What part did money and finance play in the colonisation of New Zealand – and is it a subject we should pay more attention to?
Catherine Comyn thinks so. The London-based Kiwi, a researcher at Economic and Social Research Aotearoa and PhD student at King’s College in the UK capital, has spent the last few years exploring how finance shaped colonisation and, ultimately, New Zealand’s history.
Her book, The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa, shows it was central to every stage of colonisation, from land sales to enforcing colonial government laws used to dispossess Māori of land and subject them to colonial rule.
Published in August, its longlisting in the general non-fiction category of the Ockham NZ Book Awards, has brought renewed attention. Here, Comyn highlights three top takeaways from her book as well as something that surprised her.
That colonisation is financial
The actions of governments and ambitious individuals typically provide the plot points of colonial histories. However, my book shows that the main driver of the colonisation of Aotearoa was finance. From colonial emigration and the “purchase” of Māori land to the establishment of colonial rule, finance was not merely a neutral support but a determinant of colonisation.
The New Zealand Company - a private company - explicitly pursued the colonisation of Aotearoa as a means of exporting Britain’s capital and labour, thereby alleviating a crisis of overaccumulation. Although the British government opposed this “solution”, this did not stop capitalists from pursuing this goal on their own. And, eventually, the Crown had to step in to mediate struggles between capitalists and labourers in the colony.
Understanding colonisation as being financially driven not only challenges history as we learnt it at school, but has implications that apply today. For instance, it complicates notions of “affordability” in reparations claims, and widens discussions about decolonisation to include economic transformation (as Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman explore in their soon-to-be-published The Economic Possibilities of Decolonisation).
That the dog tax wasn’t about dogs
The government’s imposition of a dog tax in the 1880s spurred widespread opposition among northern Māori, culminating in armed resistance in Hokianga in 1898. The political potency of the issue was made clear by Ngāpuhi rangatira Hōne Riiwi Tōia, who stated, “I will die, we will die, on account of these taxes and the European laws”.
The steadfast Māori opposition to the tax stemmed from its purpose. Beyond raising revenue and quelling tensions between Pākehā farmers and Māori communities, the dog tax served to protect the central unit of the Pākehā economy – sheep – while commodifying yet another element of the Māori economy (it followed the levying of a wheel tax and a land tax, as well as seasonal restrictions on the hunting of native birds).
The insistence by Māori that their dogs were owned by nobody perplexed colonial officials attempting to enforce the tax. But this highlighted the fundamental difference between the capitalist economy they represented and the Māori one that prevailed in Aotearoa.
That Aotearoa was (sort of) colonised by convicts, too
We often like to separate Aotearoa from the “convict colonies” of Australia. But the man who spearheaded the colonisation of this country, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, developed and published his colonial “method” while serving jail time for abducting and forcibly marrying a 15-year-old girl in an effort to seize her inheritance.
Although my book aims to decentre individual personalities, this is a biographical detail I couldn’t resist noting. In his personal and entrepreneurial exploits (the two seem inseparable), Wakefield seems to personify material processes of capital accumulation that were expanded in the British colonies through force, deception, and theft.
What I learnt from researching and writing the book
When completing my master’s at the University of Auckland in 2018, I came across Andrew Clifford’s research on bank notes issued by Te Peeke o Aotearoa (The Bank of Aotearoa), the “Māori bank” established in 1885 by Tāwhiao, then leader of the Kiingitanga.
I found this fascinating and wanted to learn as much as possible about the bank, but little of its history had been documented. Even the dates of its operation are unclear: it is likely that Te Peeke suffered a major fire in 1886, but dated cheques suggest the bank survived the fire and was functioning into the 1900s.
In my research, I found accounts by Pākehā journalists of the time to be conflicting and sometimes spurious. One thing that struck me in reading these accounts was how the very existence of the bank made Pākehā uncomfortable and even fearful. This was seen in the mocking attitudes of journalists towards those Māori who “fancied themselves” as bankers. And it was evident in fears that the bank’s opening might trigger a run on the European banks. One journalist even accused Māori directors of misappropriating clients’ deposits for their own purposes, including funding a trip to England to petition the Queen. There is no evidence to support this claim, though I found it interesting in suggesting the possibility of the Kiingitanga movement employing the mass wealth of its communities to further political causes.
A reprint of Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa will be published shortly.
Book takes is an exclusive Listener online column where authors share the top three things readers will gain from their books, as well as an insight into what they found during the researching and writing.
