The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

We have seen that there was a sense on all sides of the post-referendum conflict that immigration control was intrinsic to Brexit, and rejection of freedom of movement was common ground across the Conservative Party and much of Labour. The Labour and Tory MPs who continued to pursue the Norway option highlighted its economic benefits rather than movement rights, and freedom of movement was explicitly defended only by the European movement, for whom it was the core of European citizenship. Immigration declined rapidly in polling salience after 2016; while this was sometimes attributed to the reduced numbers of new European immigrants, it was much more likely to have been because of the fact that Brexiters – having won the principle of ending freedom of movement and being focused instead on blocking May's deal – no longer felt the need to campaign on these numbers, while many of their supporters believed that they were actually being controlled. Even Farage, when he launched his Brexit Party for the 2019 European elections, did not campaign on immigration. Followers who had attended one of his rallies boasted to me on Twitter that he had not mentioned it in his speech; it was so central to Farage's brand that he did not need to emphasize it at every twist and turn, since when he talked of the “betrayal” of Brexit his supporters would have understood that immigration control was part of what he was complaining about. The position of Conservative leaders, in contrast, was more ambiguous, and whenever they appealed to the public or their party membership over the heads of parliament, political racism came into the open. When May wrote an “open letter” to the public on 25 November 2018 in an attempt to get support for her agreement, her first point was: “It will honour the result of the referendum. We will take back control of our borders, by putting an end to the free movement of people once and for all” (BBC News 2018a), and official advertisements reinforced this message.

The extreme right, Farage and Johnson in the crisis

By this point, May's project was in deep crisis and this represented Johnson's opportunity.

The referendum campaign had been “the UK's most divisive, hostile, negative and fear-provoking of the 21st century” (Moore & Ramsay 2017: 164) and indeed in living memory. The narrow result, perceived by many on the losing side as achieved through extensive dishonesty and abuse, provoked deep divisions both within parties and across society. These sharpened the cleavage between “open” or “liberal” and “closed” or “authoritarian” groups in parliament and the electorate, which now became known as “Leavers” and “Remainers”. This would almost certainly have been the case whatever the 2016 outcome, since a narrow Remain win would have antagonized the emboldened Leave movement and electorate – and especially the more aggressive Leavers – probably leading to new conflict. Indeed, it is highly possible, given the climate which developed in the late stages of the referendum and its immediate aftermath, that with the Brexit press having paved the way for viewing a Remain win as illegitimate and almost half of Leavers believing that the vote would be rigged, this could have led to the kind of protest and violence which followed Trump's defeat in 2020. There would have been a temptation for the Brexit tabloids, Farage and some Tory Leavers to stoke this situation; extreme right groups, some of which leaned towards violence, would also have brought themselves to the fore. However, the Leave victory meant that open intimidation and violence, after initially surging, slowly dissipated and the climate which they created instead reshaped the political project as it passed into the hands of the Conservative government.

The intensity of racial politics around the 2016 referendum shocked those observers who had accepted the narrative of positive change in British society. Yet, while some forms of liberalization were real, overall the country was far from being “post-racial”, and many sources of continuing racism were embedded in social relations, institutions, beliefs and attitudes. However, the constant renewal of a tradition of political racism had also played a crucial role in perpetuating the general level of racism and blocking fuller liberalization. This tradition, originating in the nineteenth century, was revived in the context of non-white immigration in the second half of the twentieth, most notoriously through Powell's speeches in 1968. As we have seen, race is a “floating signifier”, and it tends to be constantly filled with new meanings, especially by political actors who need to adapt to changing circumstances and the challenges which these pose for the achievement of their goals. It was possible for Brexit to catalyse racist tendencies in society because political racism had been regularly reproduced by sections of the political right and the press, and fed by the immigration policies of both Labour and Conservative governments. Although this tradition was “Powellite” in the sense that his example was seminal for most of the actors, contemporary racemongers are not simply Powell tribute acts, even if that is how some present themselves at times. While they attempt to emulate his considerable success in popularizing racism, they have also learned from the problems which he encountered and the political dead ends in which the extreme right – who followed him in overt racism – also found themselves.

As the Vote Leave slogan, “Take Back Control”, suggested, the overt meaning of the project for British exit from the EU, developed by the British right-wing over a quarter of a century, was a nationalist attempt to recover autonomous sovereign power for the UK state from its enmeshment in the shared sovereignty of EU legal and state institutions. “Regaining” sovereignty was also the most widely acknowledged motivation for voting Leave in 2016 (Centre for Social Investigation 2018), but since restricting immigration – long described as immigration “control” – was not only the second most popular reason for voting Leave but also (as we shall see in Chapter 4) the dominant way in which regaining sovereignty was justified by the Leave campaigns and the Brexit press, the majority for Brexit was both widely informed and in its narrow margin (51.9 versus 48.1 per cent) probably also decided by anti-immigration politics. While racism and hostility to immigration did not define Brexit as a project or process, they are central to understanding it, and no serious appraisal can avoid comprehensively examining their relationships to its overtly dominant nationalist theme. This I do over three chapters: this chapter discusses the ideas behind Brexit and the Eurosceptic/Europhobic campaign in the decades up to 2016; Chapter 4 analyses the referendum itself; and Chapter 5 examines the Brexit process and conflict following the referendum, between 2016 and the UK's formal exit in 2020.

British nationalism, Atlanticism and Europe

The movement for Brexit is part of a wider tendency towards economic and political nationalism in powerful states in the twenty-first century, which has increasingly threatened international cooperation. In this sense, Brexit can be compared to other policies, especially but by no means only of authoritarian regimes; but as the only secession from the unique international state entity which is the European Union, it is also very distinctive. Likewise, Euroscepticism is a major European political current and exists in most member states, but nowhere else has a Europhobic movement become dominant or come close to producing withdrawal from the EU; indeed, so far the British experience has acted as a deterrent rather than an incentive to others. Geopolitical repositioning linked to changes in ruling parties and regimes can also be found elsewhere, but Brexit is unique in its simultaneous transformation of international and domestic constitutional arrangements.