Replenishing the earth: the settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939

James Belich's Replenishing the Earth is a fascinating and accessible volume that explores the story of the "Anglophone settler explosion" (21) during the long nineteenth century.To illuminate the scope and importance of this process, Belich compares and contrasts settlements in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.This is a rich and complicated story, and Belich's engaging writing style draws readers in.His prose conveys both his enthusiasm for his research and the stakes of his claims.Belich wants nothing less than to explain how Great Britain and its "newlands" (86) came to dominate the world culturally, economically, and politically during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.His answers are compelling and offer much for other historians to engage.Belich draws on and engages a vast array of literature and covers a lot of geographic ground without sacrificing clarity, partly because the book is so well organized.The first section establishes Belich's general themes to explain the development and rise of the Anglophone world.These include the mass transfer of people, information, and goods, as well as the ideology of "settlerism" (153).Subsequent chapters test Belich's explanations in a range of places, moving from London to New York, Chicago to Melbourne, with attention to how the hinterlands of these cities expanded and shifted over time.Belich compares histories of resource extraction and teases out how cultural ties flourished even as political ones were weakened or severed in the Anglo world.The range of topics covered and juxtaposed is one of the strengths of the volume.This book also provides broader context for those interested in specific parts of the expansion Belich investigates.For those most familiar with the story of American westward expansion, for example, Belich emphasizes the important parallels to its "twin" (79), the British