Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939

by James Belich (Author)

5 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0199297276

ISBN-10: 9780199297276

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Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new answer to that question, uncovering a "settler revolution" that took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin, the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Between 1780 and 1930 the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to emigration, the emergence of a settler "boom mentality," and a late flowering of non-industrial technologies--wind, water, wood, and work animals--especially on settler frontiers. This revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement into something explosive--capable of creating great cities like Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single generation.

When the great settler booms busted, as they always did, a second pattern set in. Links between the Anglo-wests and their metropolises, London and New York, actually tightened as rising tides of staple products flowed one way and ideas the other. This "re-colonization" re-integrated Greater America and Greater Britain, bulking them out to become the superpowers of their day. The "Settler Revolution" was not exclusive to the Anglophone countries--Argentina, Siberia, and Manchuria also experienced it. But it was the Anglophone settlers who managed to integrate frontier and metropolis most successfully, and it was this that gave them the impetus and the material power to provide the world's leading super-powers for the last 200 years.

This book will reshape understandings of American, British, and British dominion histories in the long 19th century. It is a story that has such crucial implications for the histories of settler societies, the homelands that spawned them, and the indigenous peoples who resisted them, that their full histories cannot be written without it.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

`A great contribution to large-scale history: constantly sparkling in its style, humorous, and offering profound new insights. A magnificent book.'
Jared Diamond, UCLA, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of the best-sellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse

About the Author

James Belich is professor of history at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. He previously held the inaugural Keith Sinclair Chair in History at the University of Auckland, and has held visiting positions at Cambridge, Melbourne, and Georgetown Universities. His earlier books, all award-winners, include a two volume general history of New Zealand, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged, and The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, winner of the Trevor Reese Prize for an outstanding work of imperial or commonwealth history published in the preceding two years.

Product details

Hardcover: 573 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press (August 17, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780199297276
ISBN-13: 978-0199297276
ASIN: 0199297274
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 2.1 x 6 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,789,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #824 in Books > History > Australia & Oceania > Australia & New Zealand
- #2817 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Emigration & Immigration
- #8795 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > History > Europe

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Roger Dan Edwards

There is a difference in settlers and immigrants

September 15, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This very well written and ease to follow book shows how the events of the British and American settler revolution was so different from any other settler event in the world. Belich's description of the basic difference between the of effects of settlers and immigrants is especially well done.

I highly recommend this book those not only interested in the history of Anglo world but also to those who are interested in world history

One person found this helpful

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November 23, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

With "Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939", James Belich emboldens his reputation as New Zealand's leading historian. After 25 years of deeply researching and presenting/re-presenting the emergence of Aotearoa New Zealand and its people, indigenous and colonial, and the relationships and politics of each, he turns his narrative towards the rise of the Anglo-World. He combines a grand sweep with meticulous research and a novelist's eye for lateral detail.

Belich was so successful at challenging received historical wisdom in his first book, "The New Zealand Wars" (1987) that his radical take on the 19th century conflict between the British and the Maori has become today's orthodoxy. However, Belich is not a revisionist for the sake of political correctness or provocation. "The New Zealand Wars", in which he awarded a number of pivotal battles to Maori tribes for the first time in (literally) recorded history, was first and foremost a towering feat of historical research.

Belich is a writer who does not allow the density of the subject matter to heavy his prose. This is his thesis: European settlement of the New World came in three successive waves - networks (especially of trade), empire (through conquest), and settlement; that it amounted to a `settler revolution', characterized by the spectacular growth of Anglophone peoples and culture across the globe; and that the settlers themselves were neither heroic nor especially villainous. Belich spells out how British world colonization involved four phases - incremental, explosive, decolonization, and recolonization - each shaped by identifiable social, political and economic forces. He brings forth as persuasive evidence the stories of four famed cities - New York, London, Chicago and Melbourne. (If Melbourne seems out of place, it shouldn't -- as Belich points out, Melbourne in 1890 was a mega-city, boasting a population greater than Madrid and Mexico City and, by a factor of nine, Los Angeles).

His story weaves together strands that are simultaneously riveting on their own and compelling as a whole. In his book "Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century" Belich is at his most compelling when describing the 'protein boom' which saw Maori society grow from three figures to four then five ("Hunters & Gardeners"). (All evolutionary biologists and macroeconomists should study his story technique). In "Replenishing the Earth" Belich stretches this treatment over four great cities and the context of their nations and the world at the time. You might call this "busting out theory" and indeed you could credit Belich as a historian who is "busting out" - reimagining, transforming, reforging.

"Replenishing the Earth" is a tour de force. Belich is well known to New Zealanders as an author and television presenter. He gets standing ovations from his students, and storied prizes from academia in Great Britain. With this wide-angled and keenly-edged book, international audiences who need to know their history will enthrall at discovering a historian and writer at the peak of his investigative power and creativity.

16 people found this helpful

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Excellent; 4.5 Stars

April 16, 2016

Format: Paperback

This well written and thoughtful book is a description and analysis of Anglophones came to dominate such a large fraction of the world. Belich uses a comparative approach, describing the settlement colonizations of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to describe the common dynamic features of anglophone settlement. The highly successful anglophone diaspora resulted in the generation of a substantial number of successful states dominated by anglophones and with considerable cultural continuity with the British anglophone homeland. Belich shows well that this phenomenon resulted from the conjunction of a number factors. England, while not the most successful initial European colonizer, established footholds in many parts of the world during the 17th and 18th centuries. British success in the Napoleonic Wars left it as the premier imperial-colonial power, partly because the Napoleonic struggles impoverished potential European competitors. British demographic and economic dynamism endowed it with the people and capital to colonize much of the world. The relative peace and relative ease of long distance marine transport allowed mass movements. As Belich points out, this phenomenon was largely duplicated in North America by the USA, providing a second major source of anglophone colonization. As he points out also, American settlement colonization was abetted mightily by British investments. Belich discusses some institutional features of the British anglophone lineage, notably early self-government, that may have played an important role. The initial British-American advantages in settlement colonization were multiplied enormously in the early 19th century by the fact that Britain was the leader in industrialization with subsequent American industrialization playing an equally important role.

Belich describes an interesting model of settlement colonization that appears to characterize almost all anglophone settlement colonies. Initial exploration and establishment of relatively small colonies is followed by a boom that brings large numbers of immigrants and considerable investments to the colony. This is followed by a bust and the speculative bubble bursts, considerable personal and economic distress, and then considerable recovery as the colony develops a successful export economy of primary products directed at the metropolitan homeland. Belich repeatedly stresses the economic irrationality of these bubbles and criticizes the popular "staples" theory of settlement growth which argues for initial settlement driven by export oriented and economically rational behavior. He also stresses the key role of governments in facilitating settlement booms, often in the face of unfavorable economics. Belich also stresses that indigenous resistance was often more successful than usually described, though as he is careful to specify, indigenous tragedy considerably outweighed indigenous agency.

This is a convincing set of analyses based on a very large volume of prior scholarship. The bibliography is excellent. There are a couple of minor weaknesses. Belich has some discussion of the genesis of the industrialization and why it occurred in Britain/Europe. As is commonly the case, he doesn't discuss one key and unique feature, the distinctive European scientific-mathematical tradition. Belich opens this book with a short discussion of why English is one of the world's most common languages. The success of anglophone settler colonization is certainly a large part of the answer but its not the only one. One consequence of successful British imperialism, followed by decades of American hegemony, is that English is a successful lingua franca in several large non-anglophone areas such as Europe and India.

2 people found this helpful

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