The Economics and Ideologies of Anglo-American Settlerism, 1780-1939

The central aim of this highly stimulating book is to explain how what Belich calls the "Anglo" world was transformed "from 12 million mostly poor people around 1780 to 200 million mainly rich people around 1930" (555). Gathering together a mass of material on British and American settler frontiers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on their evolving relationship with their motherlands, Belich offers an arresting reinterpretation of their significance. He has some precursors, for example Donald Denoon, who wrote a fine book for its time that, like Belich's, is rooted in economic history. But Denoon left out the United States, which is the biggest single segment in Belich's tale, and Belich goes into the dynamics of settlerism in a much richer, more penetrating, and more ambitious way than did his predecessor.

Belich sees the Settler Revolution as an Anglo phenomenon, taking off about 1800, and as the key element in creating Kenneth Pomeranz's Great Divergence between rates of growth in the East and the West, which brought the latter global power in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was, he believes, the product of three interacting revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: (1) the American, which created the bifurcating Anglo world; (2) the French, which helped the new United States to flourish and spurred on, finally, (3) the Industrial Revolution in Britain while retarding it in Europe. The British Industrial Revolution provided the means, such as improved shipping, of making mass transfers of people to the American West and to the British Wests in Canada, Australasia, and South Africa.

This interpretation of divergence is fascinating but very contentious. Angus Maddison, for example, argues that Western Europe and its offshoots drew significantly ahead of Asia in income per capita between 1500 and 1800, with Britain, the North American settlements, and the Netherlands at the head of the charge. And, despite the Industrial Revolution taking off first in Britain, Maddison's numbers indicate that the divergence between British growth rates and those in Western Europe narrowed after 1820 (302-16; Tables A7 and A8, 382-83). On that basis, one could argue that the Anglo world was essentially the product of the success of Britain's "industrious revolution" before 1800, in which time it also acquired the best places for white settlement that encouraged growth on the Anglo frontiers after 1800 (de Vries 249-70). Smithian growth also remained of key importance after 1800. Belich recognizes that a great deal of the growth on frontiers before 1870 remained dependent on continuous improvements in traditional sources of power. Settlement advanced using sail, water, and wind, together with the ubiquitous horse that took up so much of the burgeoning arable produce on the frontier. Smithian growth was not a feature of the frontier alone. Productivity gains in traditional technologies also made significant contributions to Britain's growth in the nineteenth century; for example, constant innovation ensured that sail was not superseded by steam on long journeys until after 1870 (Graham 86). Again, the efficient working of power machinery often depended on support from preindustrial technology. Railway companies were one of the biggest owners of horses in Britain as late as 1914, using them for the vital task of local delivery (Thompson 64-67). The success of the Anglo world before 1880 was, it could be argued, in large part the product of an industrious revolution that had begun 200 years before.

Belich distinguishes three stages of settler colonization. The first, incremental colonization, was the dominant force before 1800 and typified by the growth of the North American colonies, where population doubled every twenty-five years. The second was explosive colonization, very largely an Anglo phenomenon, involving mass transfer of human and capital resources where, in the great boom-times, population could double in ten years. The third he calls recolonization. As the booms that propelled explosive colonization turned into busts, settler society's survival came to depend on "export rescue" to pay the...