James Belich

Since the publication of his award-winning and internationally renowned revisionist history of the New Zealand Wars in 1986, James Belich has been a historian very much in the public eye. Through his 1998 series, The New Zealand Wars, he introduced a television audience to the conflicting history and ... (more)drama of the nineteenth century. He followed up with a mammoth and magisterial two volume history of New Zealand, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged, in which he introduced the theory of recolonisation. Belich's gift for the grand narrative and his attention to the detail of history has taken him from New Zealand in the 1860s to world history. His most recent book Replenishing the Earth traces the ‘explosive settlement' which characterised British imperialism, and has been described as a superb work of history, written with verve and wit, and one of the most important books on modern world history to have appeared in years. Join him in conversation with Jane Stafford.