James Belich's aforementioned book Replenishing the Earth is notable for the fact that it chooses to make the attempt to analyze the settler-world en toto, as a whole, rather then looking at it one particular settler-society on a nation by nation basis. On the one hand, this is a bit misleading, although he makes an attempt many other settler-societies his primary subject is the Anglo-world as the title makes clear; on the other-hand even the most talented historian would struggle to bring settler societies as diverse as the Anglo-colonies, Argentina, Russian Siberia, French Algeria, and Chinese Manchuria and Taiwan. Even the question of what a settler-colony is can get somewhat blurry even if, as Belich points out, colonization in the sense of settlement, rather then in the sense of domination of a subject people, was the most common and common-sense use of terms like colony and colonization for sometime. In one sense, all of the Americas can be said to be settler-colonies, in the sense that Europeans came, settled, and imposed their class structures and social norms (either displacing or in synergy with indigenous structures and norms) and left behind both disproportionately numerous descendants and ruling classes that are disproportionately Euro-descendent and culturally Euro-American. But there is still quite a bit of difference between the United States/Canada and Guatemala; for that matter there is quite a difference between Argentina and Columbia. Still, there are similarities (that we will get to) that have long been denied. Blurring the distinction too much would mean of course that virtually the entirety of the world could be considered a settler-colony--and that is far beyond the pale. The European settler-world is considered properly by Belich to consist mainly of a string of geographically disparate "neo-Europes" and it seems proper to note as Jared Diamond did in his documentary Guns, Germs, And Steel (critics have rightly pointed to its major flaws) that these colonies were typically in the same rough climate band as Europe itself. According to Belich the first European settler-colony outside modern European borders was southern Greenland--which later went extent; the first successful neo-Europes were a string of mid-Atlantic colonized by the Iberians in the late medieval/early modern period, the Canaries being the most populous--and Iceland. Whether Iceland or the Faroe islands qualify as "settler-colonies" is not something I am in the position to say and so perhaps there is good reason that Belich did not include them. Romania, if Terry Jones series The Barbarians is correct, may have been the first true settler-colony in Western history as much of its people were destroyed in an enormous bloodbath and replaced by Roman veterans; take it with a grain of salt but I have heard it said that Romanian is the closest European tongue to classical Latin. Whatever they may have contributed to the modern European settler-colonial tradition lands such as Romania or Iceland were colonized so long ago and in historical contexts and class structures so different from the modern world that it is hardly relevant. A messianic faith in the power to make the world over is common to all modern settler-colonies as Belich points out foreshadowing much of the "settler revolution" to come the first children born on the Atlantic island of Portuguese Madiera were named Adam and Eve. As we shall see there were far more modern concerns and animuses driving the rise of the Anglo-world than a simple religious desire to replicate a society found in an ancient literary text.
While settler-colonialism in an abstract sense is not unique to the Anglophone world, the modern world, or even Europe in particular, few doubt that the most successful settler societies have been and are modern Anglophone societies. America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are economically and militarily powerful societies whom most of the world finds both terrifying and seductive. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand remnants of what Belich provocatively dubs "the British West" and a "second United States" punch far above their belts economically, culturally, politically and even militarily in comparison to their relatively small populations. South Africa prior to the collapse of Apartheid was home to two unique settler-cultures: An Anglo-Boer culture in South Africa proper and a German-Boer culture in Namibia--which was the last African country to become formally decolonized in 1990. Ever since the Western destruction of Libya led by the Obama administration South Africa has indisputably had the highest standard of living of any Western nation--though South African whites had long attained had one of the highest standards of living in the world. As the site of Africa's first successful Industrial Revolution and the dominant commercial power on the continent the Anglo-Boer settlement of South Africa is not without historical relevance to the present--even though whites as a whole make up just 8.4% of the population according to wikipedia. The adoption of neoliberal orthodoxy throughout world has been substantially boosted by the fact that the Anglophone world--led by Britain and its settler-offshoots, adopted it as a matter of course. Even newly "decolonized" South Africa, which had a largely state-capitalist economy, adopted neoliberalism upon the assumption of power of Nelson Mandela and the ANC. It is little wonder that despite being demonized as a terrorist by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan seemingly overnight Mandela had been transformed into a new Christ on Earth.
During the second half of the 20th century a struggle for world supremacy was waged between Russia and the United States. There is one less-widely reason why this came to pass other then matters of ideology and the simple fact that they emerged as the two undisputed military-economic powers after WWII: Russia and the United States had the world's largest "settler-colonies". An anti-communist history professor once pointed out a similarity that Russia and the US shared in the European imagination: they were both had a wild "cowboy" swagger about them they had both conquered horse back from sea-to-sea. Technically speaking, the Russian Empire had once had a foothold on three continents. Even the Asian "threats" or near-threats to American supremacy are not without their own settler-experiments: Japan's colonization of Korea and its fascist invasion Manchurian were matters of contention with the other powers that certainly had a settler-flavor about them. Louise Young's book Japan's Total Empire makes the case that Hokkaido in the north of modern Japan was subjected to Japanese settler-colonialism after the Meiji revolution and served as both a template for later Japanese colonial adventures and as their most successful colony; the popular movement against the US military presence in Okinawa have also issued their own critiques of Japanese colonialism. The similarity of colonial experience between the far north and south of Japan is suggested in the popular and now classic anime Samurai Champoo. Russia and China have so much geographical territory to aid their challenge to the United States largely due to their expansionist efforts in the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. How much is truly "settler-colonial" and can actually be called "colonial" is very difficult to say; in neither case, does settler-colonialism truly explain Russia and China's history of economic development. The same thing cannot be said with complete confidence about the Anglo-world and certain other European offshoots.
The Flesh Became Word: Settlerism And the Rise of The English Language
According to Belich, in 1790 there were 12 million English speakers and by 1900 there were approximately 200 million; the great majority of these new English speakers resided in the settler-lands outside Britain proper. This figure does not include the colonized within Britain's immense Empire who either picked or were forced to pick up language as their mother language (P1) or more commonly acquired it as a secondary language (P2). This reserve army of settlers distributed widely across the world geographically served as a reserve army for the English language which already received a leg-up as a language of international business thanks to Britain's industrial superiority on the world market in the 19th century and its immense financial weight which has persisted into the 21st century. It is interesting to think that without this reserve Shakespeare may have been considered merely an interesting playwright outside the Anglophone world, but the dominance of the Anglophone world and its corresponding deification of Shakespeare has made the late 16th and early 17th century london playwright relentlessly influential even in foreign tongues. Although it maybe disputed that the novel is a distinctly English style its rise to prominence in middle-class British culture in the 18th and 19th centuries spurred on and influenced continental national canons of great novelistic work: Defoe, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shelley, Stevenson etc. Historically-speaking, whether German, French, or Russian literature was of a superior quality in comparison to English or American literature is of secondary importance to the fact that there were a greater quantity of English-speaking readers. That really isn't an assertion of Anglo-superiority in any real sense, one only has to consider the fact as intellectual historian Peter Watson has rightfully pointed out that the US and Britain: "may speak English, but more then they know, they think German" and one may add that politically the Anglo-world is more "French" than they like to admit. Quality can triumph over quantity and in that sense dynamic visionaries of many cultures have often breached the Chinese wall of the Anglophone world. Contrary to the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis the particularities or boundaries of one's own mother-tongue is not the limiting factor of human-thought; that said, the fact that Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Camus are, more often then not, read in translation in English is not without significance. Christine Lagarde struck quite a nerve in France when she pegged the national character as that of a Gallic Hamlet that reads too much (France dominates in terms of Nobel-prize winning literature and unique books published per capita) and acts too little. For Lagarde a dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal France is a giant lulled to sleep by a nanny-state that encourages laziness among workers rather then productivity and discourages risk-taking as a whole. Her ascension to head of the IMF was fascinating as that had been a position held almost exclusively by Americans and it was not without significance that during negotiations in the EU she refused to speak French because it would "slowdown" the negotiations unduly. The wider symbolism of the act was a tacit acknowledgement that English had surpassed French as the cultural and diplomatic lingua franca of the European continent. Prior to the 20th century, especially the second half of it, no European (including an English gentleman) could consider their education complete until they mastered French, even English popular writers seemed to add French words and phrases liberally-- as if they were spicing a dish. The rapid demographic growth of Francophone Africa has put wind in the sails of language-nationalist organizations like La Francophone; previously many linguists had written French off as an increasingly ghettoized and declining international language but the fear remains that bitter post-colonial relations and the onslaught of English (and now Chinese) could hamper the French language's 21st century resurgence. The growing heft and infectious character of the English language and the nature of language in general is a subject at the heart of Kojima's brilliant game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The rise of English isn't just a matter of a now defunct British Empire which was once the world's largest and most populous colonial Empire but also a matter of the displacement, ethnic cleansing, slavery, and in many cases, genocide, which occurred in the Anglo-settler world. In the long-run, the fact that many people in India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Africa speak English maybe the essential fact of English's long-term global influence but the cementing factor has truly been the continued prominence, power, and prestige that the United States and the "Second United States" that was Britain's longest lasting off-spring continue to enjoy. As Belich points out in much of the world de facto European colonization lasted less then a century and real colonial domination was often in force for perhaps 50 years; in the settler-domains, European control has existed for between 200 and 300 years and despite all the talk of pundits about "racial tipping points" if the history of Latin America is any guide then the neo-Europeans will play a key role for many centuries to come.
The Anglo-World And Capitalism
Belich has some very interesting insights into the economic life of the Anglo-world and its continued disproportionate influence within global capitalism. The first is what he calls "hyper-colonization" or a kind of settler-boom that coincided surprisingly neatly with the business cycle in settler nations. The settlerism created and was conditioned by a boom-time mentality that banked on never-ending natural resources and opulence it was violently opposed to pessimism in attitude and typified the "irrational exuberance" that scholars now see as typical of capitalist booms--prior to the bust. Anglo-settlers not only bred like rabbits and grew at a rate that Belich argues exceeds 20th century demographic booms in the Third World but also migrated to new lands at unprecedented rates and within this population boom was a "post-Malthusian" economic boom that went beyond merely clearing new lands or adding new people. Massive population growth was not unknown elsewhere but in the Anglo case it coincided with a relatively constant and ever-increasing standard of living--certainly an unknown outside a few core European countries and a few non-Anglo settler-colonies. While the populations of America and Greater Britain grew at a blistering pace they also enjoyed the highest standards of living in the world--higher then even England which enjoyed the highest wages in Europe throughout most of the 19th century. This was quite out of place with the Malthusian theories that had been developed to justify the oppression of the most miserable segments of the British working class and the increasingly anachronistic aristocratic hegemony over social and economic life in Britain. For those bourgeois economists who still maintained a scientific and progressive outlook it must've put wind in their sails in their struggle against the landed classes and their reactionary apologists such as Malthus. Belich argues that the pervasive belief in progress among the 19th century bourgeoisie, however unfounded and irrational, led to situations where nations literally did rise from nothing out of nothing more sturdy than simple belief--and often, all in one lifetime. It is interesting to look at how 20th and 21st century economists and historians have assumed that the rise of settler-nations occurred in a "rational" way--according to the academic development models that academics created in the 20th century! Belich is hostile to what he calls the staples thesis which is the notion that the growth of the Anglo-settler colonies were driven by various export staples: cotton, wheat, timber, wool, meat, sugar etc. The unspoken implication of the thesis that Belich does not articulate is obvious: if the great settler-nations built something from nothing, and in some cases like in South Africa the settlers actually went from poverty to wealth, then the way for developing nations to get rich today is to expand their exports--which is exactly what the IMF and world bank recommend. The truth is rather the opposite: all the Anglo-settler nations were import-driven economies and Belich finds that imports did not outweigh exports in value-terms even in gold-rush California and Australia or even the cotton-growing South.
Likewise, "rushes" around certain commodities such as gold, cotton, or wool were not done with the intention to export or balance out exports and they did not usually create booms but in fact coincided with them. Booms coincided with hyper-colonization and Belich finds that "Indian wars" usually coincided with economic booms or just preceded them. Belich's thesis is interesting whether its the nascent American colonies or Australian penal colonies or frontier life in a region or state that hadn't seen a boom he finds that indigenous people held their own fairly well and navigated European colonization quite skillfully--it was when settler-onrushes became "hyper-colonial" when they crashed against indigenous society with the force of economic-demographic acceleration that indigenous resistance floundered and bargaining-room shrank. Belich argues that the global "Anglo-Wests" were built up by a "progress industry" complete with booster literature and a manic willingness on the part of investors and emigrants to throw good money after bad. In, short the West was built on at times little more than the drive of progress for progress's sake. Shrewd capitalists did not evaluate the financial returns of the colonization enterprise once sufficient returns had been proven and invest rationally accounting for risk and emigrants were not attracted by the promise of dignified work--rather many capitalists threw good money after bad seemingly undaunted by loss or weak returns and emigrants were attracted more by stories of getting rich quick and stories of life in paradises crafted by nature where abundance and slothful idleness were not at cross-purposes. The behavior of the latter is easily understandable even if we may chuckle at it today but the former is less easy to understand.
Belich argues that investment in the settler-colonies did not offer higher returns on investment then what was common when investing in domestic British industry, rather if anything returns from industry was slightly higher then the returns offered by these new Anglo-worlds. The argument that financialization, whether the case of Britain in the late 19th century or the United States in the mid 20th century, stems from a failure in real capital accumulation or low profits in manufacturing is a very common one; I have argued before that real productive accumulation and finance/other rentier sectors have different dynamics even if their part of the same totality of capitalism and are very difficult to separate in practice. But the question is still staring us in the face and begging, "Why then did Britain pour billions of pounds of capital into these settler-nations if the goal of capitalism is to maximize profits?" What Belich does not seem to consider is that 19th century finance capital and industrial capital are very different industries with very different attitudes and skill sets required for both. To go into invest in productive industry would require a financier to manage an industrial operation himself or to find those knowledgeable to do so at a discount rate; real industrialists were not exactly in a hurry to give away all of their return to the banks and various speculators, although it cannot be said that they never availed themselves of this option. For bankers or speculators collectively to add their capital to the stock of industrial capital as a whole would've likely severely accelerated the tendency towards over accumulation that was likely already apparent to cautious investors. "Institutional investors" to use a nauseating phrase from finance PR happy-speak would've been forced to either compete with experienced owner-operators who invest most of their profits back into their respective industrial enterprises or to try to induce productive capitalists to avail themselves of borrowed capital by offering it at a discount. From this perspective its easy to see why they did invest abroad as it offered the highest return, with the least effort, and the most opportunity to employ the "idle capital" building up in the pockets of the British financial system and "coupon clipping" bondholders. The corporate revolution which helped to reconcile the tension between finance and productive capital had yet to break out for most of the "settler-revolution" and for most of the period that it was it was still slowly but surely gaining dominance. The demand for money from millions of settlers living on new lands must've seemed limitless and the potential for profit and here is the key phrase, because just because capitalists seek the highest profit possible does not mean they always attain it, must have also seemed to be unlimited. The progress industry spent as much time plying investors into believing the delusion of limitless profits and asset growth as it did painting images of New Cannons complete with rivers of milk and honey. Another reason for the willingness to invest in the Anglo Dominions is cultural--British investors trusted the security of the business cultures of the British Dominions and the United States, whether justifiably so or not, then they did other European countries or their subject colonies. A good example is Argentina which had a bust in the first half of the 19th century that discouraged British capitalists from directly investing in Argentina and Latin America until around 1870, in most respects the bust was not different from busts that occurred at home or elsewhere in the Anglo world but there is no doubt that differences in language, culture and unfamiliarity with conditions in Britain and vice-versa deterred the seemingly rapid rebuilding of investor confidence that occurred after busts in the Anglo-settler world. Typically British finance capitalists did go easier on debtors who spoke their own language and shared their culture whether it was cultural and linguistic familiarity that made resistance to overbearing financiers possible or a sense of ethnocultural solidarity between creditor and debtor is hard to say. As non-subject colonies, a British financier would've had a tough time squeezing Australia and New Zealand for everything they were worth and certainly would've run into resistance from either the crown government or (potentially secessionary) dominion governments. The United States was too populous, geographically secure, independently-minded, jealous, and willing to risk war with Britain to allow itself to be squeezed with the same endless blood-sucking that was typical of British financial operations in Argentina, Iran, and Egypt. Britain took heavy political flak at home and abroad just for its covert support of confederacy--politically war with the United States was a non-starter unless Britain wanted to see rising European powers like France, Germany, and Russia rush to her aid.
Weighing all the facts was the Anglo-settler world built on a mere soap bubble then? The short answer is no, as Belich points out the settlers looked out at vast stretches of desert, swamp and frozen tundra and really did build nations up from inhospitable desert soil and materialized gold from its subterranean maw. There was a material core to their seeming irrationality and I would argue that it is rooted in political economy that was different from a traditional European metropole or a subject colony. The settler-economies could be import-driven as long as it was booming but once returns stopped meeting expectations frontier-economies had a tendency to bust and once that happened they pursued a strategy that Belich calls "export rescue" to pursue slower but more measured growth. However, once this happened it was rare for a former boom region to experience its prior level of growth--usually another boom did occur but in another frontier region blithely restarting the cycle all over again. Like the China phenomenon today it was hard for markets to rationally get a handle on a phenomenon that delivered such unprecedented high speed growth. Also like China or Japan in its high-speed growth phase the settler-nations used the state to invest enormous quantities of capital in infrastructure they planned for continued high-speed growth. This wasn't wholly rational either, they built canals, roads, railroad, and steamship lines that seemingly lead to nowhere but in a weird way the supply created its own demand future booms and growth could continue unabated because no industrial technologies allowed colonists to compress time and space. These economies could be import-driven because British manufacturers had entered a phase of domestic overproduction and were hence driven to export their surplus to maintain profitability and the industrial capitalist system. Exports to settler colonies whether paid with good or bad money, in gold or on credit, was product that could be still be sold and passed on down the line to whatever sucker was still holding the debt when it busted. However, these colonies were fairly industrial as they took English society to be its commercial model and they accumulated capital rapidly and were early implementers of technology that compressed time and space. Tension between settler-manufacturers and English commercial and manufacturing interest was one of the motives behind the American revolution and tariffs were a point of tension between the US and Britain for sometime. Belich I believe correctly criticizes the revisionist view that the US had acquired a superior business culture and manufacturing base in relation to Britain by 1820 if this had really been the case then Northern manufacturers wouldn't have screamed with every lowering of tariffs and the issue of tariffs wouldn't have sowed so much division and mistrust between the North and South. The need to protect US industry from British competitors made protection a key aspect of American political economy with openly protectionist and shadow protectionist policies extending well into the 21st century even after the US attained industrial and financial hegemony.
In the Dominions, however, Belich argues that in the competition between British manufacturing and finance it was the interests of the former that were sacrificed. As the Dominions experienced their own industrialization it was necessary that they either take fewer imports from Britain so their own industrialists could supply the domestic economy or they even had to be allowed to export manufactures to Britain itself. To pay back British financiers the Dominions had to be allowed the lattitude to protect their economies even if this clashed with the interests of British industrialists--in this respect the British Empire had learned a key lesson from the American Revolution. The irony is this recognized in practice recognized the debt-dynamic in international trade which was traditionally ignored or often denied by classical British political economy in debates about free trade. It should also be noted that most settler-colonies had chronic shortages of labor and therefore, were what the economic historian Robert C. Allen would call high-wage economies. Allen had a novel argument about Britain's industrialization which would make most neoliberals squeamish if they ever stopped to consider its implications beyond its surface-level confirmation of "Eurocentrism" or "Anglocentrism" which is that Britain became the first nation to successfully industrialize precisely because of its high wages which incentivized capitalists to economize by developing new technologies, management practices, closely watching costs etc. The United States similarly saw a wave of industrial innovations related to its high wages (apparently the second only to Australia) during the 19th and first half of the 20th century according to Allen. This also coincides with another odd development of the settler-economy which is the long persistence of the family farm and its seemingly strange anachronism, as settler nations were building enormous economies founded on the "natural economy" of the family farm--Britain itself was increasingly doing away with it. Marx explored this contradiction in Chapter 33 of Volume One which dealt with the fact that political economists were discovering that the proletariat and capitalist private property was not a ready-made thing in the frontiers of the settler-colonies where the mass of settlers owned sufficient means of production themselves they disdained to sell their labor as was common in Britain. Sakai's book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat takes this to a further extreme by arguing that the settler-colonies were a largely non-capitalist safety valve that preserved a backwards petit-bourgeois mode of production (for whites at least). I think that overstates the case, as Belich points out it took a lot of capital investment to cultivate the marginal lands that made up much of the ecology of the settler-colonies even if this large capital investment was often worked by a small family and did not produce its natural corollary--the wage worker. Belich argues that the labor of women and children, which was usually indirectly compensated, was perhaps the main form of cheap labor available to the settler colonies--it was certainly a form common to all of them.
By itself, it could explain the high domestic demographic growth in the colonies a large pool of child labor was often necessary to keep small farms profitable. But children grow up, fathers die, and inheritances are split up, "prodigal sons and daughters" run off etc. in the global scheme of things settler-agriculture typically could largely be thought of as the marginal lands that take so much capital to operate that they do not bear rent as Marx argued in Volume 3 when taking into account the wheat exporting mid-West and New England. English farms and other long-cultivated European lands were often much more productive but for this reason they bore ground-rent, whether inherited from tradition or set by the new capitalist mode of production. The more agriculture became developed in North America, Argentina, parts of Brazil, and the Tasman world the more it came to serve as downward pressure on global agricultural prices (which largely centered on England) and therefore it had the effect of taking marginal lands out of production in Europe itself and/or reducing ground-rent. That was indeed the whole point of the triumph of free trade doctrine in the Corn Law campaign in the mid-19th century, as the Whigs elegantly put it Britain was to be the world's workshop whereas the rest of the world was to be its agricultural supplier doing their part to keep the costs of the British bourgeoisie low and its profits up by keeping the cost of the means of consumption for its working class low. Marx and Engels read this as the economic complement to the political-cultural triumph of the English bourgeoisie in the 17th century and in my view they were on very solid grounds. For Belich it is the triumph of the settler-colonies that makes Anglo-metropolises like New York and London possible by providing their literal daily bread. To the methods of capitalist accumulation both primitive and otherwise in the settler-colonies such as the seizure of prime land by speculators, the give-away of it by the state to capitalists, the financial lever as a method to induce the bankruptcy of both small firms and small farms and the willing and unwilling resort to wage labor in the settler-colonies must be added the further downward pressure of colonial grain and raw materials producers such as India, Egypt, Mexico etc. Nearly all the settler-colonial nations were impacted by the fall in the price of foodstuffs in the 1920s and 30s. Just as these nations were laboratories for political democracy, they also doubled as laboratories for small enterprise and small-scale (but capital-intensive) commercial agriculture--both naturally had to give way to big capital or big business and did through regular financial holocausts that regularly bankrupted wiped out small businesses by the thousands in busts and eventually expropriated first thousands, and then millions of small-farmers, who ironically, had expropriated their land from indigenous peoples. Small-scale mining had to give way to big-time operators who in time became monopolists and so it came to pass that in the 21st century Australia's richest woman became that way via inherited mineral wealth.
Against those who believed land-reform could solve all ills (such as the Georgists) who Marx and his followers have a tradition of critical support Marx pointed out that it was precisely in America where a strong aristocratic tradition was absent and cheap land was freely available that "capitalist slavery" (here he means wage-labor) was proceeding fastest. The settler-world was based on an odd contradiction then which is that while it promised a real "democratic capitalism" in the sense that there was both political democracy and relatively democratic access to land its natural conclusion was that by design the people of colonies had to "democratically consent" to the removal of the means of production from their hands via the market. By the end of the process you could say that it was done more quickly and on a bigger scale then Europe itself even if settler standards of living remained higher. Wakefield's in comment in chapter 33 that slavery is the origin of (settler) colonial wealth is interesting and certainly true in the Southern case in the US where the South had some of the most wealthy capitalists in the country even if the Southern economy wasn't necessary the most dynamic part of the nation. Australia appears to have utilized slave-labor for a time in the Northern sugar colonies attained via the pacific slave trade known as "blackbirding" Fiji was an Australian sugar-colony that the elite Melbourne seized (it had little interest to the British themselves) for the purpose of producing slave or semi-slave earned profits. Some even claim that many indigenous Australians were subjected to slavery until as late as the 1960s. How central slavery was to the British settler-colonies is definitely up for debate and while the human-cultural cost of the genocidal-ethnic cleansing aspect of colonial development gets emphasized perhaps it should be considered that the end goal wasn't only displacement of the indigenous and cultural colonization but also proletarianization or in some cases lumpenization. Wage-labor appears to be something that Indigenous people resorted to all over the Americas (even in the US) and I do not believe this is something that should be written out of history. It should be noted that limits were always placed on how "free" the working classes of settler society could really become by colonial ruling classes or metropolitan authorities. They were looked at as profit-making enterprises after all, at least initially, and certain unfreedoms among settlers such as indentured labor, penal colony labor, or familial labor. Nancy Isenberg is out to change the narrative that the United States or its colonial forebears was ever a "classless" or "egalitarian" society with her book White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America and that is one thing I would fault Belich for the absent of a focus on class and how it developed in these settler-societies that took root all around the world. How did these societies come to be divided between a proletariat and a rich capitalist class, which was after all, in some cases even richer then the capitalist classes in Europe and even Britain itself at certain points?
The "America Bonus" And The Industrial Revolution
Belich's critique of what is often called "the America bonus" in the debate between "Eurocentric" and "Sinocentric" scholars in the debate over the Great Divergence is an interesting one. The thesis is not a particularly novel one which is that Europe's control over the resources of the Americas gave it a windfall, or a bonus, that allowed the Industrial Revolution to occur. The reason that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not in China was precisely due to this windfall and it seems the two sets of scholars actually have surprisingly few disagreements except maybe over when the Industrial Revolution happened and when the West surpassed China and whether China would've had its own Industrial Revolution if the Americas had never been discovered or if the West hadn't colonized China. When it comes to the bullion bonus aspect Belich notes: "The problem with the cash bonus idea is that the European bullion that received the most bullion, Spain and Portugal, did the least blooming." But Belich is hardly the first to notice this and seems to ignore the objections that maybe lodged against its dismissal. First off, Spain and Portugal were ruled by aristocracies who appropriated this bullion and used it to run both massive state and trade deficits that sustained very lavish lifestyles for their elites for a time. Much of this money usually disappeared into the pockets of other Europeans but inevitably ended up in China which had a dual-effect of both financing trade with China and introducing inflation into feudal European economies. Robert C. Allen argues that Spain's attempts at industrialization were wrecked by inflation but seems not to contemplate why Britain actually thrived during the same period even though he admits inflation was higher there. The positive effect of monetary inflation in diluting the economic power of the landed aristocracies rarely seems to get its full-due in explaining why the European bourgeoisie made more progress in Europe and its off-shoots then say China and India; neither does political-social revolution for that matter.
Belich dismisses the "ghost acres" thesis, which holds Britain would have to replace cotton with domestic wool production if not for the Americas, on the grounds that cotton did not supplant wool which grew 6.5 times from 1800-1900 and much of Britain's cotton was re-exported anyway. This seems strange given that cotton was Britain's bread and butter industry for sometime employing up to 20-25% of its working population in the mid-19th century; Iron and Steel was probably Britain's secondary leading-edge industry. It also seems strange dismissing it for the general European divergence since it was typically the avant-garde edge of industrial development even if it wasn't powerful enough to cause full-fledged industrialization by itself. His point on sugar holds good as sugar was scarcely 4.4% of British calories which is a barely relevant percentage indeed and the 22% of calories in the British diet in 1900 both occurs way too late to explain industrialization and ignores the fact that European sugar beet had largely replaced cane sugar. However, a contention that maybe raised is that sugar was an important luxury product and given the widespread resort to slavery it was also a highly-profitable one. Foreign investment may have amounted to 7% of British gross national investment but no attempt is mounted to tell us if these investments were more profitable then domestic investments or if they contributed to making domestic production cheaper then it otherwise would've been and thus helped boost profits that way. Robert C. Allen admits that London's proximity to Britain's colonial trade and its industries such as shipping had an effect that pulled British wages up across the board though one is tempted to see Marx's explanation that Britain's wage-structure grew out of the decay of British feudalism as a more profound and far-reaching explanation. At least Allen's explanation of technology and colonialism gives us an idea of how Britain's high-wages could be paid unlike Belich's non-explanation of why wages in America and the British Dominions were high. That has always seemed to me to be seemingly historical tautological non-explanation--wages were high because demand for labor was high and demand for labor was high because it was high!
Belich sees Ireland as far more integral to Britain's industrial success due to his own focus on a key commodity in the British economy--food. In fact, for most of the early decades of the industrial revolution (which Belich late-dates at 1800 rather then say 1780) Belich admits that Ireland was a far more important supplier of food then either the recently divorced United States, Canada or Australia. I actually have no problem with him putting Ireland in its proper place and context which it seems to lose in the endless debates about the slave trade. The massive colony next door may have played much more of a role then slavery in the era before new shipping technology compressed travel-times. Other then Ulster Ireland's function as a settler-colony imposed in order to police the Catholic Irish subject colony its hard to see the relevance of the Anglo-settler colonies to Belich's specific claims on the British great divergence. Belich's main point seems to be that the great divergence centered around mega-cities which the Anglo world was disproportionately endowed with million plus cities, which scarcely existed prior to 1800, and thanks to the settler-colonies it was able to feed and supply those cities. Belich's point that there only two cities with 2.5 million people in 1890--London and New York really seems to lack a good deal of relevance in my view. Yes, they were huge industrial cities but Belich doesn't really explain what makes 2.5 million a magic number, especially when one million people (or even half of that) was legitimate mega-city status prior to 1900. And the reason for this has to do with agricultural improvements that set in around 1900 particularly widespread use and technological improvement of artificial fertilizers by the Germans in the 1890s. If we take a little scroll to wikipedia's page on Paris's historical population levels it would seem that the city proper attained one million people around 1846 and in 1886 the city proper of Paris was 2.3 million hardly a case of vast Anglo superiority and divergence. The city of Paris proper is only 2.2 million today while the metropolitan area as a whole is 12 million; Paris may have had 3 million people in 1885. Unless Belich can find a way to attribute the growth of Paris to Algerian wine I can hardly see how the megacity phenomenon prior to 1890 can be chalked up to settlerism if the data there is at all correct. Vienna and Berlin were probably each around 1.5 million in 1890 and according to Peter Watson Germany had become roughly half urban around 1900 and had more large cities within it then the rest of Europe combined. One might have spoken of a Anglo-German divergence in 1900 if urban population was the sole criteria of divergence. Belich is on firmer ground when he talks about meat consumption as a factor in Britain's divergence from the rest of the world and this is a theme that Robert C. Allen talks about as the upper-portion of the British working class had long been able to afford to eat meat daily in fairly significant quantities allowing them to work longer and harder then workers elsewhere in Europe. Whereas as much as 40% of the French population is believed to have been unable to do more then 3 hours of light labor due to malnutrition in 1780 the British rate was probably half that. It is estimated by some historians that it was only around 1876 that the poorest paid English workers actually made enough that they did not starve--so much for "free" Britannia. Belich is on firmer grounds here when talking about meat consumption though I'd rather avoid a debate between vegetarians and carnivores as to whether it was nutritionally necessary. Settler-colonies like the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina exported massive quantities of meat mainly to Britain and the export of sheep for meat did help Britain improve its wool output as sheep bred for meat-eating purposes produce poor quality wool. But this still seems to skirt around the central question of why Britain had the money to buy so much imported food and meat which really isn't explained by Belich. The settler-colonies may have relieved price pressure on the average English consumer and postponed a day of reckoning stemming from less then ideal capital accumulation, innovation, and rent-seeking in English-Scottish agriculture but it only explains the supply-side aspect of things within a fairly limited historical period. It hasn't been proven that if England had been forced to reduce its meat-consumption this would have 1. retarded its development and the industrial revolution 2. that new ways of producing and consuming meat would not have been found in the face of high prices. It's pretty easy to imagine how this might have been devastating for the average Briton but less so for how it would've been devastating for capitalism which has so little regard for what Marx called "the historical-moral" aspect of maintaining a given standard of living. Although its easy to see how this relative security gave Britain and Anglos as a whole an advantage which helped pacify the growth of more radical labor movements then what they were afflicted with.
The tautological problem previously mentioned does reek of the empiricism which Belich analyzes his subject and is a good example of why Marxists believe that we need more than a simple "tallying up of the facts" to come up with solid historical analysis. The Industrial Revolution which occurred first in Britain does seem to be the reason for Britain's own demographic explosion and certain pressures leading to emigration and why the Anglo-settler world outpaced the rest of the settler-world. The evidence that it enabled it to happen as Belich claims seems weak except perhaps the US's role as world cotton supplier after the Haitian revolution, however, it shouldn't be thought that an alternative wouldn't be found as North Brazil emerged briefly as a cotton supplier. Certain commodities do go a bit beyond the importance Belich gives them such as gold, even if gold diggers imported more goods in value terms then they actually mined in 1848 once the gold was in circulation or stashed in a British bank and embodied in circulation it could effectively be used many times over and aid greatly in expanding the money supply. Belich admits that Pomeranz is on firmer ground when it comes to certain commodities like timber and leather which Canada, the US, and Argentina respectively played their role in replacing these crucial commodities which he argues are some of the first that nations industrializing experience a shortage of. In the case of the British isles with its quite limited forestry and limited supply of land suitable for grazing and cattle runs this definitely makes sense. It was only after 1815 that Britain really started to turn to the Anglo-settler world for its timber and grain needs whereas previously the Baltic world had filled this role. How long Britain could've gone on relying on the Baltic exclusively is hard to say. I do not know where Britain would've gotten its leather from which Eduard Galeano once memorably dubbed "the plastic of the age" as far as I know it appears to have gotten it from Argentina and other settler-colonies almost exclusively.
Belich argues that British industrialization did not cause Anglo hyper-colonization but did in fact super-charge it. Putting aside the debates about its effect on commodity demand and its introduction of new technologies, demographically Britain exploded during the industrial revolution. Not only does capital have a history of encouraging population growth or immigration when it feels that the labor supply might be getting tight but Marx pointed out that cycles of poverty cause workers to have more children. For most of the 19th century the majority of the immigration to the Anglo-settler world was Anglo and not pan-European as most histories seem to claim; Catholic Irish fleeing economic-genocide and English colonial oppression was also a factor in demographic migration. Certain conditions, in Industrial Britain and the parallel metropole of New England made emigration a positive and desirable factor. The capital built up by the British banking system which in turn rose from the "idle" surplus of the productive classes which was seeking an outlet for investment is also a factor. I do not think that the "settler revolution" can fully explain industrialization as Belich seems to think except to the extent that most colonialism involves "settlement" and capital itself needed colonialism to rise and thrive. The settler-revolution made Industrialization a hell of a lot easier and it added new metropoles through neo-Europes that were geographically diffuse across the world, thus it made the domination of the British Empire proper and European capitalism proper more secure.
Why Did It Occur?
Samir Amin in a relatively recent lecture told his audience that there was no use bemoaning colonialism too much because as he put it "it happened because it had to happen". In particularly, he cited the settler-colonization of North America and the Tasman world as part of this harsh necessity; that couldn't have been easy for him to say as in post-colonial circles settler-colonialism is regarded as especially heinous as it displaces and destroys the native. But the legendary Egyptian Third Worldist Marxist did have a point bemoaning the crimes of settler-colonial states or wishing the slave-trade or late 19th century conquest of Africa had never occurred is a fruitless endeavor. It is fruitless because to attempt to split capitalism and colonialism is a form of mental gymnastics where one tries to have their cake and eat it too. Some post-colonialists do realize this and they simply wish the cake had never been baked at all, they deny that capitalism was ever a historically progressive phase for humanity, they seek a return to an imagined pre-capitalist traditional or egalitarian past and
juxtapose it as an alternative to cruel, heartless, European capitalism. If we take Europeans out of the picture for a moment and look at the world as it was in say the 16th century we see the advanced nations of the non-European world divided into classes, into societies that replicate similar dichotomies as European feudal or slave modes of production if not the exact form; we also see regions of the world that have relatively egalitarian tribal cultures existing on marginal or non-cultivated lands, most of these cultures have very nascent forms of class hierarchy and structure, relatively primitive means of production that can be used to raise the productivity of labor. Is it possible to imagine that the class contradictions of the advanced non-Western civilizations would not have forced them to inevitably take up capitalism? To imagine otherwise is to assume they would've stayed stagnant and to deny that commodity production does not inevitably, and here we are talking long-historical scales lead to capitalism. To assume that they would not have developed capitalism is to assume that the root of European capitalism is simply colonial theft, and thus as Proudhon argued, the capitalist mode of production can be abolished or prevented from emerging simply by enforcing the rules of commodity exchange. To assume that the road to capitalism didn't have to be taken means that there was some alternative to escape non-capitalist modes of class domination available to small-commodity producers other then the pursuit of production and exchange for profit. Ironically, pre-capitalist societies were more "social" but their method of production was quite individualist, it is the capitalist class which by force, fraud, or fair exchange expropriates the peasantry which gives rise to an alienated working class that produces private profit with its increasingly combined and social labor. With the corporate revolution and the rise of finance to complete dominance even this private ownership and profit becomes an increasingly collective form of ownership but simply for the bourgeoisie as a class above all else. As brutal and nasty as it is, it is difficult to imagine a route to social and technological progress without taking the "capitalist road" at some historical point, with or without violent force.
However, to assume that a moral capitalism could've developed that did not strive to grab resources or subjugate weak peoples is to be seriously naive about the nature of capital which seeks to maximize profit and which is riveted by such crises that whatever grease can be thrown on the gears (whatever its source or real necessity) is considered a godsend. We only have to look at the case of Japan which was the first non-Western society to successfully industrialize through its own efforts and we see not only a Japanese form of settler-colonialism within Japan proper during the industrial development of Hokkaido but an outreach of nascent colonial domination through drug-dealing, covert manipulation, military intervention and outright annexation before Japan had even completed the work of constituting itself as true metropole and a full-on industrial power. Attempts to construe Japanese colonialism during the rising phase of Japanese capitalism as "defensive colonialism" which implies this was a measure taken exclusively due to Western pressure e.g. Commodore Perry incident ignores the agency and economic-strategic interests of Japanese capitalists themselves and also ignores the historical legacy of the pre-capitalist colonial projects both within Japan and outside of it. Even exempting the influence of the West on Japan I believe we would still have a similar result, some Japan scholars argue that the bourgeoisie had risen during the Tokugawa period and that Japan was more urban then the Western European average we might see Western influence and pressure as a catalyst that helped triggered indigenous processes such as the Meiji Revolution. The major take-away point is this, capitalism as a system of production for profit strives for the highest profit and therefore, expecting capitalist nations not to eventually go down the path of colonialism and imperialism is like putting a tray of fresh steaks in front of a Lion and expecting him not to eat. Theoretically, it could be argued that a Lion could subsist on a vegan diet, just like how capitalism could "theoretically" develop without colonialism but left to its own nature it has a quite vicious carnivorous appetite. In reality, capitalism had to conquer the world in order to make the world market the guarantor of international production and to institute an international division of labor. Just like how big capitalists step on little capitalists and workers it is difficult to imagine how and why nations with greater capital stocks would voluntarily choose not to tyrannize over nations that are less economically powerful.
Now, moving to the "settler" mode of colonialism as on the face of it seems devoid of the same economic impulse that drove say the Belgian Congo e.g. enslaving the inhabits, getting them to labor to export the resource which is sold at home at a profit etc. The settler-mode of colonialism doesn't just subordinate but disrupts and displaces indigenious inhabitants from the lands that it wishes to occupy. This usually seems to happen in regions that had the geographical-ecological possibility to sustain such "neo-Europes" but also in regions that are relatively sparsely populated, without extensive and intensively applied agriculture and without class structures that were relatively strong and complex. The Maori are generally acknowledged to have relatively strong military-feudal/slave class structure and perhaps that explains the fierce brutality of the Maori wars and the relatively high Maori proportion of the population that still exists. A similar thing can be said about the settler-colony of French Algeria. The Zulu Empire itself and the long Dutch-Indigenous wars of the 17th-18th centuries seem to be evidence that there were complex societies with class hierarchies that were able to field ferocious war-fighting campaigns; the fact that white settlers took so long to triumph decisively in the African case is indicative of a fact that Belich points out that explosive hyper-colonization was late in coming to South Africa. Likewise, it does not seem that the indigenous South Africans were affected by European disease in the same way as indigenous people in the Tasman world, Siberia, North and South America; furthermore, South Africa remained a Dutch settler population despite the Boer War and inflow of (male) British migrants as Belich shows Anglos typically did not emigrate en masse to regions where there was already a majority of other "white" European settlers such as in New Mexico and French Quebec and French regions of Louisiana. It shows an interesting point that Belich points out which is that Anglos did not move to certain regions only to become a minority there, the other preferred migrant of choice in the Anglo world was typically the German migrant. It certainly shows a limit to the "pan-European" melting pot that Anglo-colonies are often imagined to be; no wonder then rising racism in the United States against Central and Eastern European immigrants came with the demographic change of immigrants from being mostly Anglo-German to being that of "foreign" races that could not claim "Aryan" stock.
Getting back to the theoretical excursion the "ecotechnic" revolution of the long 19th century that coincided with the industrial revolution is one reason why the settler revolution occurred. These marginal lands were easier to cultivate using new technologies and farming strategies, new weapons technology made peoples easier to dominate, steam ships, rail, better sailing tech reduced the cost and time spent on journeying to such marginal places far away from Europe. New mining technology opened up new fields to cost-effective excavation by European or neo-European labor. The concept of hyper-colonization is interesting too as it draws parallels between a "normal" process of colonization and the rapid colonization that took place on these marginal continents and peripheral lands in the 19th century. Indigenous people adapted quite well to European presence and were quite formidable until they were overwhelmed demographically as much as culturally or strategically. The American West still belonged to the Comanche Empire for much of the second half of the 19th century and for good reason at the time many tribes feared the comanche more than they feared the Americans until they were overwhelmed by the settler inflow. The reason why these lands were worked up mainly (but not exclusively) by European labor is that the indigenous inhabitants were relatively small in number, and resisted slavery and dispossession, therefore it made more sense to send in European labor that was cost effective to farm, mine and manufacture on these lands. Not all emigrants came from the working class of course there were also many were middle class emigrants who felt flustered by opportunities at home and it is not unreasonable to assume this may have promoted social mobility at home as members from the working class ascended into class positions previously inhabited by bourgeois and petit-bourgeois whom had taken to emigration. These continents were "worked up" using European labor because neither the corporate infrastructure, nor the technology, nor the mass of capital, nor a sufficient native workforce was available in sufficient quantity to sustain the kind of corporate finance-monopoly imperialism of the late 19th and 20-21st centuries. They were such huge colonial efforts involving so much manpower that they had to embody a certain democratic spirit, regardless of whether the home country liked it or not, they were composed of millions of small producers who were subordinate to the local and later world market as well as foreign investors and bankers as the lever and guarantor of capitalist production. Veblen argued that in small towns, especially new towns in the United States, everyone in it entered into "a common conspiracy of silence" where there was mutual bullish bearing on the tendency of property prices to rise, looked at objectively this forms a kind of "democratic" consent and determination of ground rent long assumed by classical political economists in analysis but sourly admitted to be sorely lacking in Europe. Although settlers attempted to remake their old societies elsewhere they usually attempted to make it a "better form" of the old society without the feudal mode of production that had such a long and painful death in Europe itself. This is especially true of any settlement during or prior to the 18th and mid 19th century age of revolutions. It can also be said that demographically significant emigration even from states that didn't have proper settler-colonies of their own alleviated tension resulting from both the decaying feudal system and capitalist contradictions at home--the long forgotten European immigration to Latin America (including Uruguay, Chile, and South Brazil among other states) should be counted among the settler-wave even if it has different particularities. Belich's analysis of that phenomenon is somewhat half-assed and half-hearted.
A non-capitalist settlement of foreign lands arguably occurred during the Bantu settlement of most of subsaharan Africa and the settlement of much of European Russia under Tsardom. Class societies have always tried to subordinate, indoctrinate, and integrate societies that are not subordinate to their internal logic; they have always attempted to expand where they could and to bring even other similar class societies under their domination due not simply to resource rivalry but also due to the aggrandizement and power that domination of exploited classes allow. Although half of Russia can be considered to be a "settler" society Belich limits his view to the Great Russian societies past the Urals, particularly Siberia which was larger then Argentina in terms of population and the closest non-Anglo or Argentine analog to the Wild West. What the great 19th century settler-lands have in common despite wide variations is a specifically capitalist form of development and higher then average wage-levels then the metropole, this pattern holds good even in Siberia and Chinese Manchuria which were settled by cultures that were quite different in almost every respect from the Anglo-world! Chinese Manchuria saw an enormous immigration of close to 50 million in the late 19th and early 20th century! Manchuria was supplied by Russian and then Japanese money and it cultivated an enormous soybean crop for the Japanese market; this was certainly a factor in Japan's seizure and attempted double-colonization of Manchuria. Even the average Siberian was free times was three times as rich as the average Russian while the average Argentinian made 60% as much as the average American. It was not without reason that Lenin then argued that capitalism was growing fastest on the regions of Russia that were newly opened or where feudalism had historically been at its weakest.
What then explains the divergence between America, Argentina, Siberia, and Chinese Manchuria in the present world? Well, the settler-boom could not continue forever, and Belich does not do a good a job of explaining what the limits to the settler-project were beyond say the ecological case in Australia. In the 20th and 21st centuries it was the ability to use finance and monopoly capitalism as lever to dominate the world economy that determined outcome in these centuries and it was the Anglo-world that did better in this respect due to their proximity to the established metropoles of world capitalist empire (particularly the British Empire). For all the gains that the core of Latin America may have made in the 19th century they ended the 20th century in comparative poverty, the victims of imperialist backed death squads and scarred by their use as laboratories of neoliberal imperialist exploitation.
