James Belich, currently Research Professor of History at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, has published several books on the history of his home country. In this book, he expands his horizons to deal with a broader set of problems, the causes and nature of the dramatic world changes with the growth in the dominance of the Anglo and American world in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The basic contents are described in the subtitle, “The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939,” although the specific interpretation of the book's title is less clear, since it is claimed that the Anglos moved into new areas for the most part with “explosive colonization,” and developments were based on the rapid expansion of the settling societies.

The problem studied by Belish is currently a fashionable one—what accounts for the delayed expansion of the Anglo world, moving from a situation behind several nations of the rest of the world, including Italy, the Netherlands, and China, and also Spain, Portugal, and Russia, among major settling nations in earlier centuries. The explanations provided are somewhat novel and quite interesting as the rather familiar arguments based on institutions and natural endowments, while considered to be of some use are believed only suggestive and imperfectly demonstrated. Rather more attention is given to what the author calls the “Settler Revolution,” with the long-term effects of the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions, and, within the British population, a shift in attitudes from regarding out-migration as a negative factor to one seen as ideologically more acceptable. Whether this argued for shift was later in development than argued for is uncertain, but it does provide an interesting link of cultural and economic patterns.

Belich is extremely well-read and up-to-date on the relevant literature, as demonstrated by his over 120 pages of footnote references to sources. The major part of the book concerns the 13 colonies and the United States, and much of the remainder deals with Britain and with the British Dominions-Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, with small snippets on Brazil, Argentina, Russia, and China. Britain was not the only settler nation, but it experienced a transformation after 1783 that changed the social and economic performance of settler and settled. And, to Belich, the key point in the long-run Anglo success was the role of settlements, which had permanent economic as well as political effects, generating the political empires with “the control of other peoples, usually through conquest” (p. 21). While there is no one single explanatory hypothesis advocated as in many other similar works, the strength of this book is in its coverage of a large body of material from diverse sources and the raising of numerous issues of interest for consideration. One example is his focus on the boom and bust aspect of economic development, the bust often followed by some nonindustrial “export rescue” leading to the next boom. Also of interest is relating the development of Anglophone domination to the beneficial effects of American independence in 1783, as it “transformed the Anglophones from a single polity into a far-flung culture-group, a sub-global but intercontinental ‘world’” (p. 555). And, his attention to worldwide agricultural productivity describes its importance for freeing the British labor force for alternative employment, leads to the claim that without this overseas productivity, the British could have provided subsistence for only one-half its population in the First World War.

Belich has provided a very interesting and thoughtful approach to explaining the domination of the British, its dominions, and the United States in the economic and political spheres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will be important for those concerned with the economic history of the United States, Britain, and the British Empire, and, more generally, global history. It will be a particularly stimulating read to those whose approach to the same set of problems focuses more exclusively on institutions and endowments.