PoPulation and develoPment Review 37(3 ) : 585–599 (SePtembeR 2011) 585

Book reviews

James Belich

Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939oxford university Press, 2009. x + 573 p. $55.00; $35.00 (pbk.).

this fascinating and stimulating book addresses what is, at first glance, a familiar and much-researched theme: the nineteenth-century settlement and economic de-velopment of the temperate-zone “neo-europes” of the world. the intercontinental migrations of labor and capital and the subsequent return flows of foodstuffs and raw materials are now commonly studied as the first age of globalization. earlier works tended to focus on individual “receiving” countries or on the various euro-pean empires. but belich, a new Zealand historian, sees something that is both more particular than globalization and more encompassing than national development: a sub-global “anglo-world,” a politically divided but culturally and economically united intercontinental system. this system, he argues, was born with the inde-pendence of the united States in 1783 (which made it something different from an empire), and it came apart, in stages, from world war ii onward as its constituent parts “decolonized.” in between an explosive migration of british people and their allies carried out a settler revolution to create something that had no real parallel in the settlement and imperial histories of other peoples.

at the heart of this study is a remarkable demographic achievement. an “an-glo” population of some 12 million english-speaking people in 1790 (essentially, the british and white american populations) grew to some 200 million worldwide by 1930. belich sees this explosive and expansive growth as having more in common with the earlier migrations of the ancient Greeks, arabs, or mongols than with the incremental colonizations that had characterized new world settlement until 1783 and continued to characterize other colonizations. indeed, no other major popula-tion group experienced anything approaching this rate of growth (over 2 percent per annum) over this long a period.

belich does not dwell on the demographic underpinnings of this unique anglo expansion, except to note that its rapid growth depended on the migration of set-tlers (families intending to replicate their societies at a distance) rather than of in-dividual migrants and sojourners (overwhelmingly male, temporary, and subject to integration into the societies of others). He focuses the bulk of his attention on the settlement process that he believes was common everywhere in this far-flung anglo-world. it grew in a sequence of intense booms, each of which established major cities and settled their regions, and each of which ended in a bust—the inevitable hour of reckoning—from which the chastised settlers, or those who survived the wave of bankruptcy and failure, set about to stabilize their new society. after the explosive phase of boom and bust, the search began for an “export rescue”: one or more export staples on which stable growth could proceed. this belich calls recolonization, since it features the tightening of economic, political, and cultural ties with the two great centers of the anglo-world: london and new York. their unprecedented growth

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and the logistical feats necessary to provision them from afar form a second major theme of the book.

i have only begun to describe belich’s model of the settler revolution (he is a great coiner of terms) and i must pass over the many chapters he devotes to testing his concepts against the history of settlement in each of the constituent parts of this world. but i will pause here to consider the core concepts of explosive colonization (boom and bust) followed by recolonization (staple exports to the center). the “long swings” of international factor flows and commodity booms before world war i are a well-explored terrain (see Cairncross 1953; thomas 1973), and the “staple theory” is a venerable and long-contested interpretation of the development process in set-tler economies. belich aims to demolish the staple theory and to replace the “long swings” of more-or-less orderly, rational development with acts of settler fervor driven by a hyperactive boosterism that was not grounded in rational economic calculations. He argues that the dynamism of the settlement process in the united States and the british dominions drew on the same set of resources, but they were not the superior institutions of britain and its offshoots, the special qualities of “anglo-Saxons,” the advantages conferred by early industrialization in britain and the american northeast, or the uniquely large capital supply available for investment. belich prefers instead to emphasize a cultural transition, a shift in attitude occurring in both britain and the young united States around 1815 that put emigration in a new, positive light. this cultural shift, which he calls the Settler Revolution, inter-acted with the other revolutionary movements of the time—american, French, and industrial—to unleash a mighty force, but not one that can be comprehended by any rational-actor model.

one might question whether such a breathless account of human foibles is need-ed to explain the explosive boom and bust cycles that characterized the settlement process. the intense character of early settlement, especially of town development, was not as irrational and reckless as belich claims. after all, cities are in space what booms are in time. the economics of agglomeration are such that getting an urban and regional economy off the ground requires the simultaneous occurrence of many factors. a boom is a coordinating device to attract the necessary migrants, capital, infrastructure, and political commitment. in such a society, the chief business of the early settlers is growth itself, and the regional economy is focused on supporting that process. but this does not imply that the settlers have no economically rational goals. only after an initial investment phase can the export of staple commodities begin to play an important role, and can the real property in which the settlers have staked their future begin to gain value. until then, the rapid exploitation of readily accessible resources—often timber, hides, or minerals—is the only way to finance the incoming capital. it is, to be sure, a risky process, but i believe belich goes too far in claiming that the booms at the heart of the settlement process were driven by a collective fervor akin to the delusion of crowds, or that commodity exports were unforeseen and unintended, constituting an unpleasant “rescue” of the now-busted settlements. it is indeed striking that the terms investment and capital are barely mentioned in this book.

economic analysis is not the book’s strong suit, but i believe belich is on firmer ground when he develops the cultural and political insights that flow from his orga-nizing model. the outbursts of supposedly irrational boosterism nearly always led to

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the emergence of stable, prosperous, commodity-exporting societies that interacted ever more closely with their metropolitan centers. belich calls this process recolo-nization, and in the case of the british dominions he gives a plausible account of how the ties between these colonies and the mother Country tightened over time, and how the cultural and economic roles of london created a collective identity of a “Greater britain,” the ephemeral nature of its political reality notwithstanding. Similarly, belich’s incorporation of the united States into his anglo-world is a bold act of interloping that challenges several hoary chestnuts of american exception-alism. He is certainly not the first historian to challenge Frederick Jackson turner’s “frontier thesis,” but his “boom, bust, and recolonization thesis” actually offers a viable alternative.

Replenishing the Earth is a big book full of big ideas. Some are more persuasive than others, but anyone interested in nineteenth-century intercontinental migra-tion or the comparative study of settler societies will find this a rewarding, thought-provoking treatise.

University of California at Berkeley Jan de Vries

References

Cairncross, a. K. 1953. Home and Foreign Investment, 1870–1913. Cambridge university Press.thomas, brinley. 1973. Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic

Economy, 2nd edition. Cambridge university Press.

simon szreter and Kate Fisher Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963Cambridge and new York: Cambridge university Press, 2010. viii + 458 p. $95.00; $32.99 (pbk.).

as a young obstetrician in london in the 1960s, who had just moved into a house built in the 1920s, i began talking to my two neighbors, literally over the garden fence. they were both widows in their 80s and we soon wandered into conversations about the role of contraception in their married lives half a century earlier. look-ing out on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, they were almost eager to talk about intimate details of their younger lives.

these discussions gave me a tiny glimpse of the richness of oral history. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher have systematically and meticulously uncovered the intimate lives of couples one generation later, whose sexual lives cover the interval between the end of world war i and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Sex Before the Sexual Revolution is as representative of a nation’s behavior as any social history can be. the narrative is rooted in a comprehensive knowledge of the literature, as well as a familiarity with earlier, more limited attempts to collect intimate oral histories. the authors interviewed 89 men and women, half from the northern industrial town of blackburn and half from the london area, locations that respectively mirror the british social classifications of working class and middle class. they let the partici-