Mapping the Anglo-American Settler Empire

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, British imperial spokesmen routinely referred to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as “settler colonies,” where Britons migrated in large numbers, dominated indigenous peoples, and successfully transplanted European ways. The term distinguished these “white dominions” from colonial possessions like India, where a small cadre of British officials governed a vast non-European majority, and local cultures remained relatively intact. In recent decades, scholars from several disciplines have revisited the settler-society paradigm. Political scientists compare the dynamics of federal polities and legal regimes among British-origin settler societies. Anthropologists and postcolonial scholars take a critical approach to “settler colonialism” by examining the rhetoric and actions of European newcomers who pushed aside native peoples. Environmental historians trace the wholesale biological transfers that remade the New World temperate-zone ecologies into “Neo-Europes,” a term that was coined by Alfred Crosby in 1986.1 Instead of these scholars, New Zealand historian James Belich engages most closely the work of comparative economists who have studied settler societies to question dependency theory or to discover the key determinants of New World economic development.2 Belich, however, has a more ambitious world-historical agenda to pursue. Wrapped around his detailed analysis of Britain's expanding settlement frontiers (including their breakaway sibling, the United States) is a grand argument that their “settler revolution” decisively shaped the modern world as an Anglo-American dominated planet. Casting an impressively wide geographic and chronological net, Belich argues that by 1783, emigration to settler lands began to create a politically divided but culturally and economically unified “Anglo-World” that included the United States and that endured at least until World War II.