Chiefs of Industry

Maori Tribal Enterprise in Early Colonial New Zealand

Hazel Petrie

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781775580409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Australia y Oceanía

Drawing on a wide range of sources in both English and Maori, this study explores the entrepreneurial activity of New Zealand's indigenous Maori in the early colonial period. Focusing on the two industries—coastal shipping and flourmilling—where Maori were spectacularly successful in the 1840s and 1850s, this title examines how such a society was able to develop capital-intensive investments and harness tribal ownership quickly and effectively to render commercial advantages. A discussion of the sudden decline in the “golden age” of Maori enterprise—from changing market conditions, to land alienation—is also included.

CHAPTER 1

Chiefly Leadership and Pre-Contact Trade

THE WAYS IN WHICH MĀORI WENT ABOUT OPERATING AND MANAGING their commercial enterprises of the 1840s and 1850s did not mimic those of the Pākehā. Like other aspects of Māori life, they followed customary patterns that had evolved over aeons. But the enormous changes in the economic environment that began with the arrival of these newcomers to New Zealand shores impacted dramatically on traditional ways of doing things. And — as is so often the case — changes in one aspect of society had flow-on effects for others. In order to understand these transformations we need to consider them against a background of older practices.

Particularly relevant to understanding the transitions involved in the adoption of technological innovations such as flourmilling and shipping are the traditional roles of the chief, the concept of mana, and the importance of a chief’s ability to provide food. The last was necessary to keep his own people fed as well as to manaaki visitors, or provide hospitality, and was essential to the maintenance and building of chiefly mana. Mana, or spiritual authority and power, is the fundamental basis of chiefly leadership. Derived from the gods, its spiritual source is tapu. Mana can be inherited or acquired through achievement but, because it is driven by power and prestige, it can also be weakened or lost.1

Leaders with access to the greatest resources were able to attract and retain a greater following, which enhanced their mana even further.2 But mana in the political sense could also diminish if leaders failed to provide a solid economic and political base for their followers. On this basis, mana might be seen as a form of hegemony. That is, a situation whereby one section of society, in this case the chiefs or rangatira, maintained their position of authority and power through a flexible system of consent and coercion. In other words, leaders had to take account of the interests of the people they sought to govern and were obliged to work constantly at retaining their chiefly position by balancing the level of force they imposed against the people’s willingness to comply. Because mana is bestowed by others, leaders who sought to maintain their standing needed to be very conscious of their people’s needs, ensure their defence, and keep them well fed and generally happy.3

Since the ability to ensure optimum food supplies and economic benefits for the community were so essential to the political and economic power of the chief, it should not be surprising that leaders took particular interest in the new crops and technologies they were able to access as a consequence of European contact. Although these offered opportunities to bolster chiefly power, communal economies did not prevent individual enterprise and initiative. Individuals were not constrained to operate solely within communal contexts, but frequently contributed the goods, cash, or skills they acquired independently to group resources on a voluntary basis.

The ways in which existing economic systems dealt with foreign trade in the early contact period indicate that, although the flexibility of the communally based Māori economy gave individuals the freedom to operate independently, the advantages of security offered by a group with strong leadership provided incentives for individuals to maintain their membership of that community. Those links could be retained through contributions of labour, specialist skills, or material resources. Similar motivations are likely to have lain behind interhapū co-operation, which took place when major projects required the resources of more than one community or group. The way that Māori society was organised and its inherent flexibility underpinned their commercial success.

Social organisation

Māori society was made up of kin-based communities. The whānau, or extended family, was typically an independent economic and work unit that cultivated crops and gathered food for its own consumption as well as produced its own clothing, small canoes, and implements. A larger unit, the hapū, comprised a number of closely related whānau who had chosen to settle in a particular place with regard to food resources and issues of defence. The term ‘hapū’, which is sometimes translated as ‘sub-tribe’, has often been placed within a hierarchical model of whānau — hapū — iwi (tribe), the iwi being an incorporation of hapū and the hapū an incorporation of whānau. However, more recent scholarship has recognised that it has, in reality, been a more fluid political unit. In different circumstances and at different periods of history, descent groups might be classed as either iwi, hapū, or a combination of two or more hapū. Although hapū and iwi are terms that may be applied to a variety of corporate groupings, the latter generally implies a broader, overarching group.4

The flexibility of this social structure and the inherent links between individuals, whānau, hapū, and iwi allowed for a variety of regroupings in the face of social, political, or economic stress. Conquest was one means of extending territory and resources as well as labour, the vanquished adding to the labour pool as slaves.5 Migrants or refugees from other areas might live under the sufferance of their patron and strategic political marriages between prominent families could unite tribal groups. The granting of land-use rights with reciprocal obligations was another means of extending tribal strength. Consequently, alliances of hapū were typically shifting affiliations, prone to internal splitting or recombination.6 This freedom of association also applied to individuals, who could choose to connect with the hapū of any parent or grandparent or move to another community following marriage, a quarrel, or for other reasons. Relationships with Pākehā were formed in the same light, as Auckland’s first harbour master, David Rough, explained:

They consider themselves friends of the pakeha, who is taken under their protection, and whose effects, consequently, they are willing to carry for a time, but in every way they are as independent as American citizens, and take care to show their feelings by the remarks they make on terms of the most perfect equality. Indeed the New Zealanders are complete republicans; even the highest chiefs have little direct authority, although they have considerable influence …7

The history of nineteenth-century Māori business tells us a lot about the workings of customary social and economic systems. Economic co-operation between tribal groups that were otherwise fiercely independent is a notable feature in this context, but it is also clear that individuals generally enjoyed a high level of personal autonomy and participated in kin-based economies on a voluntary basis. Mutual benefit was the key motivator. So the element of reciprocity, which underpinned Māori society and left givers with a hold on recipients, meant that expenditure on funerals, weddings, and ritualised gift exchange, much criticised by Pākehā, was neither wasteful nor irrational. By expanding potential claims to resources, labour, and political or military assistance, they were investments likely to prove beneficial in the longer term. It was a system that would be largely understood and complied with by George Grey during his first term as governor from 1845 to 1853 but which other colonial leaders would fail to recognise.

Ties of kinship bound communities together, but the strength of cohesion and degree of control exercised by leaders depended upon their personality, powers of persuasion, and economic wealth. If these were lacking, the inclinations of the individual might be more powerful motivators than chiefly coercion. Writing in 1815, the Reverend samuel Marsden, founder of New Zealand’s first Christian mission, expressed the belief that chiefs could not ‘command the people as a body to labour on their ground’. Only slaves were ‘wholly under their authority’.8 David Rough would later observe other examples of egalitarianism among all ranks of Māori society:

The slaves (captives or descendants of captives in war) are kept in subjection, but many of them have lately been liberated by Christian Chiefs. I was told by a Missionary that Te Wero Wero [Te Wherowhero], the great chief of the Waikato, may be seen sitting by the side of the lowest slave at church or school.9

John Gorst’s impressions after Te Wherowhero’s son had succeeded as the second Māori king continue the theme:

Maories are, in their opinions and sentiments, the most independent people in the world, and exhibit an individuality which would delight Mr John stuart Mill. I have known laws passed at Kihikihi or Rangiaowhia, at an evening runanga, prohibiting the sales of pigs and potatoes to Europeans, followed next morning by a rush of old women to Otawhao to dispose of the forbidden articles.10

Personal autonomy gave individuals the freedom to pursue their own economic initiatives, but if incentives of security were present, the individual’s gains in terms of skill or wealth were typically shared with the wider group.

Given the difficulties with regard to categorising Māori social, political, and economic units, it may sometimes be more us...