REPLENISHING THE EARTH:SETTLER REVOLUTION & THE RISE OF THE ANGLOWORLD PAPER: The Settler Revolution And The Rise Of The Angloworld

by James Belich

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, World History, European History, Politics, Australia

588 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2009

About the author

James Belich is a historian and academic whose writing has focused on reinterpreting nineteenth-century New Zealand history, particularly the New Zealand Wars. His scholarship on Maori and Pakeha relations has received critical recognition and his book, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1980), won the international Trevor Reed Memorial Prize for historical scholarship. He is a Professor of History, and in 2006 he was made an Officer of New Zealand Order of Merit.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been following Belich's development of his revisionist analysis of settler colonialism for quite some time now, and it is refreshing to see a fuller development of the case that there is no single causal explanation for the spread of the Anglo-world in some sort of uniquely and inherently British cultural, social, political, or economic condition or institution. The case that we can see in modern (that is 19th century) settler colonialism a series of booms and busts, and an uneven process of colonial development is compelling – especially as he shows that this process is different in different colonies, and that it is not uniquely British (the Siberian evidence is brief, tantalising, and compelling), even if it is most developed in British settlement colonies – including the USA – where the evidence is also powerful.

I have three problems with the case. First, Belich deploys the notion of settlement colonies as neo-Britain's, a concept he credits to Alfred Crosby's neo-fatal impact analysis of an ecological history of empire (Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe 900-1900). The second relates to this: while I understand the case that there was a expansion of an Anglo world, his focus on a desire to replicate Britain (or America) in settler colonies (Australasia, Canada, the Mid-West, and so forth) combines with the sense of neo-Britain to obscure the question of whether the desire came to fruition – arguably, a desire to construct an overseas Britishness led to quasi-Britishness where there were significant differences from Britishness. Third, I would have liked a much clearer outline of the condition of 'recolonisation' early in the book. I have gone back and re-read, several times, pp 206-9 where this essential concept is defined in a typology/theoretical outline of stages of settler colonialism. While Belich is properly concerned to rebut his critics, he does so at the expense of a pithy explanation of 'recolonisation'. It was only in the conclusion that I saw a succinct statement that explosive colonisation (the first distinct stage of settler colonialism) was followed by recolonisation because explosive colonisation weakened central imperial control.

These three points are not by way of denying the argument – it is powerful and provides a solid basis to develop a more sophisticated analysis of settler colonialism. Instead, these points are suggestions for issues we should look at more carefully as scholars/analysts of settler colonialism. As one who deals with cultures of colonialism, the neo-Britain/overseas Britishness problem is the major one for me. If I may be a revisionist to Belich's revisionism – it's not that simple.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

another belich classic!

the array of research and his mastery of it is something to behold when he’s focused solely on the history of little old NZ. the fact that he manages the same trick on the entire English-speaking world (and a lot of the non-English speaking world) is stunning.

the theses for why the English-speaking world managed to to reproduce itself and spread so far so fast are not simple aphorisms, which makes them much more intellectually rigorous while also far harder to explain at a dinner party than something like “guns germs and steel.”

[James Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

On occasion, it is very important to step back and examine an issue in history from a large-scale perspective. This is precisely what James Belich has accomplished for what he calls the "Anglo-World." This book examines the explosion of settler societies in the nineteenth century, the homelands that created them, and the indigenous peoples who resisted them. The Anglo-World consists of the following: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This is very much a book about the United States. However, there is very little about the actual resistance of the Indigenous people in the United States.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really ambitious re-theorization of the macro-history of Anglo settler colonies. Belich takes on earlier conceptions of Anglo superiority, and argues that actually it was the lucky/accidental coincidence of a range of cultural, economic, technological, and historical factors that allowed Anglo civilization to expand from Britain to the US--the eastern states of which Belich argues became their own imperial metropolis--and into the Western US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a certain extent South Africa. One major argument Belich makes is that Anglos were not unique in any given factor that allowed their expansion, but the particular confluence of factors allowed them to expand across the planet. In particular, the tendency to clone their home civilization across long distances was one major factor. This, he argues, played a key role in why British and US colonialism of their settler colonies was so much more effective and unified than Spanish or Portuguese colonialism in Latin America--which was equally expansive and economically exploitative, but didn't reproduce new Spains or Portugals--and more globally dominant than Russian colonization in Siberia or Chinese in central Asia--both of which reproduced their home societies with varying degrees of success, but weren't global enough in scope to effectively compete with the Anglos. Instead, the Anglos were the only group who combined a fortuitous early industrialization--which Belich dates to 1800-1820 in Britain and 1820 in the US--with strong cultural, economic, linguistic, and ideological links between the metropolitan centers in Britain and the eastern US on the one hand, and their expanding colonies on the other. In other words, the close relationship between, say Ohio or Alabama and the eastern US in the early 1800s facilitated the economic boom cycle that rapidly built up the West as reproductions of the more slowly developed east.

Belich also contests the typical export theory of settler colony economies, which posits that settler economies were driven almost exclusively by exporting staples back to the home country and importing manufactured goods. This book shows convincing evidence that settler economies moved through cycles of boom and bust, then were "re-colonized" by export rescue. In boom phases the primary driver of economic growth was growth itself, with massively more import than export. Contra staples theory, Belich shows a common trend where people in the colonies made their money not by selling to Britain or the eastern US, but by producing for local consumption by those who built the rapidly expanding boom cities like Melbourne or San Francisco. The new settlers and the builders required massive amounts of food, wood, feed for animals, and other materials, so there was no economic sense in trying to sell staples to the metropolitan center when goods and resources could get a much higher price locally. However, at some point these booms--which were in effect, economic bubbles--all went bust, with catastrophic economic results as frequently between 50-90% of businesses and farmers went bankrupt and economies, real wages, growth, etc. constricted rapidly. With the busts people turned increasingly toward exports to the metropolitan center, which Belich argues was a re-colonization that brought the colonies back more tightly into the orbit of the colonial centers.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's rare to see a book with an argument this sweeping which manages to hold up this well throughout the book and provide a durable new lens through which to look at major world historical events. This examination of how British and American settler frontiers in the 18th-early 20th century supercharged those countries' economic and political growth is compelling and provides real depth in examining the different places where this played out, from the original 13 American colonies, to the Ohio river valley, to the far west, to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and even Argentina. The analysis is a bit more materialist than I would like, I think underplaying the importance of ideology in settler colonial and broader imperial projects, but as an economic focused history, does its job very well

[Poppy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would you believe this is my first Kiwi Historian book I’ve read in grad school? Represent! 🇳🇿

I liked most of this argument but it did seem a bit far fetched at times, and his writing style (and jamming in so much information) made it hard to follow at times. I wish he had discussed places in the British empire that didn’t come to fruition (West Indis/Asia etc), but I notice that wasn’t the point. Nonetheless I’ll be thinking about these ideas for a while, and the influence of the ‘neo British’ or ‘neo American’ culture and identity. As a social and cultural history buff I wish there was literally any glimmer of this, very rooted in economic ideas.

[Ryan Menke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives an absolutely unique insight into the growth of Anglophone colonies, the United States, Canada, and Australia, giving a completely different perspective on their rapid growth and how the only major differences between the three is in absolute scale.

I highly recommend reading this book if you are interested in determining why the United States and similar countries are as large and prosperous as they are today.

[Robert Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really brilliant book that shows how to tell economic, social and political history in a seamless,entertaining and informative manner for even those of us who think they are well read on the era in question.

[Kelvin Yudianto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep and enjoyable

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Respectfully, not his best work.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The story of European imperialism is dramatic and traumatic, etched deep into the psyches of both victors and victims, and it has tended to dominate discussion of European expansion. Yet, in much of Asia and Africa substantive European empire arrived very late and did not last very long. The British did not comprehensively dominate India until the suppression of the 'Mutiny' in 1859, and they were gone ninety years later. Outside Java, the Dutch East Indies was largely a myth on a map until about 1900 - an understanding that, if any power was to have a real empire in this region, it would be the Dutch. European empire in most of Africa was not even a myth on a map until the 'Scramble' of the 1880s, and often not substantive before 1900. 'Before 1890 the Portuguese controlled less than ten per cent of the area of Angola and scarcely one per cent of Mozambique.' 'Even in South Africa . . . a real white supremacy was delayed until the 1880s.' For many Asians and Africans, real European empire lasted about fifty years. A recent study notes that 125 of the world's 188 present states were once European colonies. But empire lasted less than a century in over half of these. With all due respect to the rich scholarship on European imperialism, in the very long view most of these European empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan.

Settlement, the third form of European expansion, emphasized the creation of new societies, not the control of old ones. It had no moral superiority over empire. Indeed, it tended to displace, marginalize, and occasionally even exterminate indigenous peoples rather than simply exploit them. But it did reach further and last longer than empire. It left Asia largely untouched, with the substantial exception of Siberia, and affected only the northern and southern ends of Africa. It specialized, instead, in the Americas and Australasia. European empire dominated one and a half continents for a century or so. European settlement came to dominate three-and-a-third continents, including Siberia. It still does. It was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion, and it is time that historians of that expansion turned their attention to it."

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the sort of sprawling history of everything that I tend not to often read these days, but what Belich is offering is a really a theory of how we've had several centuries of predominance by English-speaking superpowers. Essentially, Great Britain and the United States were the economic winners of the Napoleonic wars and were able to take advantage of technology and finance to send wave after wave of population surges to assorted frontiers throughout the 19th century. From there, Belich detects an almost generational pattern of growth-forward settlement and city building, almost inevitably followed by a bust, to be followed by a period of what Belich calls "recolonization," as the new frontiers begin to settle down into resource generators for their respective metropolitan capitals. Belich does have many examples of exceptions to this pattern, but he's plowed through enough monographic material to make you believe that he's onto something. That the man writes with some genuine wit does help to lighten the load of what could otherwise be an insufferably pedantic exercise!

As for my main caveat, I'd note that Belich tends to deal more with what the prospective settlers thought they were gaining and less with what they were running from. One of the salutatory points made by Joshua Freeman in his study of the giant factory entitled "Behemoth" was how authoritarian Britain was in the immediate decades after the end of the Napoleonic Wars; it's certainly food for thought. Seeing as Belich displays, at points, some personal irony about being a person of non-English descent writing about the English speaking peoples, the role and motivation of the German-speaking people participating in the movable feast of Anglophone colonization is another point that someone should explicate upon.

Originally written: August 19, 2019.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little thinner than I had hoped but still a great reinterpretation of modern history - civilizations on the edge of Europe sent out settler populations at roughly the same time - Russia to Siberia, Portugal to Brazil, Spain of course, Britain to the Americas and Australia. A great shift in Angloworld - emigraion before 1815 was declasse and for criminals - suddenly became respectable. Then the final chapter, which covers the rise of "Angloworld," in which Capital and Frontier become reintegrated, post 1945. By contrasting colonists with settlers, this NZ historian does a great service but more must be done to eliminate the whole postcolonial BS theory.

[Kalkino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just picked this up from Foyles on Charing Cross Road. I don't usually buy this kind of book without reading a review, but it is just out this month and I thought I would take a risk.

Just as an aside one of the great things about buying an expensive first release hardcover book is the feel of the new pages

[AskHistorians]

Why is it that British colonialism made the largest impact, in terms of lasting sense of Anglo-connections, whether with America or Australia? In a somewhat controversial book, Belich draws attention both to the economic cycles that made the British Empire the paramount power, and the revolution in settlerism as an ideology that allowed for a wide-ranging cultural expansion.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting take on the Great Divergence debate. I might question how he assesses culture, but still, it's an excellent book.