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Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of play. This substantive history of world health and world population is analysed as sites for thinking about global bio-politics; and the article looks seriously at the interwar period as a point at which ‘the world’ (or Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’) was already challenging the idea of ‘inter/national’.

The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia's race-based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine-detention and the internment of "enemy aliens" in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum-seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non-criminal and often non-citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum-seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia's histories of detention.

This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a pathologized, contaminated and racialized other. That ‘whiteness’, ‘purity’ and ‘national hygiene’ which was actively sought in the early 20th century functioned through both public health and immigration regulations: the practice of quarantine was the point at which these came together. Quarantine assisted in the imagining of the new island-nation as an integrated whole, and in the imagining (and literal pursuit) of its ‘whiteness’.

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