Colonising New Zealand

A Reappraisal

Paul Moon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000435214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Colonising New Zealand offers a radically new vision of the basis and process of Britain's colonisation of New Zealand. It commences by confronting the problems arising from subjective and ever-evolving moral judgements about colonisation and examines the possibility of understanding colonisation beyond the confines of any preoccupations with moral perspectives.

It then investigates the motives behind Britain's imperial expansion, both in a global context and specifically in relation to New Zealand. The nature and reasons for this expansion are deciphered using the model of an organic imperial ecosystem, which involves examining the first cause of all colonisation and which provides a means of understanding why the disparate parts of the colonial system functioned in the ways that they did.

Britain's imperial system did not bring itself into being, and so the notion of the Empire having emerged from a supra-system is assessed, which in turn leads to an exploration of the idea of equilibrium-achievement as the Prime Mover behind all colonisation—something that is borne out in New Zealand's experience from the late eighteenth century. This work changes profoundly the way New Zealand's colonisation is interpreted, and provides a framework for reassessing all forms of imperialism.

Part 1
The Moral Empire

1 The Arc of Empire

By the time New Zealand appeared on the horizon of Britain’s interests in the mid-1760s, the British Empire had already been in existence for at least two centuries. Many historians look to the Elizabethan era as the period when Britain’s imperial tentacles began to stretch out,¹ with the extension of trade routes by state-sponsored pirates like Francis Drake and John Hawkins, the (initially failed) forays into establishing settlements in America by Walter Raleigh and Richard Grenville, and the publication of Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting, which served almost as a manifesto for an expansionist Britain.²

However, tracing the pedigree of the Empire requires an exploration of its conceptual origins, which is a much less precise undertaking. Firstly, the notion of an origin can be interpreted either as a beginning or as a cause, and frequently, there is ‘cross-contamination of the two meanings’.³ Secondly, there is the risk of placing too much meaning on origins, to the detriment of more recent causal elements As David Armitage cautioned, ‘[t]he origins as a concept, as of any other object of historical inquiry, are not necessarily connected to any later outcome, causally or otherwise’.⁴ One of the risks in drawing connections with origins is that it diminishes the role of more recent circumstances on the shape of history and even denies to some extent the agency of the actors involved. Nietzsche’s view on the significance of origins in this context was evermore absolutist: ‘the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart’, and so the notion that any preceding meaning or purpose can be derived from the study of origins ‘[is] necessarily obscured or even obliterated’.⁵ Of course, such a stance risks denying origins at least some significance in subsequent events, either as causes or as beginnings, but beneath Nietzsche’s rhetoric is an emphasis on not allowing origins to assume any more importance than the minimum they are due.

There is also the challenge, when searching for the Empire’s conceptual origins, of determining what is meant by the ‘British Empire’. The notion of an empire itself is not a fixed entity (despite frequently being deployed as if it were). Certainly, many aspects of the British Empire had no historical precedent, and so while it was an empire in name, and shared traits with other, earlier empires, there was much about it that was experimental, unprecedented, and initially lacking a comprehensive imperial ideology.⁶ The fact that the British Empire mirrored certain traits of previous empires does not necessarily make it entirely analogous with the structures, functions, and trajectories of those empires. Then there is the fact of the Empire’s evolution, which was accentuated by its longevity. The British Empire in 1650 was a vastly different animal to the British Empire in 1750, and almost unrecognisable to its 1850 configuration, but to appropriate Orwell’s depiction of England ‘like all living things, [it had] … the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same’.⁷

Once historians start fossicking around for the conceptual or cultural remnants of the origins of the Empire, just about any fragment that is excavated can be held up as evidence of a marker in the gestation of imperial thought. One such specimen in this archaeology of Empire is an act of mythical national resurrection that took place in 1296. The author of the Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds pronounced at that time that Edward I had, with ‘England, Scotland and Wales under his sway … acquired the former monarchy of the whole of Britain, for so long fragmented and truncated’.⁸ The former monarchy alluded to here was the imagined realm of King Arthur, which legend assured readers in the thirteenth century had encompassed all of Britain. Edward was the new Arthur (as supposedly prophesied by Arthur’s mythical bard and magician, Merlin),⁹ recovering a lost British empire. Between 1277 and 1283, this ‘British’ imperialism manifested itself in Edward’s conquest and annexation of the Welsh principalities,¹⁰ which left the conquered territory dotted with a series of imposing castles.¹¹ Edward’s empire might have been based on an effective bureaucracy and progressive jurisprudence, but the signs of brute force that brought it into existence—in the form of fortresses—remained the more visceral reminder (for both the Welsh and the English) of where the source of power lay. And it was fitting that Arthur was portrayed by Edward’s propagandists as the progenitor of this imperial Apostolic Succession, as he was also a figure deeply embedded in Welsh folklore.¹² Henceforth, the king’s hagiographers could depict the conquest of Wales as an act of unification rather than subjugation.

However, in establishing a convenient mythology for Edward’s imperial pretensions, unwittingly, a process of infinite regress clanked into action, in which the proposition of an Edwardian Britain required the support of a preceding proposition (in this case, an imagined Arthurian Britain), and that proposition in turn necessitated a prior proposition, and so forth, seemingly ad infinitum.¹³ For explorers of the conceptual origins of the British Empire, the precursor of Edward’s Britain in Arthur’s imperial accomplishments was signalled in Geoffrey de Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.¹⁴ The book not only detailed Arthur’s alleged territorial possessions but went on to assert that he once exercised dominion over an empire that rivalled that of Rome.¹⁵ Such a proposition, as counterfactual as it was, rested on the medieval notion of translatio imperii, in which imperial power existed like some immutable element that could not be diminished, and that was transferred in a linear succession. Establishing the chain of this transfer of imperial power was central to the role of mythic genealogies in medieval royal ideologies and enabled monarchs in the medieval era to claim an uninterrupted constitutional lineage that extended back to the Trojan ancestry of the earliest Roman kings.¹⁶

Apart from the obvious elasticity with the historical record that such lineages depend on, there is a conceptual problem with translatio imperii in relation to the origins of British imperialism: where did this Anglo-British imperial impulse originate from? According to English medieval writers, it was effectively an inheritance from Rome, replete with its own imperial lineage, but this immediately raises the question of why the same sorts of imperial urges did not manifest themselves throughout all the other former parts of the Roman Empire. Perhaps part of the explanation for this English/British exceptionalism can be found in another tributary of origins: that of national unity. The means by which Britain became Britain was itself a form of proto-imperialism, in that it involved the power of the leaders in some territories being subsumed into a larger administrative and political system.

This is a process that has been identified as ‘internal colonialism’. It is a prescriptive notion which asserts that many European imperial states initially were born of two or more distinct cultural or ethnic groups and that the emergence of effective forms of centralised government caused the idiosyncratic legal, religious, cultural, linguistic, economic, and family systems in these states to lose their significance. The emerging national culture gradually transcended these differences, causing them ultimately to ‘merge into one all-encompassing cultural system to which all members of the society have primary identification and loyalty’.¹⁷ A new set of common values emerges, culminating in what Durkheim described as a collective consciousness.¹⁸

The proponents of internal colonialism argue that such territorial expansion as well as cultural assimilation is a form of colonisation writ small and, for some nations, established a template for eventual colonial expansion beyond their borders. In the case of England’s emergent ‘empire’, the inception of an English kingdom in the tenth century is instructive, not the least because when the Wessex kings conquered the Danelaw regions and brought most of England into a single kingdom, the concept of the Empire of Britain came into being.¹⁹

Even at this point, though, at what appears to be the beginning of a unitary England achieved by means of internal colonialism, there were signs of a legacy of intent for this development that preceded its manifestation. Two centuries earlier, the Mercian kings exercised some dominance over rulers of other parts of England, to the extent that in their royal charters, they used titles such as rex Britanniae, rex Anglorum, rex totius Anglorum patriae, and in some instances, imperator (albeit with the qualification that the rule they proclaimed was over a people rather than a country).²⁰ But even such tenuous claims are not necessarily the genesis of a unified English imperium. The term ‘bretwalda’ (‘Britain-ruler’) was used as a title from the time of the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the sixth century. The bretwalda controlled church affairs and collected tribute payment from other rulers throughout England and ‘played an important role in the development of a consciousness of English unity in the Anglo-Saxon period’.²¹

Around 731, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Moral Empire
• Part 2 An Imperial Supra-system
• Part 3 The Imperial Equilibrium
• Bibliography
• Index