Population, Mobility and Moral Regulation

Legg, Stephen

Abstract

Populations are living, moving, lusting, mysterious things. They have mortality, but rarely die; they reproduce, but are rarely born; while geographically located they are constantly on the move; and although analysed through charts, algorithms and regressions, they must be understood through particular emotions, whims and desires. Solving the conundrum of populations is a wish as old as that of governance itself. Solutions have ranged from the political (from authoritarian dictatorship to liberal government), spiritual (from national theocracies to individual pastoralism), and economic (from state-directed to laissez-faire economies) to moral claims (the public and political good, religious ethics, the moral economy). The ‘moral’ has also been imagined as a realm in which individual behaviour can be analysed and changed, for the benefit of the individual and, importantly, for the benefit of the population (its body politic, its spirit, its profitability, its constitution).

Population geographers have led the discipline's engagement with demographic concerns, and mobility has been at the core of their analyses. The founding arithmetic of the sub-discipline calculates the population of an area to be the result of an increase from births, decrease from deaths, and the effects of net migration. Studies of the latter have enlivened the empiricism of the discipline and created exciting engagements with theorisations of mobility (Tyner 2013). Yet, population geographers have been reluctant to engage with the broader political and cultural examination of population within geography. The role of census taking, for example, has been studied as an act of territory making and as willfully resisted acts of state surveillance (Hannah 2000, 2011, and this volume). Likewise, despite ‘moral restraint’ and ‘vice’ being listed as ‘preventative checks’ in Malthus's foundational model of population, these have featured little in studies of population geography.

Historical geographers have engaged more vigorously with studies of moral regulation and, separately, with population and mobility, in certain ways. What follows examines these traditions along and then across the ‘archival grain’ (Stoler 2009). After examining some recent studies of moral regulation within historical geography (of mothering and of gay bars), I turn to studies that have, more or less explicitly, considered the mobilities in and of moral regulation (of drink and of prostitutes). I then turn to studies of populations in motion, which have prompted (or been denied) forms of control and oversight (of convict and indentured labour). In conclusion, I turn against the emphasis of these works, which privilege a (Foucauldian influenced) emphasis on land and placement, even when studied through motion. In a counter-geographical concluding section (although one which retains a Foucauldian emphasis on outsiders and a postcolonial interest in the subaltern), I turn to a hyper-mobile, amoral non-population – that of pirates. If the pirate historically acted as an anti-body to national populations – an opposite and external threat that triggered defensive violence – the refugee functions as contemporary Europe's morally troubling anti-body.

Citation

Legg, S. (2020). Population, Mobility and Moral Regulation. In The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography (355-373). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529739954.n20

• Online Publication Date: Feb 10, 2021
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 355-373
• Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography
• Chapter Number: 18
• ISBN: 9781526404558
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529739954.n20
• Keywords: historical geography; infant mortality; mobility; population; regulations
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/47828493
• Publisher URL: https://sk.sagepub.com/hnbk/edvol/the-sage-handbook-of-historical-geography/chpt/18-population-mobility-moral-regulation