Fermanis, PorschaPorschaFermanis2021-10-272021-10-272021 the A2021-06-01Historical Reflections0315-7997http://hdl.handle.net/10197/12579Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural ex-ceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about British identity politics today. Set in an inward-looking, socially homogeneous, and postindustrial society somewhere in the colonial southern hemisphere, Erewhon provides an anachronistic simulacrum of both an isolationist “Little England” and an imperial “Global Britain,” critiquing the idea of the self-sufficient, ethnonationalist “island nation” by demonstrating the extent to which it relies on the racial logic of White utopia-nism, as well as on a disavowal of the non-British labor that supports and sustains it.enThis is a post–peer-review, precopyedited version of an article published in Historical Reflections. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Fermanis, P. (2021). Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 47(2), 91-104. Retrieved Oct 26, 2021, is available online at: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/historical-reflections/47/2/hrrh470208.xmlBrexitEthnonationalismNeoimperialismSamuel ButlerSettler colonialismRace theoryUtopianismWhite supremacyJournal Article4729110410.3167/hrrh.2021.4702082021-10-22StG-2015_679436SOUTHHEMhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/