Scholarly Critique on the Settler Society
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
For those historians who work on English-speaking settler societies, they always take North America, New Zealand, South Africa, Australasia and islands in the Caribbean as their case studies and examine how they form an analytical unit. Noticing the inadequacy of historical studies on the 18th and 19th Anglo-world, especially the explosive growth of English-speaking societies between 1780 and 1930, James Belich thinks historians should pay more attention to the Anglo-world as a whole unit. In Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939, Belich examines the Anglo-world, a world embracing Britain, the United States, and the sometimes neglected ‘British West’ of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.
According to him, the European expansion took three forms: the creation of networks, mainly of trade: the formation of empire, often by conquest; and settlement, which ‘emphasized the creation of new societies, not the control of old ones.’[1] Rather than focus on the networks of trade and the formation of empire, Belich mainly discusses the history of Anglophone settlers and explores how they endured, and the most expansive of these were predominantly Anglo settlements in order to provide a new explanation of global economic disparity between East and West by1900.[2]
In the book, Belich argues there were four stages of British colonization: incremental, explosive, recolonization, and decolonization. The incremental phase saw the relatively slow expansion of settler populations between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries; The explosive stage witnessed a series of exploding west characterized by frenetic booms; in the period of recolonization, exports come to prominence as an ‘export rescue’ ensues, during which the shattered settler economies are restored through sales to their old lands; Finally, in the stage of the decolonization, the America experienced double decolonization: it first de-coupled culturally and economically from Britain, and then, after 1890, underwent a process of domestic decolonization as its mid-west and far-west moved to parity with its eastern old land and New York lost its nineteenth-century ascendancy. With primary resources and insightful ideas, Belich creates a provocative work on the settler society of the Anglo-world. However, when I read his book in detail, I find his book is still in need of further exploration.
Belich attempts to give a new explanation to the rise of the Anglo-world and adopts the cycles of boom and bust to support his arguments, which, I think, is very problematic. Belich believes a new ideology of settlerism was existed that promoted the mass emigration and investment within the Anglo-world and the mass transfer of goods, money, ideas and people began just before the proliferation of steam transport technology and accelerated exponentially after it.[3] He hopes his book could “provide a new explanation for the explosive growth of English-speaking societies in the long nineteenth century. In doing so, it has had to focus on the technological, economic, and cultural developments that powered the crucial changes. Political history has had to take a back seat, and social history has scarcely featured at all…It argues that settler societies were configured not only by time and place but also by rhythm ─ the rhythm of boom, followed by bust, followed by export rescue.”[4] Discarding the political and social factors, Belich assumes the economic cycles could help him to explore these topics. He points out, the cycles of boom and bust bound the centers and peripheries of the Anglo world, which created spiraling patterns of interdependence and growth of the Anglo-world. Behind them, there was a repeating pattern of risky economic colonization, which was followed by a sober bust-time economic recolonization. Connected the centers and peripheries of the Anglo-world, the cycles of boom and bust finally caused the global economic advantage of the Britain and its settler dependencies by the end of the nineteenth century.
As Fernand Braudel described in his masterpiece, it is undeniable that there were Kondratieff long-term and short-term economic cycles existed in world history.[5] It is also an undisputable fact that the goods, money, ideas and people exchanged in the Anglo-world played significant roles for creating an advanced Anglo-world. But how did the cycles of boom and bust connect the whole Anglo-world, Belich did not explain them in detail, which could not convince his readers how the economic cycles could help them to understand the history of the Anglo-world. It seems like he attempts to offer a new explanation, however, it is still unclear what the functions of the economic cycles were in the 18th century British history.
Belich’s discusses the great divergence between China and the Britain in the middle of the 18th century, however, his arguments on the great divergence is still in need of further consideration. In the book, he explores the great divergence occurred over the long nineteenth century when the British world pulled ahead of China. Situating his work between Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism, Belich wants to fill the gap on how to explain this issue. On the one hand, taking David S. Landes and Immanuel Wallerstein as excellent exemplars, he accuses Eurocentrists of underrating Britain’s exceptional economic history.[6] In his opinion, the great divergence was essentially an Anglo-American phenomenon. In the 18th century, the British and the Americans became ‘an organic unity.’[7] Meanwhile, the dynamic and intrinsically volatile forces were loose among them, which were re-constituted into ‘New Lands’ and were connected together in an ‘Anglo-World’. It was these Anglophone elements that caused the Anglo-world ‘diverged’ and surpassed their rivals in Asia and Europe.
On the other hand, taking Andre Gunder Frank as a representative of the Sinocentrists, Belich claims that “no amount of research on China” can “provide a convincing explanation” for the great divergence. Belich rudely draws a conclusion and underestimates the great contributions of some Sinocentrists, like Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong and Philip C. Huang.[8] While in fact, these Sinocentrists have created very productive historical works, which have greatly help us to understand the 18th century world history. Take Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) as an example. In this book, Pomeranz argues that Britain’s economic advantage over China was due to its steam-enhanced access to both “ghost acres” and dependent markets in the nineteenth century. The enormous “ghost acres” released the population pressure in Britain and encouraged the British to immigrate to the outside world; Meanwhile, the Britain economic dependencies stimulated the economical exchanges of the wood, fibers, and foods among the Anglo-world and allowed the British to consume them, which created good conditions for the British industrialization. Unlike Pomeranz, Belich shows the mutual enrichment of Britain and a very limited set of “ghost acres” and markets in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, although he ignores the roles of the other British colonies, especially the Caribbean and India, also played in constructing a great British empire. Belich shows that Britain was special only because better sails and then coal power let it take full economic advantage of its overseas peripheries.[9] Underestimating the contributions of both the Sinocentrists and the Eurocentrists, Belich attempts to fill the gap, but he seems oversimplify the factors of the great divergence in the 18th century.
Putting the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa under the umbrella of the Anglo-world, Belich attempts to offer us a new explanation of the rise of the Anglo-world in 18th and 19th the world history, which refashions our understanding the history of the British empire at that time. Belich is an ambitious historian and produces an original and provocative monograph, but if he wants to convince his readers, perhaps he still needs a lot of hard work to do.
[1] James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23.
[2] Belich, ibid, 14
[3] Belich, ibid, 98–99.
[4] Belich, ibid, 548
[5] Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Perspective of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 71-85.
[6] Belich, ibid, 442.
[7] Belich, ibid, 51
[8] See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998); Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) and The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
[9] Belich, ibid, 443-5.
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