The Meaning of the Nineteenth Century: Reflections on James Belich's Replenishing the Earth

One could make the case that the traditional field (and journal!) designation "Victorian Studies" might better be replaced by a revised "Nineteenth-Century Studies" in order more accurately to name the wealth of trans-period and trans-historical research that has transformed scholarship in recent years. To consider any such change, however, raises two immediate questions. In what sense can we say that the nineteenth century is a distinctive period? When/where can we assert that it is not simply more than the eighteenth century, or the seventeenth, or the twelfth, but is rather qualitatively different? (Or, as some may wish to put it, when/where/ how did the nineteenth century become distinctively "modern"?) And second: assuming we identify to our satisfaction such a qualitatively different nineteenth century, is there still a role within it for an Anglo-centric "Victorian Studies"?

James Belich, in his magisterial and masterful Replenishing the Earth, provides resounding answers to both questions, perhaps the most effective that have been offered in recent years. Let me begin therefore with a quick summary of his main arguments, and then return to these broad questions. In passing I will also reflect on matters of method and historical explanation.

I.

Belich's opening gambit is unforgettable. It consists of two paradoxes that emerge from the juxtaposition of two pairs of cities: Chicago and Melbourne, London and New York. Chicago's story is that of the quintessential mushroom city: spectacular growth from perhaps one hundred inhabitants in 1830 to 1.1 million in 1890, with all the concomitant aspects of such an urban explosion. It is the poster city for the North American frontier settlement, and one that is usually explained in terms of the peculiarities of United States history. Curiously, however, the story of Melbourne, on the other side of the planet, is uncannily similar: founded in 1835, it had close to half a million inhabitants by 1891. Local histories again explain the mushrooming of Melbourne through local factors, especially the discovery of gold, though the timing is not quite right. But more to the point, says Belich, given the similarities between the simultaneous developments of these two exploding cities, shouldn't we be looking for a historical explanation capacious enough to account for both?

New York and London posit a different interpretive problem of size and timing. Whereas premodern cities rarely if ever exceeded one million inhabitants, the twentieth century has seen the rise of hundreds of them, and even of more than seventy cities with populations of 2.5 million or more. Scholars have accounted for this twentieth-century phenomenon through the transformative effects of a massive modern agro-industrial revolution that progressed apace from around 1900. But New York and London—and only New York and London—both became cities of multiple millions of people long before the agro-industrial developments that supposedly made them possible. How come? And why them?

The answers, claims Belich, lie in the great forgotten revolution of the nineteenth century: the Settler Revolution. More than European empires, it was the explosion of European settlement—that is, the massive creation of neo-Europes in non-European lands—that was the most dramatic nineteenth-century development of unprecedented scale, and that had the greatest global consequences. Moreover, this development was Anglo-centric. Around 1780 there had been several more or less equal settler races: the Spanish, the Russians, and the Portuguese, as well as the British, and the latter did not have much of an edge. But from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century the great Anglo divergence took place, in which Anglo peoples bred like rabbits and settled like bad weeds. (Belich's definition of Anglo peoples is a bit vague, partly cultural, partly racialist, and occasionally linguistic; expansive enough to encompass the Irish and at times flexibly becoming "Anglo-Saxons" so as to allow the inclusion of Germans.) These settlers generally moved from east to west, be it the familiar American West...