Faculty of History
Professor James Belich
Emeritus Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History
Balliol College
01865 (2)77736james.belich@balliol.ox.ac.uk Most of my early work was on the history of New Zealand in global context. My books included a two-volume history of New Zealand, Making Peoples (1996) and Paradise Reforged (2001), as well as The New Zealand Wars (1986), which became a television documentary series. More recently, I turned to the comparative history of settler societies and their relations with indigenous peoples, an interest which produced Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world. My current research interests are becoming increasingly diverse. They continue to include settler societies, imperialism, and racial ideas, but now also extend to global history and the origins of European expansionism in the late medieval and early modern eras.
Research Interests
- Origins of West Eurasian expansionism
- Global nodes, global orders
- The Black Death and global history
Publications
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.