The battle over Māori sovereignty
Just when the missionaries were beginning to convince themselves that two decades of arduous and unrewarding labour were bearing fruit — when Māori were listening, warfare was waning, converts were increasing and Māori were showing interest in literacy as much as the gospels — a new and menacing threat arrived. This came not from the Pacific, but rather from England. An ex-convict economist and mercurial entrepreneur had persuaded investors and some political leaders that the future of Britain, and their personal prosperity, lay in the colonisation of New Zealand.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield was everything the missionaries were not. His world was governed not by the strictures of evangelism, but by the Scottish Enlightenment principles of political economy. His grand literary task was not the promulgation of the Christian gospels, but an annotated edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism. Where missionaries believed in the vanity of human invention without the saving grace of Christ’s resurrection, Wakefield had faith in his own imagination and in his almost unlimited capacity to design a better and more vibrant society based on the laws of political economy.
Wakefield and his New Zealand Association, which by 1840 would become the New Zealand Company, represented an urbane and urban British existence very much at odds with the rural, artisan-based life of the New Zealand missionaries. Both looked to the South Seas to create very different replicas of their own idealised but very different British societies. The conflict between these two ways of imagining New Zealand’s future would become the foundation moment for the country, creating a lasting tension that has been a critical aspect of its history ever since.
BRITAIN AND COLONIAL EXPANSION IN THE 1830S
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain had no appetite for colonial adventures. The American Revolution and the loss of the 13 colonies had destroyed the economy of Britain’s mercantile empire just when free trade was proving more appropriate to an industrialising and urbanising economy that was intent on saving money, especially on colonisation. New Zealand before 1840 was loosely tied to the British Empire by a free trade in ideas, manufactured goods and individuals, supplying raw materials to Britain’s industrial engine room. But it was not alone in the South Pacific; the United States and France were also on the scene. Industrialisation depended on the importation of raw materials, but free trade did not require colonies or even exclusive relationships with Britain. Rather, it allowed for a cosmopolitan range of entrepreneurs, preachers and adventurers, from Europe and the Americas, to build the many strands of economic attachment between New Zealand and the outside world.
The American Revolution had made colonisation unfashionable, while freeing Britain for rapid industrialisation, which was itself highly disruptive. Some parts of the rural economy, once dynamic drivers of the British economy, fell into decline as industrial cities emerged. Great new wealth was generated very unevenly. Britain avoided the revolutionary turmoil of parts of the Continent, but not the anxieties and social tensions of these disruptions. Mired in these internal problems, Britain was looking inward. Many would start to fear that industrialisation was dividing the nation into an impoverished class of labourers and an elite growing wealthier by the day — with revolutionary possibilities.
In this flux, the New Zealand backwater would lead the way in a new interest in British colonisation that, by the end of the century, would remake the maps of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The Enlightenment gaze that had settled on New Zealand at the time of Cook returned with competing humanitarian and economic lenses.
Until the mid-1830s, the missionaries’ work had been largely untroubled by the interference of government or the arrival of colonists, other than a trickle from the convict settlements of Australia. Missionaries had wanted some form of intervention, but only to control Europeans, beyond the grasp of British law. Humanitarians and evangelical missionaries were celebrating their success as the long campaign to suppress slavery turned to colonisation and the needs of Māori as aborigines. Colonisation became, in their minds, an institution almost as evil and certainly as dangerous as slavery. The lessons of history were for them irrefutable and a reproach to European civilisation.
Everywhere — and they could see no exceptions — colonisation had meant disaster, and sometimes even extinction, for indigenous communities. The closest example was the war with and eventual extermination, as they saw it, of the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Disease, war and exploitation had always been transported in the baggage of colonists and released unfettered on the inhabitants of the new world.
Isolating Māori and Oceania from colonisation suited the three major Protestant missionary societies, who worked closely together in London lobbying a sympathetic Colonial Office on behalf of their common interests in New Zealand. They shared the humanitarian belief that Māori society would be at grave risk if there were to be an influx of colonists. In their view, Māori should be left alone to achieve an independent Christian sovereignty, free from European interference, excepting, of course, from their missionary guides.
Wakefield had a very different view of New Zealand’s future. His ideas about colonisation were developed when he had time on his hands, serving, with his brother William, a three-year sentence for abducting an heiress. With William’s help, Wakefield had married 15-year-old Ellen Turner at Gretna Green and eloped to France. He expected her wealthy and influential family to recognise the marriage and provide him with the patronage and status that would reflect their daughter’s place in society. It seemed a ludicrous scheme, but Wakefield had already successfully tried the same ruse just over a decade earlier.
When the plot failed and he was sent to Newgate Prison, Wakefield set his sights somewhat higher, aiming to solve those large intractable problems facing Britain: poverty, dramatic population growth and the happiness of all. Wakefield would become the most vocal and successful advocate of colonisation in the 1830s. He would, in his imagination, build large viable colonies that would not only transform the economy, but also resolve almost all the social problems facing contemporary Britain. He had opinions on the causes of the Swing Riots of 1830, when agricultural workers staged an uprising against mechanisation. He had opinions on where Adam Smith had got things wrong. He had opinions on solving the scourge of prostitution. He had opinions on almost everything.
Wakefield also had a plan. He would create the conditions for the rapid transfer of population from an overcrowded Britain to ‘empty’ spaces just waiting for colonial settlement. Once booming, these settlements would generate more wealth, sucking more of Britain’s excess population into these thriving new societies, until the wealth amassed and the relationships between capital and labour, between landowner and tenant, between tradesmen and their employers and between the city and the countryside, reached a form of equilibrium.
Wakefield’s new society was not, as many have argued, an attempt to recreate a hierarchical and conservative Britain. Wakefield’s ideal society was no Arcadian village with its squire, parson and obedient smock-wearing labourers, but rather a bustling metropolis, modelled on a British provincial city. It would require a thriving rural hinterland, but that was not its aim. It was pure coincidence that one of the ships commissioned to be the vanguard of the New Zealand colony was called the Tory. The scheme’s Arcadian reputation was a result of its failure, not its intent.
Wakefield was an Enlightenment economist. His objective was happiness, and happiness was to be achieved by ensuring that everyone, from the lowest labourer to the wealthiest entrepreneur, had time for leisure. As historian Erik Olssen has commented, there was something quintessentially modern about Wakefield’s ideal. In leisure, a society would create its literature and its art, although Wakefield was never entirely clear about what this would look like. To achieve his aim, Wakefield recast Adam Smith’s view of competition. Markets worked, he claimed, not because individuals competed in their pursuit of happiness, but because they cooperated with one other. The invisible hand was not one of competition, but of fellowship and common purpose.
Wakefield was a poor public speaker, but he could write and was a superb publicist for his ideas. Yes, he was something of a shyster and a charlatan, and his first foray as an advocate for colonies was deceptively entitled A Letter from Sydney even though it was written while in Newgate jail. Wakefield could pass as an expert on colonies thanks to a burgeoning travel literature of the new world, without having so much as set sail for these distant places. In his view, colonists became landowners far too easily. This often meant that although they could become wealthy, compared with those left at home, a lack of labour to employ meant they had to work too hard to achieve this. There was no time for leisure.
Isolation, too, destroyed the potential for culture and for fulfilled lives. Wakefield even explained (and disparaged) religious revivalism as a psychological disorder, an inevitable response to colonial remoteness. He dismissed the existing art and literature of the new world, seeing them as universally inferior to those of Britain. Despite their cultural superiority, Britons faced greater economic pressures, the middle classes were stretched and poverty was widespread. His immigration scheme was designed to create balance between colonies turning a society ‘without leisure, over-worked, anxious, and discontented’ into one with ‘high wages . . . peace of mind and instruction’.
His solution was regulating the price of land, a notion he acquired from his reading of David Riccardo, an early nineteenth-century economist of land and rents. If the price of land in the colony was high enough, then the money raised from its sale could build up infrastructure, bring in the labourers and rapidly increase the value of land. A colonising organisation would induce investors to buy land because they would make money, lots of money, and quickly. As land increased in value, profits increased and the organisation could bring over immigrants, and around and around went the money machine. The new society would have an economy built on a high level of specialisation of labour and everyone would have access to leisure.
It was a grand illusion, a new South Sea Bubble, but it convinced many of its virtue. The whole enterprise was even made to look like civic philanthropy, supported by the wealthy and the influential for the good of society. They claimed no financial interest in its success, but invested capital in it nonetheless. Wakefield’s personal virtue was not easily defended, but he brought to saving capitalism the same humanitarian enthusiasm that evangelicals brought to saving aborigines.
Not to be outdone, however, Wakefield had his own plan for their salvation. He proposed setting aside a tenth of the land to be onsold to settlers as endowment reserves that would eventually become the property of chiefs, who would benefit from the extraordinary capital gains he anticipated. Chiefs would be almost instantly transformed into gentry: for Wakefield, it was the economic settings, not race or culture, that mattered. In reality, such ‘tenths reserves’ would become reserved in the company for the benefit of Māori.
WAR BY PAMPHLET AND SUBMISSION
During the second half of the 1830s, Māori were fought over, and their prospects debated, in an intense and often bitter dispute between Wakefield and his supporters in one corner and the missionary societies and humanitarians in the other. Māori themselves took little direct part in this debate in London. They were represented in the perspectives of the missionaries’ experience, but more freely imagined by Wakefield, unconstrained by actual contact with Māori in New Zealand. He did, however, adopt his own Māori, Ngāiti (or Ngāti) from Ngāti Toa and Te Hiakai from Ōtākau. Both had been retrieved from a French whaler in Le Havre in 1837 and brought back to London. Te Hiakai died soon after of tuberculosis but Ngāiti was paraded around the city as evidence that the Wakefields also knew a thing or two about civilising aborigines.
The battle was as much for the future of British society as for a yet unformed colonial New Zealand. The missionaries emphasised Christianity, respectability and morality. For Wakefield, religion helped to maintain social cohesion, but any religion would do. A Quaker by upbringing, he believed in God as a way of providing order and stability in a world driven by economic and secular imperatives. It was a bitter battle of pamphlets, petitions, giving evidence before select committees and lobbying the colonial secretary and other ministers. Mostly, the humanitarians had the upper hand, with the ear of the colonial secretaries, and an ally in James Stephen, the Colonial Office’s permanent secretary, who ‘deliberately preferred’ Wakefield’s ‘enmity to his acquaintanceship’.
In 1836 and 1837, as part of a Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), the House of Commons heard evidence from the CMS, the LMS and the Wesleyans, through their leaders Dandeson Coates, William Ellis and John Beecham. They jointly argued that there could be no legitimate way of acquiring the sovereignty of aboriginal communities. The only morally appropriate way to do so was by treaty, by consent, but that would be impossible until aboriginal communities understood the nature of sovereignty and what they were being asked to give up. This was an extraordinary argument, given the extent to which Britain and other European countries had been using treaties and brute force to overwhelm indigenous polities for centuries. Even more extraordinary was the fact that the committee bought the argument and included it in its findings. Such a position by the British government would have made further colonisation of indigenous peoples impossible.
The campaign in defence of aboriginal sovereignty within the empire had reached the pinnacle of its political persuasiveness. In an intellectual and political climate dominated by humanitarianism, the New Zealand Company had been forced to justify its own experiment as benefiting Māori as well as colonists, and far more beneficial than missionary-guided isolation. On one thing the humanitarians and the company’s supporters agreed: those white savages already in New Zealand were a degenerative example of European life to Māori and their influence should be eliminated.
In the company’s thinking, if a proper colony was established, with a wide variety of respectable classes, from landowners to labouring families and with men and women equally dispersed among it, then Māori could be easily absorbed into this idealised society. Wakefield argued, as many reformers have done since, that if the conditions of the market — in this case, for land — were ideally set, then Māori would be easily assimilated.
Like the missionaries, the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), established in 1836, was inspired by Christian principles and determination to protect non-Europeans within the British Empire, but unlike the missionaries, it was prepared to foster a compromise. The APS considered that moral governance based on Christian principles, and aimed at protecting aborigines, could successfully achieve the humanitarian goals of protecting non-European peoples. Nonetheless, the anti-Wakefield lobby continued to block those seeking a royal charter for establishing a colony in New Zealand.
But once the New Zealand Company made it clear that it was going to New Zealand, charter or not, the humanitarians in Britain who favoured isolation had no option but to change tack. Until then, aboriginal sovereignty had to be defended to keep Europeans out, but once it was breached by shiploads of colonists, the Crown would have to go too, to protect Māori alongside Her Majesty’s subjects. The humanitarians would remain a force in British politics and the APS would continue to be an advocate for Māori rights long after 1840, but they never had the same influence over colonial policy they had achieved in 1837.
BUILDING A MĀORI NATION
Long before they were prepared to consider New Zealand becoming a British colony, many Europeans on both sides of the Tasman regarded some form of intervention in New Zealand as necessary. As early as 1814, Governor Lachlan Macquarie had invested Thomas Kendall with the powers of a justice of the peace, and Ruatara, Hongi and Korokoro with authority to assist him. This was well before James Busby’s appointment as British resident in 1833.
Busby was a widely travelled Hunter Valley viticulturist whose opinions on colonial affairs, including the state of New Zealand, had impressed the Colonial Office. Throughout his residency, between 1833 and 1840, Busby was committed both to tutoring rangatira in the functions and responsibilities of government, as he understood them, and to encouraging the creation of institutions able to take formal responsibility for governing the country as a nation-state. Although these debates and experiments rarely extended much beyond the Bay of Islands, Henry Williams supported Busby’s aspirations, provided translations when necessary, and advised on the complex questions of mana in the north.
Busby encouraged the creation of a national flag, a declaration of independence and some rudimentary forms of judicial processes. None of these were seen as extending from tikanga, but they were well-tested British liberal institutions for making and administering law. To choose the national flag in 1834, rangatira, selected by Busby from a group assembled in a large marquee, voted for three possibilities. The winning flag achieved 12 votes, the second 10 and the third six. A very small number refused to vote. From the beginning, Busby impressed on Māori the need for some form of representative government and voting as a key part of decision-making. Even in 1834, many leading rangatira were prepared to take part.
It has long been considered that the French posed a serious risk to the evangelical missions and to British futures in New Zealand. In the 1830s, French whalers made up a substantial portion of the rapidly growing number of visiting whaling fleets, although their focus was more on Akaroa and Ōtākou than the Bay of Islands. Charles Philippe Hippolyte de Thierry, self-styled baron and selfcrowned king of New Zealand, grew up in Britain on the edge of French émigré society. He was a colourful pretender, a fantasist more than a serious challenge to British authority. He arrived in Hokianga in 1838, chasing a 40,000-acre estate he claimed he had purchased from Hongi through Kendall, when they had all been together in Cambridge in 1820. Wāka Nene and Taonui allowed him to settle on 800 acres with a group of followers who soon deserted him. He supported French annexation of New Zealand, but only after the British and the Dutch had quite sensibly refused to listen to him. But for anxious Britons before 1840, he would remain a worrying symbol of what might have been and what could be.
Busby’s most ambitious plan for building a Māori constitutional structure was prompted by his alarm about Thierry’s announcement from Tahiti that he was going to forcibly establish himself as sovereign chief of New Zealand. He Whakaputanga (the Declaration of Independence) was the result. Again, Busby, with Williams’ advice, invited a select group of rangatira to deliberate, not on any Ngāpuhi marae but at his residence. He wanted to detach a key group of rangatira from their hapū and turn them into representatives who could take part in a parliamentary congress, without what he saw as the perpetual interference of their tribes.
With both the flag and He Whakaputanga, Busby was deliberately encouraging the emergence of an elite group of rangatira to which the trappings and then the substance of constitutional government could later be attached. He even fantasised about building a parliament. Busby believed that Māori could be set on the same path to constitutional independence and legal protection as the once fiercely independent tribes of Britain. These ideas reached back to the understanding about the economic and constitutional development of indigenous peoples that had emerged in the wake of Cook’s voyages more than 60 years earlier.
Little has been recorded of the deliberations over He Whakaputanga, and the oral record also appears to be largely silent. The declaration was drafted by Busby, translated by Henry Williams and transcribed by Eruera Pare Hongi, one of the earliest Māori experts in written re reo. It stated: ‘Ka wakaputa i te Rangatiratanga o to matou wenua a ka meatia ka wakaputaia e maotu he Wenua Rangatira. Kia Huaina “Ko te Wakaminenga o nga Hapu o Nu Tireni”.’ ([We] declare the Independence of our Country, which is hereby constituted and declared to be an independent state, under the Designation of the United Tribes of New Zealand.) The rangatira claimed independent sovereign authority for Te Wakaminenga o nga Hapu o Nu Tireni and denied any other authority in the land but their own. More significantly, they laid out a constitutional aspiration, determining to meet in the autumn of every year, to make laws for the dispensing of justice, the preservation of peace and the regulation of trade. To this they invited other rangatira from elsewhere, exhorting them to give up their differences and join them.
Those 34 major rangatira who signed He Whakaputanga on 28 October 1835, and those leaders from Hokianga and the Bay of Islands who joined soon after, were not claiming to usurp chiefly authority over anyone else. To the extent that they accepted Busby’s intentions, they were beginning to create a constitutional structure that would stand above the tribes and, as more rangatira joined, a sovereign and independent state.
Te Wakaminenga o nga Hapu o Nu Tireni did not meet until Hobson’s arrival, but this should not discredit the importance of He Whakaputanga and the ideas behind it. Busby continued to take it seriously and added further signatories, including senior rangatira Te Hāpuku of Ngāti Kahungunu in 1838, and Te Wherowhero of Waikato in 1839. Busby also kept appealing for some form of policing support from New South Wales to give Te Wakaminenga support. In 1836 and 1837, however, skirmishes again took place between Pōmare of Ngāti Manu of the southern Ngāpuhi alliance and Tītore of the northern Ngāpuhi alliance. Both were signatories to He Whakaputanga.
Although small compared with the conflicts before Busby’s arrival, these shattered the humanitarian dream that rangatira could work in concert to turn Te Wakaminenga into an instrument of constitutional generation. From then on, faith in the capacity of Māori to create an independent state was diminished. The task appeared too daunting and time-consuming as pressures on both Māori and Europeans in the Far North intensified.
Busby’s masters did not approve of his role in this unambiguous statement of Māori sovereignty because until there was a functioning state, who were they recognising? The British government had come to accept that Māori did possess a form of sovereignty that must be respected. But without a settled government — evidence that Te Wakaminenga could make and enforce laws — the Colonial Office regarded this sovereignty as of limited value to Māori themselves. Busby continued to argue that, by guaranteeing ‘native sovereignty and independence’, British protection was essential for Māori to travel further down the road of constitutional independence.
As Mānuka Hēnare of Ngāpuhi has argued, this experiment in statecraft should be taken seriously, even if Te Wakaminenga did not meet as planned. Those chiefs who signed did appear sceptical that they could ever exercise the powers they were claiming, but Busby had ensured they were not acting in ignorance of the nature of government or even of the ideas underpinning modern constitutions. Busby’s reputation may have been defined by his impotence — he was nicknamed the ‘man-o-war without guns’, unable to impose legal powers he did not have — but his role as a conduit of constitutional information and a promoter of Māori sovereignty was far more important. Busby and Williams shared their fears of French intervention with rangatira and made it clear they preferred a national basis for making laws.
Busby, the authorities in New South Wales, missionaries and humanitarians in general had many conversations about the difficulties of imposing British law on British and other European citizens while in New Zealand. Fear of intervention from elsewhere and the need to control outsiders had, with Busby and missionary prompting, led to the fourth article of He Whakaputanga: an appeal to William IV for protection. All this demonstrated Māori willingness to further a relationship with the British Crown, but not at the cost of giving up any of their chiefly authority.
Nor did Māori need to rely on knowledge of British constitutional models: American and French whalers provided alternatives, and a small but not insignificant number of Māori had journeyed to Europe and North America. What a government might look like in New Zealand, how it might be constituted, how it would make laws and ensure they were obeyed, had been ongoing topics between Europeans and rangatira even before the 1830s, and after 1835 these only intensified.
The French were also hovering. Wakefield’s allies attacked Britain’s recognition of New Zealand sovereignty, not so much because of its view of Māori, but because it opened the way for the French to slip in. By the late 1830s, French colonisation companies were thinking seriously about establishing a colonial presence in the South Island, based at Akaroa. The Nanto-Bordelaise Company, with royal support, and on the basis of an 1835 deed signed between a French whaler, Jean François Langlois, and Ngāi Tahu, dispatched the Comte de Paris to Akaroa with 57 settlers on board. Deposits were paid, Māori acknowledged French interests, and the whole deal was no better negotiated than those of the New Zealand Company that would follow. One of William Hobson’s first and most urgent missions after Waitangi was to send a ship to Akaroa to raise the Union Flag before the French settlers arrived in August 1840.
There were various schemes for British intervention in New Zealand. Under one, a magistrate would be sent by ship to hear cases, trying Europeans for illegal actions under New South Wales law, and rangatira would be deputised to arrest and deliver such captives to shipboard trial. William Hobson provided the favoured model: a factory system not unlike that applied in Britain’s early endeavours in India. The British should acquire, with Māori consent, small pieces of land in the Bay of Islands, Hokianga and Cloudy Bay as judicial and trading toeholds, while the rest of the country remained under tribal control. Europeans could register their purchases with these ‘factories’, but their lands would not be subject to British law and would remain in a Māori world. In London, Dandeson Coates, secretary of the CMS, at the end of the long pamphlet for Lord Glenelg, the colonial secretary, implored him, ‘again and again’ to:
avert the evils which threaten at once the Native Tribes of New Zealand . . . Only let New Zealand be spared from Colonisation, and the Mission have its free and unrestricted course for one half century more, and the great political and moral problem will be solved — of a people passing from a barbarous to a civilised state, through the agency of Europeans, with the complete preservation of the Aboriginal race, and of their national independence and sovereignty.
In New Zealand, though, things had gone way beyond where any of this was possible.
In early 1839, the British government realised that only control of the whole country would contain the extensive territorial aspirations of the New Zealand Company. That Māori might not be willing to sell their land was never considered. This great battle over Māori sovereignty had created two imagined futures for New Zealand, as both sides were forced to recast their aspirations. In the crucible of the dispute, Māori rights to land, indigenous sovereignty, cultural autonomy and a place in the modern world were all subject to intense scrutiny and were reshaped as a result. And this discussion would continue after 1840 and until the present day.
