| James Belich | |
| Birth Place: | Wellington, New Zealand |
| Discipline: | History |
| Awards: | Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement (2011) |
| Relatives: | Jim Belich (father) Camilla Belich (niece)[1] |
James Christopher Belich (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.[2] [3]
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.
Of Croatian descent, Belich was born in Wellington in 1956, the son of Jim Belich, who later became the mayor of Wellington.[4] [5] Educated at Onslow College,[6] 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.[7] [8]
Belich lectured at Victoria University of Wellington for several years before moving to the University of Auckland. His book The New Zealand Wars won the international Trevor Reese Memorial Prize in 1987. Based on his Dphil thesis, it was later turned into a major documentary series for Television New Zealand. The New Zealand Wars was a five-part series with Belich presenting[3] that was released in 1998. It was controversial for the startling claim that northern Maori invented trench warfare.
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. Belich has written a two-volume work A History of the New Zealanders, consisting of Making Peoples (1996) and Paradise Reforged (2001).[4]
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. 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).[9] 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.[10]
In 2011, he remained professor of history at Victoria University's Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies. 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.[8] [11] In 2023, he remained Professor of Global and Imperial History at Baliol College, Oxford. His book The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2023.
In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, Belich was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for service to historic research.[12]
Belich was the winner of the non-fiction category at the 2011 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement[13] His book, The World the Plague Made, was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize.[14]