The origins of New Zealand’s first government house

SUMMARY: In 1842 the former first government house located at Okiato, New Zealand, burnt to the ground and the site was abandoned. A well on the site was excavated in 1994–95, revealing a base layer of burnt timbers, a Maori digging stick and ceramic sherds with an estimated manufacture date range of 1823–41. We argue that this deposit is derived from the 1842 destruction of the Okiato government house building. An analysis of the wood identified kauri (Agathis australis) and kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), confirming that the building was not a prefabricated imported structure, but rather was constructed on site from locally available timber.     

Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

Focusing on the striking instance of colonial New Zealand, this article examines constitutional design for colonies of European settlement, arguing about such design in two key respects. First, this article examines the proposals of so-called ‘colonial reformers’ endeavouring to influence constitutional framing, including how their notions on ‘local self-government’ or ‘municipal government’ were reflected or not, while also illuminating their concepts of how to accommodate indigenous territorial governance and indirect administration of indigenous territories in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Second, recovering traces of these disputes and ways of thought from the archives, and how they were operationalised in grounded constitutional drafting or design, rather than resorting to analysing abstract canonical, high-level texts, such as those of Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill, is ultimately more rewarding for evaluating constitutional emergence and design. It reveals tensions within ‘colonial liberalism’, as characterised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. How putative settler interests informed these metropolitan-Westminster constitutional enactments or not, assessed through cabinet-level discussions, in Colonial Office deliberations on settler agitation, illustrates missteps and failures as well as the particular ways in which diverse features of imperial constitutional design emerged. Examining these points is timely given Linda Colley’s focus on a ‘contagion of constitutions’ in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries.     

A link in ‘the great chain of Empire friendship’: the Victoria League in New Zealand

With the objective of exploring New Zealand women's part in imperialism, this article focuses on the history of the Victoria League. Through its activities during war and peace, the League promoted New Zealand's place as a loyal part of the British Empire. The League in New Zealand was part of a ‘female imperialism’ whereby elite women in the ‘white’ settler societies performed gendered work to promote the strength and unity of the Empire. Women's work considered suitable for empire friendliness and unity ranged from hospitality and socialising in the ‘private’ female world, to the support of immigration and education. Wartime saw patriotic ‘mothers of empire’ in full force. The article covers the League's work into the second half of the twentieth century when, despite the ‘end of empire’, imperial loyalty endured, entwined with emerging national identities. Maternal imperial identity slowly waned, the legacy of Queen Victoria lasting until local challenges to the process of colonisation became vocal.     

Facilitating international fieldwork: the receptive services of New Zealand’s geography community

This study aims to provide preliminary insight into facilitating international fieldwork in New Zealand by researchers and universities who support visiting university groups. Anonymous online surveys sought views of supporting researchers (15 respondents), and supported scholars (8 respondents). The extent to which international fieldwork is facilitated by partnerships with local institutions depends upon the nature, scope and location of the visiting field trip, and the willingness and ability of the local community to provide that support. Where provided, support was diverse and perceived to contribute positively to student learning. Both supporting researcher and supported scholar perceive value in these connections.     

The ‘Rebalancing’ of New Caledonia’s Economy

This article assesses the impact of ‘rebalancing’ (ré-équilibrage) policies implemented in New Caledonia following the Noumea Accord in 1998. These policies were designed to redress the disadvantages of the Indigenous Kanak population (both at the political and at the socio-economic level) and to foster Kanak support for a post-Noumea Accord deal with the non-Indigenous population. It outlines the institutional framework of the Noumea Accord and its impact on development policy, exploring the structural dynamics of the New Caledonian economy and the extent of achievements in reducing inequalities. Conventional indicators demonstrate some accomplishments as regards reducing provincial inequalities but this article argues that the goals of rebalancing remain far from achieved and it explores the reasons for those shortcomings. I argue that most difficulties stem from the lack of structural reforms and absence of a shared vision of development. Nevertheless, scope does exist in New Caledonia for fostering balanced development that is environmentally and socially sustainable and better adapted to local specificities.     

New Zealand’s “arc of influence”: the “clean,blue, green” country

Over the last 50 years, the area of New Zealand has been expanded to include territorial seas, an Exclusive Economic Zone, marine protected areas, an extended continental shelf, the Ross Sea, and a wedge of the Antarctic continent. While New Zealand’s territory is now significantly more marine rather than terrestrial, the country is often imagined as a series of isolated islands floating adrift in the Pacific. In this paper, we consider how the space of the nation-state can be reimagined to create a more relevant sense of place and identity. We argue that the perception of New Zealand as “100% pure” and “clean green” can be developed into a “clean, blue, green” image that better reflects the country’s expansive and diverse “arc of influence” through conservation values. We focus on the role of mapping within this issue; critiquing existing maps of New Zealand’s marine territory while also presenting our own speculative maps.     

King Solomon’s Gold: Ophir in an Age of Empire

Contemplating King Solomon’s enormous importation of gold from the mysterious land of Ophir filled Victorians with vicarious pride and glutted their pedantic appetite with no end of tempting antiquarian puzzles concerning the identity of his trading partners. This article provides details and context regarding the various putative Ophirs proposed by British travellers during the nineteenth century, which ranged from Sumatra to the Gold Coast. It concludes in the latter decades of the century, when the legend of King Solomon’s mines converged with the discovery of gold in South Africa. As scholars have noted, the mid-century discovery of ancient ruins in present-day Zimbabwe by the German explorer Karl Mauch rekindled the Ophir debate and focused most people’s attention on South Africa as its location. This was also the immediate context to Rider Haggard’s fascination with ancient African civilization in his immensely popular novel King Solomon’s Mines. Numerous subsequent explorers, adventure novelists, and armchair archaeologists added to this wave of speculation about Ophir in the three decades that followed Mauch’s original identification of Great Zimbabwe with the biblical Ophir. By connecting these later depictions of Ophir (both fictional and archaeological) with speculations from earlier in the nineteenth century, this article presents King Solomon’s gold as a common context for evolving justifications, ambivalences, and understandings of British imperialism, from an empire of trade to one of conquest and annexation.     

Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal?

This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a shift in prevailing rationales for cultural policy, away from cultural justifications, and towards economic and social goals. Neo-liberalism is shown to be a significant but rather crude tool for evaluating and explaining New Labour’s cultural policies. At worse, it falsely implies that New Labour did not differ from Conservative approaches to cultural policy, downplays the effect of sociocultural factors on policy-making, and fails to differentiate varying periods and directions of policy. It does, however, usefully draw attention to the public policy environment in which Labour operated, in particular the damaging effects of focusing, to an excessive degree, on economic conceptions of the good in a way that does not recognise the limitations of markets as a way of organising production, circulation and consumption.     

Ottoman Maps of the Empire’s Arab Provinces, 1850s to the First World War

In recent years the central Ottoman archive in Istanbul has been gradually releasing and computerizing thousands of maps stored in its collections. Our study introduces 137 maps already available to researchers that focus either directly or indirectly as part of broader presentations of imperial domains on the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. These maps, which all date to between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War, differ widely in character, content and function. The maps are briefly described according to their content and set in their historical context.