James Belich

Profile
James Belich is a trail-blazing New Zealand historian. In three important works he has confronted most of the major questions in New Zealand history, and produced scholarly history which has also reached a general readership.

Selected published works
The New Zealand Wars: The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, 1980, Trevor Reed Memorial Prize; Making Peoples, 1996; Paradise Reforged, 2001.

Publishers
Penguin Books New Zealand www.penguin.co.nz

Biography
James Belich was born in Wellington in 1956 and educated at Onslow College and Victoria University of Wellington (Master of Arts 1978). He attended Oxford University (Doctor of Philosophy, 1981) as a Rhodes Scholar. He was deputy editor of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and a James Cook Fellow and is currently Professor of History at the University of Auckland.

Belich is perhaps best-known for two major works of general history and for significantly re-interpreting nineteenth century New Zealand history, especially in the area of Māori/Pākehā relations. Fronting the television series based on his acclaimed The New Zealand Wars: The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1980), which won the international Trevor Reed Memorial Prize for historical scholarship, introduced him to a wide general readership. The book has remained in print ever since, and has sold over 25,000 copies.

According to Roger Robinson in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998), “Belich’s writing is confident in its broad sweep and vigorous in its detail, whether he writes about Māori techniques of trench warfare or the courting rituals of the society elite of Tauranga in the late nineteenth century.”

I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand, 1868–9 (1989) won the Adam Award for an outstanding contribution to New Zealand literature. Belich has also made a major contribution to New Zealand history with two volumes of general history. The first was Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders: From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Paradise Reforged was the sequel to Making Peoples. Subtitled A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Paradise Reforged concentrated on the twentieth century. It was shortlisted in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and was published by Penguin Books in Britain.