Writing history is largely a matter of what filters you use.
Different-coloured filters bring out different patterns. For most recent
chroniclers and analysts of the Anglo-Americanization of the world in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the filters used have been those that
show up the “imperialism” of the process. The most startling novelty of
James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The settler revolution and the rise
of the Anglo-world is that it scarcely mentions imperialism at all, except
to marginalize it (“with all due respect to the rich scholarship on European
imperialism, in the very long view most European empires in Asia and Africa
were a flash in the pan”); yet it still makes a pretty convincing job of
explaining the huge and important process that is its subject. Even where it
does not totally convince, it is immensely illuminating, as new filters
invariably are. 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.
Dilke’s book was written before the word “imperialism” came into vogue, at
least in connection with British overseas expansion. Empire carries
essential connotations of power, or domination, whose major manifestation in
Britain’s case was India – which again finds no place in Belich’s book, and
hardly featured in Dilke’s either. Dilke was interested in something else:
the migration of the British people over the globe, including North America;
with the aid of some state power, certainly – the general protection
afforded by the Royal Navy, occasional military expeditions to pull the
migrants out of trouble, charters and treaties – but not in order to
dominate anyone. Rather, the aim was to reproduce British-type “free”
societies, usually freer than Britain’s own, in what were conveniently
regarded as the “waste” places of the earth. Belich calls this “cloning”. It
was an entirely different process from the more dominating sort of
“imperialism”, representing a different philosophy, involving different
social classes, and mainly affecting different regions of the world. Belich
believes that it was a far more important influence than what is generally
understood as imperialism on the whole course of modern history.
Belich’s approach brings out two further features obscured by conventional
models. First, “settlerism” was transnational, in several senses, quite
apart from the obvious one that it pushed beyond national frontiers. Other
peoples did it besides Britons or even northern Europeans: Belich has
interesting sections on Iberian, Chinese and Russian movements of
settlement, the last-named mainly in Siberia, uncannily similar in many ways
to the great “Anglo” ones. Or, rather, the “Anglo” one; for Belich is
insistent that the British colonization of Canada and Australasia, and the
Americans’ opening up of their West, were not merely similar but essentially
the same phenomenon, umbilically linked, to a far greater extent than
national accounts of each of them – and especially the myth of American
“exceptionalism” – would lead one to believe. That is the first thing you
discover when the imperial element is filtered out.
The second is that this kind of colonization was not necessarily a case of the
centre “exploiting” the periphery. Settlers positively sought out “oldland”
goods and capital rather than having them forced on them. They arguably
gained more from the exchange than the metropoles did. At the very worst,
“exploitation was mutual”. The cultural ties between them were also
voluntary. It was the Australians who wanted to retain their British
identity, rather than its being forced on them, and Britain which eventually
cut the tie between them (by joining the Common Market). Resentment over
their rejection by Britain led Australians to reconfigure themselves
thereafter, fashionably, as colonial victims; but for most of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries Australians and Californians preferred to
regard themselves as “co-owners” of the great British and American
enterprises – even as superior partners: fitter, more democratic, less
debilitated by “civilization”, “Better Britons” (or Americans) – rather than
marginal to them. Some even dreamt of shifting the metropolises of their
worlds to their new lands: to Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, which one
optimist in the 1880s “predicted seriously would someday be the centre of
Western civilization”. It was this kind of process and feeling that created
what Belich calls the “Anglo-world”, and contributed – more than a more
one-sided “imperialism” could possibly have done – to its success.
The “Anglo” part of this neologism is problematical. Belich is aware that the
coinage is a compromise, with the potential to hurt non-English British and
American feelings, especially those of the Scots, who “contributed
disproportionately to British expansion”; but the term is unsatisfactory in
other ways too. Its meaning is elusive and shifting. In what Belich calls
its “default usage”, it is synonymous with “anglophone”, but in practice it
excludes English-speaking non-whites all the time, and the Irish for long
periods. It also includes the millions of German and Scandinavian speakers
who joined the strict Brits in emigrating to America, for example: the link
here, in contemporary perceptions, is supposed to be their racial affinity;
on to which is tacked another category Belich calls the “Anglo-prone”, a
term he never defines, and whose ordinary dictionary definition doesn’t help
us much (“prone: having a natural inclination or tendency to something”),
but seems to be used here as a kind of all-purpose description for any
non-British who conformed to British requirements. Belich is aware of this
problem, too. At one point he describes one particular “Anglo collective
identity” – there are others – as “nameless, vague, and amorphous”. Such
imprecision may be unavoidable. Great historical movements are rarely as
precisely defined as our filters can make them appear. But it doesn’t help
when we come to try to analyse them.
Belich’s own analysis of “Anglo” settlerism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries will be the most contentious section of this book. He is insistent
that neither Britain’s early start (which in fact was quite late), nor her
institutions, nor any particular virtues or other qualities of the “Anglos”,
had much to do with it. Instead he relies on a strict typology of what he
takes to be its different stages: “incremental”, “explosive”,
“recolonisation”, and “decolonisation”, of which the middle two are further
subdivided into “boom”, “bust” (the second) and “export rescue” (the third),
which apparently operated in virtually every successful case of “Anglo”
settlerism in this period. The scheme comes over as rigid and reductionist,
though Belich is at pains to deny this: “it is not, I hope, a procrustean
matter of forcing particular histories into the general model”, but simply
of “offering an extra dimension”; in almost the next sentence, however, he
compares that dimension to “the seasons”, which seems pretty procrustean to
me. It is also presented as a “natural” process, following an internal
dynamic of its own, though of course with various external factors, usually
fortuitous, starting it off and helping it on its way. This is why American
westward and British colonial expansion followed such similar courses. This
is in other words a very materialistic thesis, and through some other
filters might even appear Marxist, though Belich seems unaware of this. (His
sole reference to Marx has him “beavering away in the British Museum in the
1850s, struggling to find an explanation for the dynamism around him other
than the triumphalism of his hosts”, which cannot be serious.) What he is
describing here, surely, are the normal travails of free market capitalism
as socialists see them, anywhere, including in metropoles (today, for
example), but exaggerated in settler contexts because they were so free. I
am not enough of an economist, or an expert in all these various colonizing
histories, to know how closely this fits the evidence at every point. It
does feel forced occasionally. It is, however, a highly suggestive model,
questioning a number of sacred cows on its way – the “staples” explanation
of colonial booms, push-and-pull theories of migration, myths of the
Dominions’ independence – and convincing in the main.
One factor Belich emphasizes throughout is the change he sees coming about in
the “culture” of emigration from the early nineteenth century onwards, which
of course might make the process seem less purely “materialist”, if culture
could not also be seen as a function of economic infrastructures (to apply
the Marxist filter again). In a nutshell, people came to regard emigration
less as “social excretion” – a bitter necessity, only undertaken by
desperadoes and the desperate – and more as an opportunity to better
themselves quite respectably; a sign of initiative and ambition, that is,
rather than of moral degradation. To this end the British colonies and the
American West had to be repackaged, to cancel out their old reputations as
boiling/freezing arid/overgrown bear-convict-cannibal-infested hells on
earth and replace them with more settler-friendly images; which was
attempted, at any rate, in a deluge of proemigration propaganda from about
the 1830s onwards, called “booster” literature in America, much of which was
tendentious, to say the least. The propagandists were ingenious. The word
“cold” was banned for Canada, for example, and replaced by “bracing” (like
Skegness). Its grizzly bears were “the gentlest in the world”. Lower Canada
had virtually no disease. (Unfortunately, the force of that claim was rather
dented by the publisher’s preface to the pamphlet that carried it,
regretting that its author had “fallen victim to cholera at Quebec” shortly
after delivering his manuscript.) Most new settlement regions were painted
as veritable Edens, both botanically, with “gigantic vegetables” being a
common feature of most of these accounts, both British and American, and
social equality emphasized for the British and Irish especially. “It is
common”, claimed one California booster, “for people to live to be 100 to
115 years old.” For those already there, and on their way to their
centenaries, optimism was the quality most boosted: “Kill Pessimists, Bishop
Advises” was the (no doubt misleading) headline in one Los Angeles newspaper
in the 1920s. At a couple of points in his book Belich likens this
repackaging to a “crusade”. It was “not easy to avoid”.
Boosters were fiercely competitive, and so sometimes disparaged rival colonies
by re-painting in the old images: don’t go to New Zealand, warned a Canadian
in 1846, unless you want to be “roasted for the breakfast of some native
chief”, which must have been confusing to those who took in a range of such
literature. There was also, as Belich concedes, some anti-emigration
propaganda. In general there is evidence that the “booster” genre was
mistrusted generally, and only acted on by the working classes when
corroborated by letters home from relatives and friends.
Nonetheless, Belich believes that the 1830s (roughly) saw “a somersault”, a
“tidal shift”, “in mass attitudes to emigration” in Britain, putting
“settlerism” up there with “socialism, evangelism and racism” as a dominant
ideology of the time, largely in response, he believes, to all this
propaganda. “Suddenly” (his word), “ugly Australian ducklings” became
“glorious swans in the minds of British beholders”; and New Zealand, the
“Cannibal Isles” of yesteryear, “the Britain of the South”. But this must be
an exaggeration. It may be thought to be undermined at least a little by a
quotation Belich himself provides, from Dominions Secretary Leopold Amery in
1925: “almost my first task was to get rid of the word ‘emigration’, its
association of unemployment and expatriation, and to substitute . . .
‘Oversea Settlement’ as the object of our policy”. This suggests that even
after a hundred years the “tidal shift” that Belich confidently describes
was far from complete. In which case, perhaps the more materialist
explanation his grand model appears to suggest might stand up better on its
own.
All this comes from uncoupling “settlerism” from “imperialism” (or from other
sorts of imperialism: it depends on your definition), which is the most
valuable insight of this book. One effect of it is to free the former from
some of the stigmas attaching to the latter; but then, settlerism had quite
enough stigmas of its own. Belich deals with most of them, and one in
particular: the injury (to put it mildly) done to most of the indigenous
races that stood in the settlers’ path. (Of course these were not “waste”
places.) Belich makes some interesting points about this. Firstly, the main
damage was done during his second, “explosive” stages of settlerism, not in
the earlier “incremental” one, when generally incomers and natives
co-existed. It was usually done by government troops, too, not by the
settlers on their own: not because the settlers were kinder, but because
they were such poor fighters, despite the prevailing myths. This leads to
Belich’s second main conclusion, a development of the thesis he was best
known for before this book, concerning the New Zealand Maori wars, which is
that Australian aborigines, native Americans and other indigenous peoples
should not be regarded as mere victims of European encroachment, but as
“intense, courageous, and well-organized” resisters who gave as good as they
got until the resources associated with “explosive” settlerism wore them
down, and should be respected for that. This is a valuable idea in the
context of some of the historical rows that have broken out recently about
European “crimes” against indigenes, like the notorious Australian “History
Wars” between “black armband” liberals (the former Prime Minister John
Howard’s derogatory term) and right-wingers over the numbers of aborigines
killed. Belich’s approach short-circuits, or leaps over, this debate, and
provides a far less condescending approach.
It is these new approaches (or filters) that make Replenishing the Earth such
a significant work. Belich’s New Zealand nationality may be partly
responsible for that. It must be the thing that has revealed to him the
peculiar importance of settlerism, by comparison with imperialism, which is
a fundamentally metropolitan concept; even to the extent of possibly leading
him to exaggerate some of its features. He insists that the settlers – his
own forebears, presumably – “were not ogres. They were whining bundles of
hopes and fears just like us”. This is emphatically not a celebratory
account of their achievements, unlike some other recent revisions of British
and American overseas history: it is too fundamentally materialist for that;
and its incidental flaws, which I think mainly arise from Belich’s
over-enthusiasm for his ideas, which are often brilliant (and too numerous
for all of them to be mentioned here), do not detract from the book’s
general credibility, and its power to provoke and stimulate. It is written
with verve and wit. Reading it is almost bound to undermine old assumptions,
and to suggest radically new ways of thinking about why we are where we are
(many of us), in the “Anglo-world”, today.
James Belich
REPLENISHING THE EARTH
The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world
528pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 0 19 929727 6
Bernard Porter is the author of several books on the history of British
imperialism, including, most recently, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004,
Empire and Superempire, 2007, and a fourth edition of The Lion’s Share,
2004.
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