deeply reactionary. Malthus himself argued that giving alms to the poor would only encourage them to breed more. Amid harvest failures and widespread hunger, the way he denounced liberal reformers and the poor laws would have made Margaret Thatcher blush.

Later, Malthusian ideas helped Britain sit on its hands as 2 million people died in the Irish potato famine. And they seeped into arguments in favour of eugenics, which were fashionable on left and right until they suffered a PR disaster in Nazi Germany. Matthew Connelly, a historian, uses this backdrop to explore the Malthusians’ second great 20th century project: stemming the rise in world population.

For modern liberals, provision of birth control is primarily a human right, which has a happy payback in reducing pressure on the planet. But it wasn’t always so. For much of the past half-century, population control came first and human rights had to be sacrificed.

Connelly lays bare the dark secrets of an authoritarian neo-Malthusian ethos that created an international population agenda built around control. He has trawled the archives of the UN and voluntary agencies such as the Population Council in New York to reveal what he sees as a hugely influential “population establishment” suffused with fanaticism, duplicity and simple fear that the poor and feckless would take over the world. He describes the official policies that made it acceptable to hand out food aid to famine victims only if the women agreed to be sterilised. And he shows how this thinking culminated in the horrors of forced sterilisation in India in the 1970s and inspired the Chinese to set up their one-child policy.

“Food aid was given only if women agreed to be sterilised”

So what was achieved? Since this great war on fertility began, the average brood has fallen from more than 5 to 2.6. In 50 countries, including many of the Asian nations targeted by the programme, fertility rates are now at or below the notional replacement level of 2.1. The “population bomb” is being steadily defused.

Some would call this victory, but Connelly asserts that the impact of the global multibillion-dollar exercise in demographic totalitarianism was surprisingly small. Birth rates were mostly falling before it began. Most women would have had fewer babies anyway as child death rates fell and they became better educated, moved to cities and began to assert some basic personal freedoms.

If this book has a weakness, it is that it does not explore the truth of this claim more thoroughly. Still, as an investigative narrative of how individuals, NGOs, governments and UN agencies colluded over decades to sideline the human rights of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest citizens, this is a valuable and extremely readable work.

Engelman’s study of human population down the ages covers much of the same ground as Connelly in its later chapters. But he finds harmony where Connelly finds discord. Engelman lauds the role of the many feminists who promoted women’s right to control their fertility, but draws a veil over the battles they had to fight to seize control of male-dominated population agencies.

The two authors agree in their support for population policies framed around human rights and reproductive health, but while Engelman ignores the tainted past, Connelly says we must face it. In a world beset by calls to arms against disease, migrants, climate and much else, we need to be vigilant against the “fatal misconception… to think that one can know other peoples’ interests better than they knew it themselves.”