Lineages of a conspiracy: the ‘great replacement’ and demography

This article argues that the panic over the ‘great replacement’ of White populations in Europe, North America and Oceania needs to be understood in the context of demography as a science rooted in English and French settler-colonial projects. From William Petty to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Robert Malthus, major formulations of populationism have been animated by the settler frontier and its double-sided promise of replenishment (for some) and annihilation (for others). ‘Excess’ populations have always been defined by their structural distance from Whiteness. Replacement theorists operate in this tradition. In a classic instance of anticipatory counter-revolution, they reassert a world-spanning hierarchy by imagining its dissolution. The supposed threat that racialised groups present to the imperial core therefore justifies their ongoing domination and virtually unlimited violence against them. Such weaponised pessimism reminds us that settler-colonial triumphalism has long been accompanied by deep anxiety about the prospect of defeat, incompletion and retribution. Only a careful assessment of demography as a science of global racial stratification can explain the enduring power of the idea of populations competing to the death in a zero-sum war for planetary space.