As a pre-modern specialist, I think it's important to add that "population" has never been a neutral or indeed even a purely quantitative concept. (Not that quantification entails neutrality or objectivity, either.) https://twitter.com/Prof_FSultana/status/1327998386231005185

People have always been numbered for reasons: as a measure of power, a source of wealth, a pool of (productive or reproductive) labour. Population is not, and never has been, an ideology-free concern.

Moreover, concern with populations in practice -- whether mediated by elaborate quantification or not -- has historically been tied to normative views of society and the possibility of intervention. You might say groups became populations when they became problems for government.

Vagrants, the poor, the foreign, the colonized -- groups out of place and out of line, in need of management or transformation -- furnished some of the first objects of "demographic" concern, and the fist objects of attention from early demographers or political arithmeticians.

Demographic quantification didn't develop as a "neutral" pursuit but as a way of pursuing political/social ends by improved means. Its 17th- and 18th-century founders were frank on this. That such knowledge facilitated what we would call social engineering was its justification.

(Not its sole justification; others included its capacity to bear witness to divine agency and design in nature -- not exactly what one would call non-ideological.)

NB Many of these authors took for granted what is often described as a Malthusian insight: that there were limits to the number of people that a given territory could support. Botero made this point w/respect to cities in 1588; Gabriel Plattes applied it to the globe in 1639.

Where they differed from Malthus was in seeing both technology and policy (and, in the 18th century, philanthropy) as effective means of reshaping both the capacity of the earth and the behaviour of its inhabitants.

The difference on this front was not that Malthus was scientific or neutral or objective and they were not, but that Malthus adhered to a different view of political economy and, so it has been argued, a different understanding of divine providence.

But in drawing his conclusions about the effective scope of policy from assumptions about nature and providence, as well as about the intellectual and moral capacities of different kinds of people, he worked within a broadly similar framework. He hadn't left ideology for science.

In any case, many substantive engagements with population in the intervening centuries were overtly concerned with managing or manipulating the culturally constructed qualities of groups: turning barbarism to civility, idleness to industry, preventing mixture and degeneration.

Though not conducted in a biological or eugenicist register, these kinds of goals and the sorts of assumptions they reflected persisted beyond Malthus and into our era. New techniques and evolving vocabularies have not changed this, even if they facilitate appeals to objectivity.

Given this history it's poignant and ironic that our eugenicists and scientific racists have chosen "demography" and "population" as euphemisms for race and antonyms for "social engineering". Racism has deep roots in "population" thought, and "population" in social engineering.