Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich

A pioneering study of the British and American settler revolutions in the nineteenth century that gave birth to the 'Anglo-World'
Uncovers the nexus of historical changes that made the British and American settler revolutions so uniquely successful
Shows how the settler revolution intersected with the Industrial Revolution to give birth to the dominant world power of the nineteenth and then the twentieth century

Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich

Description

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.

Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich

Introduction
Part I: Shaping the Anglo-World
1. Settling Societies
2. The Founding Rupture
3. Exploding Wests
Part II: The Settler Revolution
4. The Rise of Mass Transfer
5. The Rise of the Settler
6. Colonizations
Part III: Testing Wests
7. The American West, 1815-60
8. The British West
9. Golden Wests?
10. Urban Wests
11. Last Best Wests
Part IV: Beyond the Anglo-Wests
12. Re-colonization and the Urban Carnivore
13. Beyond the Anglo-World
14. Thinking in the Rounds
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich

Author Information

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.

Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich

Reviews and Awards

"Belich's well-paced, vivid writing style makes what might otherwise be a dry analysis of figures gleaned from secondary sources quite digestible...There is much here to interest historians of the West and historians of comparative and transnational settler societies generally. Belich's revisioning of the British settler colonies as the British West and his persuasively argued case for a dynamic between metropole and colony, in which the settler society was the active agent, make his most recent book an important contribution to the field." --The Western Historical Quarterly

"A fascinating and accessible volume...Replenishing the Earth is a rewarding book that enables readers to re-situate and reconsider stories of settlement and expansion that they might think they already know well." --The Annals of Iowa

"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

"A provocative, empirically sound reexamination of the expansion of the English-speaking world in the late 19th century." -- CHOICE

"A comprehensive survey of and challenge to the immense historiography on Anglophone settler expansions of the long nineteenth century...Teachers will find Replenishing the Earth a rich and provocative source at all collegiate levels...A goldmine for the particulars of growth and expansion." --World History Bulletin

"Useful not just for scholars comparing settler societies but for everyone working on nineteenth-century North America or Australasia...an impressive contribution both to settler history and to world history." -- American Historical Review

"[A] comprehensive, highly original, largely convincing, and always fascinating account of Greater Britain's will to power, with which account scholars perforce will grapple for years to come."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Belich has provided a bracing revisionist view of Britain's formal and informal nineteenth-century empire, one that should engage specialists and generalists alike....Argued with wit and vigor, this ambitious book makes a provocative, multilayered contribution to comparative and transnational history." -- Diplomatic History