James Belich

James (Jamie) Belich is a historian whose books combine original and provocative scholarship with good reading. They have won literary as well as history prizes. He is Beit Professor in Commonwealth and Imperial History at Oxford University and co-founder of its Centre for Global History. His first two books changed understandings of the New Zealand Wars, 1845-72: a lively account of Titokowaru’s War, (‘I Shall Not Die’), and The New Zealand Wars, a multiple prize-winner and bestseller, later made into a top-rating TV documentary series. He then wrote a much-praised two-volume history of New Zealand, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged. In 2011, he won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for career-long achievement in non-fiction. In 2009, Belich received stellar reviews for his comparative study of settler societies, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783 -1939. His latest book, The World the Plague Made. The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, which will revolutionise conceptions of the global impact of the Black Death, is to be published by Princeton University Press in July 2022.