Abstract
Before moving into substantive analyses, there is a need to look at the wider context for Maori population and development – most importantly, the major events in New Zealand’s nineteenth century social, political, cultural and economic history alongside which demographic and development trends unfolded. For example, these were affected by, or at least occurred in tandem with shifts in New Zealand’s constitutional path; with the direction taken by the settler economy; with social transformation in general; and with the forging of New Zealand’s cultural identity. One can add the country’s external relations including contact itself and the annexation of New Zealand, which sealed forever the fate of the indigenous Maori. Another seminal event in external relations came at the very end of the colonial period. This was the decision by Richard Seddon’s Liberal Government, somewhat against Whitehall’s geopolitical thinking, not to join the Australian Commonwealth in 1901. One sticking point of relevance here seems to have been differences in the citizenship status of Maori from Aborigines, even expressed at a popular level then (e.g. cartoons) (New Zealand Graphic Oct 1900; Oliver 2000). Maori were enfranchised, but Australian Aborigines were not to be ‘citizens’ of the new Commonwealth for decades to come. More widely, there was certainly concern about the erosion of New Zealand’s social reforms (Smith 2012). The present study is built around period-specific analyses of population and development, in each of which there were major events that covaried with these.
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Notes
- 1.
One cannot overestimate the seminal importance of this aspect of Boast’s work. His legal history of resource transfers, including by confiscation, in North America and Australia, and elsewhere in the British Empire at that time, and earlier (Boast 2008: passim and 50–55, 55–61), gives the New Zealand researcher access to a much wider comparative context, and thus a framework against which to evaluate more objectively what happened here. He has also taken the important step of assessing the attitudes of instrumental New Zealanders at that time, alongside the social philosophical conventions of their day. These are very valuable contributions, but they are less directly critical for my book – my concern is with the effects of the transfers on Maori, not with the motivations of protagonists, nor how transfers were implemented. Later, however, I must touch again on some of the points Boast raises where they directly relate to Victorian attitudes to development policy.
- 2.
Complete vital registration is an expensive statistical tool; civil registration as in some northwestern European countries even more so. Data on indigenous Australians, for example, have become relatively complete only in the twenty-first century, and they were excluded from Federal data collections until the 1960s. In the interwar years the United States was still struggling to achieve this goal, with some parts of the country not yet in the ‘registration area’ for statistics until 1957–1958 (Shryock and Siegel 1976: 20–23). Apocryphally, up till then ‘national’ nuptiality data sets had been built up by a federal statistician in his holidays going from courthouse to courthouse to record data. For Te Rangi Hiroa’s date of birth see (Ramsden 1971: ‘Appendix 1’, 244). For twentieth century ‘late registration 1946’ see Pool (1977: Table 4.2).
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Pool, I. (2015). The Wider Historical Context. In: Colonization and Development in New Zealand between 1769 and 1900. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16904-0_5
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