Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

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James Belich (Professor of History, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington)

Replenishing the Earth

The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

James Belich (Professor of History, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington)

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English

Oxford University Press
25 June 2009

History; General & world history; British & Irish history; History of the Americas; Australasian & Pacific history; Colonialism & imperialism

Why does so much of the world speak 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.

By: James Belich (Professor of History Stout Research Centre Victoria University of Wellington)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 48mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780199297276
ISBN 10: 0199297274
Pages: 592
Publication Date: 25 June 2009
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld

Replenishing the Earth is the biggest, boldest, most truly global [of the] British World histories. Book of the week. Stephen Howe, The Independent This is one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years - arguably since Sir Charles Dilke's pioneering Greater Britain introduced a concept very like Belich's Anglo-world to his Victorian contemporaries in 1868 Bernard Porter, Times Literary Supplement Original and intelligent...this book offers a novel explanation of the rise of the Anglo-world... Whatever the future holds, their past is compellingly told here. Donald MacRaild, Times Higher Education Supplement 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