Tom Brooking
The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769–1860 by Erik Olssen (University of Auckland Press, 2025), 584pp, $65
With The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769–1860, Erik Olssen has produced an extraordinary tome—his first volume in a projected trilogy—one that offers a challenging and heavily researched account as to why New Zealand experienced such a very different history of race relations to Australia and North America. Emeritus Professor Olssen shows how the far-flung colony of New Zealand evolved to be a very different place from Great Britain, despite being promoted as both a supposedly ‘new’ and ‘better Britain’; and he argues that encounters between tangata Pākehā and tangata Māori had a profound, if mixed, effect on both: the ‘experimental society’ turned out to be a lot different from what was first advertised as ‘new’ and ‘better’. The book is divided into six chapters that chronologically explore the twists and turns of this central thesis.
Olssen’s focus uses a lens that emphasises the influence of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment in particular, with its empiricism and its anti-authoritarian values, allowing him to reveal vibrant and complex interchanges between two very different cultures that ended up producing a hybrid society. In the first chapter, Meeting 1769–1814, Olssen begins by revisiting the three Pacific voyages of explorer James Cook in 1769, 1770, and 1772 to emphasise just how deeply Cook was invested in a ‘progressive’ understanding of the world. This, in practice, meant Cook believed that Māori had the capacity to develop into civilised people and that such ‘progress’ should be relatively easy to accomplish.
Various contemporary accounts of his explorations show that Cook maintained these progressive views, which are perhaps surprising in their modernity. Even when there were setbacks, and Cook became depressed, bad-tempered and apparently ill—as on his third voyage in 1773—he still believed that Māori had the capacity to adapt their world-view positively. Cook believed that ‘commerce would soften the New Zealanders’ manners and lead them to abandon ancient customs’, and he found Māori ‘no wickeder than other men’.
Olssen argues that such attitudes were partly a response to the cultural turn sweeping Europe, where revolutionary ideas about the ‘Noble Savage’, following influential literary works by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the historian Edward Gibbon and others, were widely discussed.
Tracing resonances of the term ‘experimental’, Olssen notes that the book A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, the official account of his second expedition—one that took his ship closer to Antarctica than anyone had been before, and published in 1777, well after his third voyage was underway—proved very popular with the public. The two-volume work confirms how much his three expeditions were in thrall to notions of the rational and scientific ‘experiment’. It tells, for example, how clocks designed by the Royal Astronomer enabled the crew to act as a group of ‘experimental gentlemen’, ensuring that longitude was measured accurately. Olssen goes on to assert that all the scientists on board the Resolution (Cook’s vessel on the last expedition) ran the whole voyage as an ‘experiment’.
Olssen’s second chapter, ‘Entangling, 1814–1830’, deepens understanding of the nuances between missionaries and Māori and the impact of Enlightenment values. Studying the activities of the early missionaries, Olssen reminds readers that Māori society was not only divided into hapū and iwi, but also segmented by gender, rank and age. The Australian commandant of Norfolk Island, Philip Gidley King, kidnapped two Māori men—Tukitahua and Huru-kokoti from the Bay of Islands—in 1793 to increase flax production on Norfolk Island. Unfortunately, King did not realise that flax growing was women’s work and Tuki the tohunga and Huru the warrior had to be sent home. King was a devout evangelical who looked after his guests well and taught them English while they taught him Māori. When they returned home, King gave them many gifts, including plants. Anthropologist Anne Salmond has pointed out that the new plants set off ‘a local agricultural revolution’ in crop-planting.
Olssen also examines the impact of whaling in the deep south of the country. The arrival of the whaling industry encouraged intermarriage and attracted southern Māori to sail across the Tasman Sea. More iwi also opted to become Christian, as some believed ‘that Christianity and the rule of law would help them achieve the prosperity enjoyed by … these pale-faced tauiwi (strange tribe)’. Māori increasingly wore more European clothes. Māori wanted to ‘engage with the modern world and take part in the consumer revolution that was transforming Britain and the United States’.
Olssen ends this section by citing the influence of the English Quaker James Cowles Prichard, who trained as a medical doctor in Edinburgh and later became a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the British Ethnological Society. Prichard inherited the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with origins. His whole approach was based on anatomy and physiology, knowledge of plants and animals, and observations of eyewitnesses. Prichard believed in the essential unity of the human species, or as Olssen calls it, ‘the monogenist paradigm: the belief that all varieties of the human race descended from the same family’. Olssen concludes that ‘monogenism provided the life blood of both humanitarianism and evangelical Protestantism’—both prime influences on the beginnings of New Zealand’s experimental society.
Olssen makes some interesting points about the slow but steady process of conversion of Māori to Christianity. He records the deep interest of Māori in literacy, a skill associated with the Holy Word. This was true, for example, of Rawiri Taiwhanga of Ngāti Tautahi, Ngāpuhi leader Hongi Hika’s nephew, who, after converting, preached widely. Baptisms increased steadily everywhere. Missionaries, too, realised they needed to speak better Māori. The key texts for both Methodists and Anglicans were the King James Version of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, published in 1833, which included all the psalms. Many Māori learned much of it by heart. The New Testament (Kawenata Hou) followed in 1837. Olssen adds that the belief that Māori were ‘God’s chosen people’ proved remarkably influential. He concludes this section by stressing just how Protestant in ethos the move to establish an ideal society was.
In Chapter Four, ‘Planning and Dreaming’, Olssen zooms in on the principal founder of the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield has not featured in New Zealand historiography for some time. A complex character, he has often been treated as just a disagreeable scoundrel or rogue, so this nicely balanced reconsideration is most welcome. Wakefield is shown to have engaged in some key discussions that helped revitalise the humanitarian drive to make New Zealand into an improved society for both Māori and British immigrants. ‘Planning and Dreaming’ also describes Wakefield’s proposal for developing well-planned cities with parks and civic facilities in Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth and Christchurch. But inevitably things did not run smoothly, as I discuss later.
In the chapter ‘Amalgamating, 1830–1840’, the focus shifts to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, where misunderstandings accumulated. Olssen makes the important point that the iwi leaders who signed were unsure as to the meaning of ‘sovereignty’. As historian Ruth Ross asserted in the 1970s, ‘kawanatanga’, or governorship, meant little to the rangatira present. Olssen develops this by suggesting that it was more often understood as a ‘moral covenant made by God’ with his ‘Chosen People’. Meanwhile, some chiefs doubted that the co-author of the Treaty of Waitangi, James Busby, the British Resident (1833–1840), had sufficient military capacity to control fighting, despite introducing a new flag in 1833 to mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 28 October 1835 by thirty-four northern chiefs. However, the Declaration agreement helps explain the relative speed and peacefulness of the signing of the Treaty on 6 February 1840.
Olssen describes how major debates took place in London over the New Zealand Company’s land purchases, as British Prime Minister Robert Peel criticised the Treaty of Waitangi, while Governor FitzRoy—serving from 1843 to 1845—continued to protect Māori rights. He insisted that no Māori could be imprisoned for a civil offence. He also tried to ensure that any property given to Māori was to be used ‘for education and improvement’. Unfortunately for FitzRoy, he ran out of money. Commander Colonel Henry Despard then lost a battle at Ōhaeawai Pā because he was completely bamboozled by the advanced Māori defensive system. FitzRoy lost his governorship shortly afterwards.
Olssen handles the slippery character of Governor George Grey, who replaced FitzRoy, very well, acknowledging his often deceptive behaviour. But Olssen gives him credit for several key contributions, including his deep and careful study of Māori mythology. Grey certainly helped preserve much important information and remained an active member of the Aborigines Protection Society. He produced a theory of ‘amalgamation without war’, set out in an influential 1840 report based on his experience in Western Australia. It centred on encouraging Indigenous people to adopt the English language, acquire the work habits needed to survive in a modern commercial society, and submit to English law. His report won the support of Stephen and Lord Stanley and saw him almost immediately appointed Governor of South Australia, the first Wakefield colony. But Olssen also recounts an apparent contradiction when Grey decided to attack Kawiti’s Pā with 1000 troops rather than make peace—an action that ran counter to the policy he had earlier elaborated. Further such ironies ensue, including the kidnapping of rangatira Te Rauparaha to calm Wellington settlers.
Grey came to believe that the government, rather than missionaries, should take on the task of ‘civilising’. He was directly involved in the purchase of most of the South Island. This pleased Bishop Selwyn, who saw it as ‘advancing … an autonomous and democratic Church of New Zealand’. Summing up this period, Olssen states that while ‘the new colony was a laboratory … proving that the two races could amalgamate on the basis of equality, thus showing that the evil consequences of European colonialism could be reversed’, the experiment in reality had yet to be fully tested.
Reviewing Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s colonisation proposals, first expounded in the 1830s, Olssen suggests they blended experiments drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment’s ‘principles’ of systematic colonisation. He then traces how settlements in Wellington, New Plymouth and later Canterbury fared. The Company would supposedly buy sufficient land, which, when sold, would ensure a supply of labour in a strict ratio to the colony’s capital and geographical expansion, and ensure that economic and demographic growth occurred alongside the development of social and political structures. It was intended to enable the transplantation of civilisation into the wilderness. The family was systematic colonisation’s foundation. That, at least, was the plan, but it proved rather more difficult to implement in practice.
Planning by the Company shipped some 12,000 immigrants to Wellington, Nelson and New Plymouth to establish three colonies that would supposedly ‘allow men and women to have many children while achieving virtue and happiness’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s father, also Edward, brought his son up by introducing him to some of England’s outstanding radical intellectuals and taught him how to become a public intellectual. He met Jeremy Bentham, founder of Utilitarianism; James Mill was a very close friend; and Francis Place, founder of trade unionism, also befriended Edward junior. Olssen skilfully covers his upbringing, romantic involvements, and subsequent imprisonment, where he argued that the settlers of Australia had made a mistake by giving land away and encouraging pastoralism. Instead, he argued for colonisation based on towns that would promote ‘wealth, leisure and knowledge’.
Olssen then compares Wakefield’s ideas with those in Adam Smith’s treatise Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, because both men believed that the best foundation for a second British Empire should be based on an ‘advanced division of labour, free trade and free society’. Wakefield was not opposed to colonies, but wanted to reorganise them along utopian lines. According to Wakefield, surplus capital and sending people to a new country with abundant, apparently unused land would increase profitability and wages in Britain. With self-government, Wakefield also believed a second British Empire based on consent could flourish. He insisted that Quakers and Catholics should not be overruled by Anglican privilege. Olssen points out that Wakefield’s scheme offered those from England’s lower classes who emigrated the possibility of improving themselves by becoming landowners and employers.
It was not Edward who arrived in Wellington on 16 August 1839, however, but his brother, Colonel William Wakefield (Edward was too busy trying to sort out political discontent in Canada). The Colonel soon realised how complicated land sales were in the Cook Strait area because of earlier intertribal warfare and shifting allegiances. After exploring Queen Charlotte Sound, he met the Ngāti Awa chiefs Hōiana Te Puni-kōkopu and Te Wharepōuri. He was also offered land at Ngā Motu in Taranaki. On 27 September, the Colonel signed a deed with the ‘Ngatiawa’ chiefs for Port Nicholson and the Heretaunga Valley, which he renamed the Hutt, before he returned to Cloudy Bay, only to be told by local Ngāti Toa that he had bought the harbour from the wrong people, because Te Rauparaha owned the entire area.
The Company’s survey set aside sections for ‘the future benefit of … the Chiefs, their families and heirs’. This was known as Tenths (10% of New Zealand Company purchases set aside for high-born Māori). As Edward’s London-based friend, Reverend Montague Hawtrey, explained, such care would raise Māori to ‘a position of future respectability’. By interspersing Tenths throughout the settlement, it was hoped that Māori would benefit from daily contact and commerce with settlers. The Company’s directors also saw the Tenths as a key to successful ‘amalgamation’. Olssen stresses that the policies around Tenths and pepper-potting reserves set New Zealand on a very different trajectory from Tasmania, South Africa and South Australia. Indeed, Olssen argues that the experiments in New Zealand set the country ‘on a unique trajectory’. ‘Pepper-potting’ became one of several techniques for achieving amalgamation, a process that lasted much longer in New Zealand than anywhere else in the Empire. But often, subsequently, the provision of the Tenths was not honoured.
The Company appealed especially to the so-called ‘uneasy class’ of ‘small capitalists’ worried about rapid industrialisation. The possibility of farm ownership, now so difficult in Britain, also held out appeal. So too did the promise of religious tolerance. Excessive mud, wind and rain, along with two major earthquakes, daunted some dreams early on: not all migrants ended up staying. Olssen concludes this section by suggesting that Māori and settlers often had difficult relationships, but some rangatira developed their own farms and became involved in defining how pastoralism and agriculture developed.
‘Settling’ segues into the chapter titled ‘Expanding 1848–1860’, where the stories of the Scottish settlement of Otago and the English settlement of Canterbury are explored. With the exception of Ngāi Tahu in the South Island, neither settlement involved Māori to the extent of the North Island settlements. Olssen describes the 1850s as a reasonably prosperous time, especially after the Victorian gold rushes of the late 1840s. Furthermore, the meticulous hydrographic surveys of New Zealand’s coasts between 1848 and 1851 allowed a more accurate understanding of what could be found in remote parts of the country, especially the South Island. Exploration deepened knowledge of the country’s geography, with much of it carried out by Māori explorers and guides. Then the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London at Crystal Palace helped raise the profile of Māori as a progressing race advancing towards modernity at a steady rate.
At the same time, Olssen concedes that Māori were worried about many emerging difficulties. The earlier success of wheat farming was being undermined by falling prices, and Māori population numbers seemed to be declining. Māori progress towards amalgamation also appeared to be slowing. Olssen notes that Auckland became a hotbed for land speculation, accelerating Pākehā settler expansion. He elaborates on the extent of Māori trade in Auckland and supplies some interesting details. Around 2000 Māori canoes, crewed by roughly 10,000 men and women, came to Auckland to sell their produce at markets in Kohimarama or Onehunga. A further 800 small sailing vessels came from the Bay of Plenty and Hauraki-Coromandel. Māori on the islands of the Gulf supplied firewood while clearing land to expand food production. Waiheke also supplied kauri spars and water, and Māori began building their own churches within the Auckland area.
The role of publishing and newspapers at this time is examined, because despite the trading interactions, Olssen signals that there was disquiet among some settlers about the government’s role. A loose group of merchants calling themselves ‘The Old Land Claimants’, many of them Scots, set up a new journal called The New Zealand Herald and demanded the right to buy land directly from Māori. Governor Hobson soon shut down this paper. Then Samuel Martin and the merchant William Brown founded The Southern Cross, which attacked Hobson and FitzRoy as well as the Treaty of Waitangi. They soon switched to attacking Grey, but his reputation was now so entrenched in London that he held sway with the Colonial Office. The expansion of Auckland continued apace and about 40,000 Māori now lived in Auckland province.
Olssen next discusses expansion in Otago and Canterbury. He immediately adopts a more critical tone because the civil leader of Otago, Captain William Cargill, did not value Māori assistance. The new colony was established to create an improved version of the Church of Scotland (so named because it was founded after the large-scale breakaway from the older Church of Scotland in 1843, driven by the desire of many Scots to choose their own minister free from the control of large landowners). Olssen makes clear that Cargill ignored the fact that the new settlement would have starved soon after arriving in 1848 had it not been for the support of the local Kāi Tahu population. There was no attempt to launch any kind of mission to local Māori, unlike the Wesleyan Reverend James Watkin, who worked with local Māori around Waikouaiti to the north of Dunedin. Watkin was also fluent in Māori, and the Ōtākou marae worked more closely with the Wesleyans than with the Presbyterians. The promise of schools and reserves, however, was not kept, despite the best efforts of Walter Mantell. This lapse annoyed many iwi leaders, who later took up the issue in the long-running saga of the Kāi Tahu claim, which culminated in the final settlement in 1998.
In writing about pastoralism, Olssen draws on recent research by environmental historians, such as Robert Peden, to show how Canterbury was ideally suited to sheep farming. He also stresses that Robert Godley fought hard to overturn Otago’s opposition to pastoralism so Canterbury could earn a viable living. The expansion of sheep farming soon extended to the Wairarapa, and later Marlborough and Central Otago. Experiments with sheep in the Wairarapa began with the support of the large Ngāti Kahungunu iwi from Hawke’s Bay, while John Barton Acland, the youngest son of an English baronet, had great success in establishing runs beside the Rangitātā River. Successful runs were also established further north in the Amuri district. The entire New Zealand flock grew from around 25,000 sheep in 1845 to more than 2.76 million in 1861, with 77 percent in the South Island.
Improved marketing also underpinned expansion of the sheep industry. Directed by merchants such as Frederick Dalgety, a Canadian who shipped directly to London, stock and station agencies flourished, and James Rattray set up the first agency in Dunedin in 1860. Godley, meantime, realised that runholders needed a licence or lease to let their flocks loose on Crown land. But security of tenure could only occur when the colonists obtained self-government. Grey helped by introducing a 14-year lease in 1851. Olssen stresses that the granting of self-government was very important in New Zealand’s progress towards becoming ‘one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies’. He gives Edward Gibbon Wakefield much credit for that progress. The Scottish Enlightenment had also emphasised ‘the separation of Church and State; a free press and freedom of speech, and freedom of contract’. Olssen goes on to argue that ‘most Britons still linked the franchise to property ownership, but the Chartists championed republican notions of democracy which insisted that the right to vote was now one of “the rights of man”’. Evidence suggests that Māori were increasingly concerned about the future, yet concurrently the nation’s economy was growing and business activity was gathering momentum. Expansion was well underway.
Olssen concludes his book with an epilogue derived from Arthur Thomson’s ameliorist The Story of New Zealand: Past and present—savage and civilized, published in 1859, and generally considered to be the first major history of New Zealand. Invoking Thomson’s praise of Māori as ‘the agents of their own conversion and civilisation’, Olssen argues that the drivers of change in New Zealand were a product of ‘distinctly English traditions of empiricism and Lockean liberalism, the Scottish Enlightenment and evangelical humanitarianism’ at the time the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. He adds: ‘The men who led the new society … shared a faith in Britain’s providential role, in its duty and capacity to end Europe’s long tradition of exploiting and even killing non-Christian native peoples’. Olssen goes on to assert that Thomson’s book—‘if inadvertently … illustrates that the intellectual-cultural cargo brought by the tauiwi was not only reconfigured in response to the encounters with the new land and its indigenous people, but this dialectical process itself came to be woven into the neural pathways of the new society and its amalgamating cultures and peoples’.
Intellectual history—and the play of ideas—are cornerstones of this important book, which offers a rather different focus and interpretation of early New Zealand history than anything produced by other New Zealand scholars. Additionally, the book is exceptional in the quality of its footnoting, with some 120 pages of detailed footnotes that greatly enhance the text.
TOM BROOKING is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Otago. He has taught courses in New Zealand, Australian and British history, as well as political and environmental history. His books include two general histories of New Zealand and the biography Richard Seddon: King of God’s Own (Penguin Books, 2014).
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