James Belich (historian)

James Christopher Belich Template:Post-nominals (born 1956) is a New Zealand historian, known for his work on the New Zealand Wars and on New Zealand history more generally. One of his major works on the 19th-century clash between Māori and Pākehā, the revisionist study The New Zealand Wars (1986), was also published in an American edition and adapted into a television series and DVD.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Series">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2011, Belich was appointed the Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and he is a co-founder and former director of the Oxford Centre for Global History at the University of Oxford. He retired from the chair in 2024.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Background

Of Croatian descent, Belich was born in Wellington in 1956, the son of Jim Belich, who later became the mayor of Wellington.<ref name="SOURCE-01">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="SOURCE-02">Template:Cite news</ref> Educated at Onslow College,<ref name="SOURCE-03">Template:Cite news</ref> he went on to study at Victoria University of Wellington, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in history. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1978 and went to the University of Oxford to complete his DPhil at Nuffield College.<ref name="SOURCE-04">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="PUP profile">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Academic career

Belich lectured at Victoria University of Wellington for several years before moving to the University of Auckland.Template:Cn His book The New Zealand Wars won the international Trevor Reese Memorial Prize in 1987.<ref name="SOURCE-07"/> Based on his Dphil thesis,<ref name="NEWSOURCE-02"/> it was turned into a documentary series for Television New Zealand, called The New Zealand Wars, in 1998. This was a five-part series with Belich presenting.<ref name="Series"/><ref name="NEWSOURCE-01"/><ref name="NEWSOURCE-02"/> His revisionist account of the wars had a substantial impact on New Zealand popular opinion.<ref name="NEWSOURCE-01"/> It was controversial for its claim that the Crown had not been victorious in the wars,<ref name="NEWSOURCE-01"/> and that northern Maori invented trench warfare.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

I Shall Not Die': Titokowaru's War (1990), based on his MA thesis, was also highly praised, winning the Adam Award for New Zealand literature.Template:Cn Belich has written a two-volume work A History of the New Zealanders,Template:Cn consisting of Making Peoples (1996) and Paradise Reforged (2001).<ref name="SOURCE-01"/>

In 2007, he moved from the University of Auckland to a professorship at Victoria University, and was appointed professor of history at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.<ref name="NEWSOURCE-02">Template:Citation</ref> He expanded his area of research to colonial societies in general and the place of settler colonialism in world history with Replenishing the earth (2009).<ref name="SOURCE-05">Template:Cite book</ref> The book was the choice of Maya Jasanoff in a list of the 11 best scholarly books of the 2010s by The Chronicle of Higher Education.<ref name="SOURCE-06">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2011, he remained professor of history at Victoria University's Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.<ref name="SOURCE-07"/> That year, Belich was appointed Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford, where he is a former director and co-founder of the Oxford Centre for Global History.<ref name="PUP profile"/><ref name="SOURCE-07">Template:Cite news</ref> In 2023, he remained Professor of Global and Imperial History at Balliol College, Oxford.<ref name="NEWSOURCE-01"/> His book The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2023.<ref name="NEWSOURCE-01">Template:Citation</ref>

Honours and awards

In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, Belich was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for service to historic research.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Belich was the winner of the non-fiction category at the 2011 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His book, The World the Plague Made, was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Works

• Titokowaru's War and Its Place in New Zealand's History. MA Thesis. Victoria University of Wellington, 1979.<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref>
• New Zealand Wars 1845–1870: An Analysis of Their History and Interpretation. 1982. PhD Thesis. Nuffield College/Oxford University
• I Shall Not Die: Tītokowaru's war, New Zealand, 1868-9. Bridget Williams Books, 1993. Template:ISBN
• Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Penguin, 2007. Template:ISBN
• The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. Auckland University Press, 1986. Template:ISBN
• Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000. University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. Template:ISBN
• Replenishing the Earth: The Settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783–1939. Oxford University Press, 2009. Template:ISBN
• The Prospect of Global History. co-edited with John Darwin, Margret Frenz and Chris Wickham. Oxford University Press, 2016. Template:ISBN
• The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe. Princeton University Press, 2022. Template:ISBN

See also

• Croatian New Zealanders
• List of historians
• New Zealand literature
• New Zealand Wars
• New Zealand history

External links

• Victoria University of Wellington Stout Research Centre page
• University of Auckland website
• University of Auckland personal page
• Profile on the New Zealand Book Council website
• Staff page at Oxford University