JACK LOVERIDGE

ACADEMIC RESEARCH

My current book project examines the reallocation of South Asia's agricultural resources following Partition in 1947 and nutritional health and population planning initiatives launched by independent India and Pakistan. To that end, I track the rising influence of American philanthropies, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and international organizations, like the World Bank, the FAO, and the WHO, in reshaping South Asia's economy and fashioning powerful new lasting notions of demographic change and economic development.

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Contrasting with existing scholarship on the changes that swept the world food economy in the mid-twentieth century, my work uncovers the linkages between late colonial and post-independence understandings of famine, population growth, and economic development in South Asia. I propose a broader framing of the global Green Revolution of the 1960s, examining the resonance of eugenic theories within population control efforts and new ideas concerning the measurable — seemingly predictable — relation between human populations, economic outcomes, and the environment. 

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My work also explores how economists, physicians, and agricultural scientists worked to estimate population growth rates and quantify food production capacity in the run up to the record grain yield increases of the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Using archival sources in South Asia, Europe, and the United States, I investigate economic, medical, and scientific inquiries that addressed hunger in the context of the struggle against British colonialism during the 1930s and 1940s and Cold War anxieties over global population growth and technology diffusion during the 1950s and 1960s.