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Full Description
In this major
work, one of our leading historians offers a new account of the origins of New
Zealand: how Pakeha settlers - nurtured on Enlightenment thought and
evangelical humanitarianism - encountered Maori, and how the two peoples together
developed a distinctively experimental society.
With James Cook's
arrival in 1769 and the subsequent colonisation, New Zealand became one of the
few post-Enlightenment experiments in creating a new nation anywhere in the
world. The Europeans who settled these islands brought with them a belief in
the power of reason and experience to improve peoples and societies. Encounters
between Maori and these new arrivals profoundly shaped the thoughts and
behaviours of both peoples.
Olssen argues
that the people who settled New Zealand planned two experiments in making a
better society. They hoped that, in contrast to earlier colonial projects, the
indigenous New Zealanders would not be driven to extinction but eventually take
their place as equals in a modern commercial society. And they aimed to create
a society that was fairer and more just than the one they had left behind; a
'Better Britain'. While both experiments were first conceived by savants and philosophers,
they gained ongoing support, by lodging in the hearts and minds of the settlers:
whalers and missionaries, mothers and farmers. In turn, Maori adapted these new
ideas to their own ends, giving up slavery and inter-tribal warfare, and adapting
the institutions of the colonisers in ways that would re-define the
experiments.
This then is an
ethnography of 'tangata Pakeha', a people of European descent changed by their
encounters with 'tangata Maori' and their land - just as Maori were themselves
changed - and the story of the society they built together. Ranging across
intellectual and cultural history, from the beach at Paihia to the coffee
houses of Paris, Olssen enables us to understand the origins of New Zealand
anew.
