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. Since 2013 Belich has been the Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History at the University of Oxford. Background Of Croatian descent, he was born in Wellington in 1956, the son of Sir Jim Belich, who later became Mayor of Wellington. He attended Onslow College. He gained an M.A. in history at Victoria University before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1978 and travelling to Oxford to complete his D.Phil at Nuffield College. Academic career He lectured at Victoria University of Wellington for several years before moving to the University of Auckland. In 2007 he was appointed Professor of History at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University. The New Zealand Wars (1986) was based on his DPhil thesis, and won the international Trevor Reese Memorial Prize. It was later turned into a major documentary series for Television New Zealand. 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). In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, Belich was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for service to historic research. 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). 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. In 2011 Belich was appointed Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at Oxford University. Awards and honours 2011 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement Works Titokowaru's War and Its Place in New Zealand's History. MA Thesis. Victoria University of Wellington, 1979. New Zealand Wars 1845–1870: An Analysis of Their History and Interpretation. 1982.