The myth of benign colonization

Two major threads are evident in the telling of our nation's colonial history.  One thread perpetuates the popular myth that the colonists were benign; on the balance of things bringing more benefit to the indigenous people than costs.  This myth remains popular in some circles and has often been accompanied by the notion that race relations in New Zealand are among the best in the world, especially when compared with South Africa, Australia or the Americas.  This myth has its origins in the writing and work of Edwin Gibbon Wakefield of the New Zealand Company who believed that New Zealand could be colonized in an organised way to the benefit of Maori and settlers, making New Zealand a little England in the South Pacific.  (Part of Wakefield vision was the 'amalgamation' of the Māori  race.  I will return to that in another post.)

Erik Olssen has argued that the historiography of the nineteenth century European settlement in New Zealand seeks to offer an explanation and motivation for the migration of tens of thousands of settlers into the colony and that two competing explanatory paradigms are evident. In the early part of the twentieth century historians gave their attention to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s dream of planting a new but better England on the edge of the empire. Liberal notions of progress, evolution, benign colonisation, civilization of the Māori race, were part of the story told and settlers were portrayed as buying into this vision. 

In contrast Reeves’ Long White Cloud painted a picture which ‘stressed the importance of the Māori, the frontier, the wars of the 1860s, and the gold rushes in emancipating the country's British colonists from Old World traditions so as to create an adventuresome and democratic society which, in pioneering bold new reforms, had become “the world's social laboratory”’.  Both of these paradigms served useful purposes in organising and analysing the historical data but in the very process of revealing patterns through such processes other stories, experiences and realities are hidden.

As Christopher Hillard wrote:

There were major divisions between historians as to what counted as New Zealand history, and as to what its overall moral was. The most serious divide was between those who claimed that Maori-Pakeha interaction was the driving force behind New Zealand history, and those who favoured narratives in which Pakeha built a society in a physical and cultural wilderness, narratives in which Maori played only incidental parts. (Christopher Hilliard  Island stories : the writing of New Zealand history, 1920-1940 , Auckland University Thesis MA History 1997)

A challenge for my research will be to look beyond both of these paradigms and  try to hear with fresh ears the stories told and remembered by actual participants in the unfolding drama of colonisation and settlement.
 

Photo E. G Wakefield