The history of New Zealand explained through powerful beliefs and the people who held them.

In this major work, one of our leading historians offers a new account of the origins of New Zealand: how Pākehā settlers – nurtured on Enlightenment thought and evangelical humanitarianism – encountered Māori, 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 Māori 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, Māori 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 Pākehā’, a people of European descent changed by their encounters with ‘tangata Māori’ and their land – just as Māori 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.

Endorsements

‘Erik Olssen’s book is remarkably lucid and insightful on a broad front of historical scholarship; it is informed profoundly on philosophical, political and scientific thinking of the period, and overall a quite astonishing intellectual achievement.’ 
— Professor Atholl Anderson, Ngāi Tahu, Australian National University

‘This new history argues that New Zealand was a series of “experiments” in settling a country. The author tracks the ideas, philosophies and values which were carried in settlers’ baggage, the early inter-connectedness between Māori and the newcomers that reshaped those experiments, and the profound significance of these decades for the future of the country and its peoples.’
—Dame Claudia Orange, Historian, Honorary Research Fellow, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand

‘I found this book stunning, breathtaking even, in its scope and detail. It revisits and explores the origins, themes and complex patchwork of ideas that came together to underpin the founding years of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our early engagement with the intellectual and physical manifestations of global colonisation, as related by Olssen, is especially interesting. This is not an easy book but steady application to its contents leads to immeasurable rewards’.
— Buddy Mikaere, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāti Pikiao, Tūhoe

‘This is an extremely important book written by a scholar of immense learning. Olssen’s omnivorous reading is the foundation for the remarkable range and sophistication of this volume. He can sketch historical contexts, see and reconstruct connections across time and space, and display a sensitivity to divergent regional patterns in manner that few who have written on nineteenth-century New Zealand have demonstrated. It is an incredibly rich text and a compelling read.’
— Professor Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago

Author

Erik Olssen is emeritus professor at the Department of History, University of Otago. His research interests focus on the relationships between politics, society, ideas, culture and economics. He was elected an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. His many books include A History of Otago (John McIndoe, 1984), The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–14 (Oxford University Press, 1988), Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s (Auckland University Press, 1995), and (as co-author) An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 1880–1940 (Otago University Press, 2011).