Saree Makdisi, ‘Riding the Whirlwind of Settler Colonialism’, Victorian Studies 53, 1 (Autumn 2010)

a bit of it:

The structural logic leading to such catastrophes is precisely what Belich aims to uncover and retrace, though his book is ultimately more interested in colonial triumph than in the human catastrophes that have always accompanied it (of which, to be fair, it is well aware). And Replenishing the Earth accomplishes its task very ably. Belich’s book, from which any scholar interested in British or Anglophone culture in the nineteenth century has much to learn, reminds us of the virtues of transcending the limits and scale of the nation-state and opening our interpretive horizons to read the world in as wide a frame as possible. It resituates Victorian Britain in its global context and also adds much needed socioeconomic contextualization for the recent interest in transatlantic studies. It is also a valuable addition to the growing body of work on settler-colonial societies, though it would have been more valuable still had it done more to engage with some of the current scholarship in the wider field, for example, the work of Patrick Wolfe, or the recent books of Lorenzo Veracini, Gershon Shafir, Nur Masalha, Gabriel Piterberg, and others, which explore the last surviving example of classic settler colonialism in the world, namely the ongoing Zionist project in Palestine (which, curiously, is the only major case of settler colonialism that the book does not discuss or even mention in passing, despite its contextual discussions of French Algeria, Russian Siberia,and Chinese Manchuria).