The United States is the third most populous country in the world after the two demographic billionaires, India and China. In 2024, the population of the United States numbered 337 million inhabitants. When the first census was conducted in the United States in 1790, the population size of the country (as then defined geographically) was just above 3.9 million. In 234 years, from 1790 to 2024, the United States has increased tremendously in size. This chapter traces the patterns of growth of the United States from colonial times to the present; and it then examines some projections of the US population for the future.

This chapter offers an overview of contemporary pro-oil mobilization in Canada and the United States. Through analysis of ninety-five organizations, the chapter looks at patterns in the scale, issues, and levels of transparency common among pro-oil advocacy groups. These data show that contestation today often happens at the state or provincial level and typically emphasizes multi-issue, long-term campaigns. Furthermore, many of these organizations demonstrate at least nominal financial transparency, with more than half naming sponsors on their websites. This level of revelation is largely absent on social media, however, with very few campaigns mentioning their sponsors on X or Facebook. Groups that are nominally finically transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice.

A population policy is a deliberately constructed program of a government to influence directly or indirectly demographic change. The program is put into place to ensure that goals of the policy are attained. A policy is generally intended to either reduce or increase population levels. Not everyone agrees on the true meaning of a population policy. Here are three questions pointing to possible issues of disagreement: (1) Must there be an explicit statement by a government that a policy exists? (2) Does there have to be a planned course of action or program? (3) Must the goals of a policy be demographic, or may they be social and economic? There are often no “correct” answers. The concern in this chapter is not to make judgments about objectives. Its purpose is to address the question: In what ways may a government influence levels of fertility, mortality, and migration?

Prohibitions, Permits, Power

A mill owner in Salem conducted his own social experiment in sobriety in February 1939. He assembled his workers and instructed them to sit and stand several times in rapid succession, noting that they would ‘never have been so responsive to orders in the days when they drank’. Salem went dry on 1 October 1937. Chittoor and Cuddapah followed suit a year later, and North Arcot went dry in 1939. Prohibition's introduction occurred at the convergence of state-directed reform, political competition, entrenched social anxieties and waves of resistance to the policy. Official assessments painted a glowing picture of its successes, reflecting the ‘idiom of enthusiasm’ so characteristic of Congress mass mobilisation. English and vernacular newspapers joined studies commissioned by Rajaji's government in heaping praise on prohibition for apparently improving the lives of former addicts. Much of the extant literature has echoed this bias while dismissing non-elite resistance to prohibition as ‘local nuisances’ to a policy of great societal importance.

That there would be such a bias is not surprising. Prohibition had been won after a long, hard struggle. By the time the policy was introduced, the priority was proving that it would work. Policymakers found themselves having to justify the sacrifices that had already been made and that were yet to come. Publicly, they feted prohibition. Privately, however, the policy continued to function as prohibitioning between political elites, between the authorities and society, and between different social groups. Prohibition thus developed a double life until the colonial government suspended it in September 1943.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

This chapter deals with the demography of race and ethnicity. It is mainly concerned with demographic issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, their implications and consequences. The chapter first discusses why demographers are interested in race and ethnicity. Next reviewed is the history of categorizing people according to race and ethnicity, and then how in the United States the statistical concepts of race and ethnicity evolved over time, from the 1790 census to the 2020 census. Current patterns of race and ethnicity in the United States are next examined, and it is shown how these groups differ in terms of the basic demographic processes, in particular, fertility and mortality. These topics are significant because the United States is approaching a time when there will no longer be any numerical majority racial or ethnic group.

Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

Chapter 2 examines abolitionist texts that engaged the conventions of the theatrical genre of farce to denounce the illegal slave trade. By analyzing how captives and abolitionists mocked the generalized awareness of pretense that helped slavery flourish under prohibitions, it foregrounds the role that farce played in processes of racialization. Henry Shirley, a kidnapped man who requested help from British authorities, pointed out that a large range of people were complicit in the illegal slave trade, thereby making the rule of law look like a farce. The chapter concludes by tracing how captives turned the logic of pretense to their advantage, using forged documents or new names in the cities of Havana and Santiago. Enslaved people, it shows, could sometimes partake in the benefits of pretense by assuming new names and passing as free.

This chapter puts together the three demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration and analyzes overall population change in the world. First considered is the question of how many people have ever lived on the Earth. Next reviewed, albeit briefly, is the main theory of population change, namely, demographic transition theory. Then the chapter looks specifically at the dynamics of world population change, taking both a long and a short view. It concludes with a discussion of the future of the world’s population.