Riding the Whirlwind of Settler Colonialism

Replenishing the Earth opens with a meditation on two pairs of cities—Melbourne and Chicago on the one hand, London and New York on the other—and what they tell us about the astonishing expansion of Anglophone settler-colonial societies in the nineteenth century. The first pair of cities seemed to sprout from out of nowhere virtually overnight. The second pair of cities experienced exponential growth in the period covered by the book, to become the two largest cities in the world, and the only two to have over 2.5 million inhabitants by the end of the nineteenth century.

James Belich reads this tale of four cities as a synecdoche of the larger pattern of hyper-expansion in the settler-colonial world historically tied to Great Britain, which far outstripped the expansion of its imperial rivals. Britain's American empire was originally far smaller than that of Spain, for example: there were about five times as many inhabitants in Spanish America in the late eighteenth century compared to Anglophone America. A century later, as Belich points out, the situation was reversed: 65 million people in Spanish America, compared with 152 million in Anglo America—not to mention millions more in Britain's South African and Australasian settler colonies (and, somewhat more remotely, a subject empire of another 400 million people or so).

As even this brief account suggests, this is a book brimming with some very impressive statistics. Here is the most sobering set of all: Ireland was supplying 100,000 cattle, 200,000 sheep and lambs, 400,000 pigs, and 90 million eggs a year to Britain by the mid-1830s, when in the coming two decades millions of Irish people would die of starvation or emigrate. In all, the food Ireland exported during each famine year was enough to feed two million people (445-46). The problem for Ireland, of course, is that those two million people were in England: it's not just that Ireland was starving as England was thriving—it's that Ireland was starving in order to feed England.

The structural logic leading to such catastrophes is precisely what Belich aims to uncover and retrace, though his book is ultimately more interested in colonial triumph than in the human catastrophes that have always accompanied it (of which, to be fair, it is well aware). And Replenishing the Earth accomplishes its task very ably. Belich's book, from which any scholar interested in British or Anglophone culture in the nineteenth century has much to learn, reminds us of the virtues of transcending the limits and scale of the nation-state and opening our interpretive horizons to read the world in as wide a frame as possible. It resituates Victorian Britain in its global context and also adds much needed socioeconomic contextualization for the recent interest in transatlantic studies. It is also a valuable addition to the growing body of work on settler-colonial societies, though it would have been more valuable still had it done more to engage with some of the current scholarship in the wider field, for example, the work of Patrick Wolfe, or the recent books of Lorenzo Veracini, Gershon Shafir, Nur Masalha, Gabriel Piterberg, and others, which explore the last surviving example of classic settler colonialism in the world, namely the ongoing Zionist project in Palestine (which, curiously, is the only major case of settler colonialism that the book does not discuss or even mention in passing, despite its contextual discussions of French Algeria, Russian Siberia, and Chinese Manchuria).

The book rejects many older explanations of the so-called Anglo divergence, including the appeal to a mythical Anglo-Saxonism, the virtues of frontier society, suggestions of environmental circumstances, or the heritage of growth-prone institutions, none of which, as Belich shows, were unique to the Anglo world. Invoking Fernand Braudel's concept of "conjuncture," the book posits a formative and explosive interaction among and between the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions and a hitherto underestimated Settler Revolution, which itself emerged out of the convergence...