American Historical Review:

James Belich’s book is useful not just for scholars comparing settler societies but for everyone working on nineteenth-century North America or Australasia. Belich tells a compelling story about economic colonialism in the nineteenth century. In the process, he provides a remarkably accessible synthesis of recent historiography describing economic development in a region stretching from the southern United States to New South Wales.

Belich’s book joins a growing body of literature about the history of anglophone settlers. Most people working on English-speaking settler polities do so on the basis that North America and Australasia (and sometimes southern Africa and islands in the Caribbean) form an analytical unit sharing institutions like common law, a particular mode of indigenous dispossession and oppression, or a rhetoric of racial nationhood. Belich, however, has larger pretensions. The rise of the Greater British world, he argues, provides a new explanation of global economic disparity between East and West by 1900 (p. 14). Nineteenth-century Anglo history, in this formulation, is global history.

A few other good reviews in this most recent AHR as well. Among ’em:

Richard S. Hill. Maori and the State: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950–2000. By Paul Moon