"Describes and evaluates the work of a great Bishop in New Zealand and Melanesia, and afterwards at Lichfield, his contribution to the life of the Church of his own time and his impact on a later age."--Dust jacket flap.

New Zealand's first Anglican bishop, George Selwyn, was a towering fgure in the young colony. Denounced as a 'turbulent priest' for speaking out against Crown practices that dispossessed Maori, he brought a vigorous approach to episcopal leadership. His wife Sarah Selwyn supported all her husband's activities, in a life characterised as one of 'hardship and anxiety'; she expressed independently her sense of outrage over the Waitara dispute. Selwyn promoted participatory church government, founded the innovative Melanesian Mission, and developed a distinctive style of colonial church architecture. More controversially, he battled with the Church Missionary Society, and was caught up in the bitter maelstrom of settler and Maori politics. His personal links with colonial and ecclesiastical networks gave him access to the heart of empire. These essays offer new insights into Selwyn's role in developing pan-Anglicanism, strengthening links between the Church of England and the Episcopal and Anglican Churches in North America, and his time as Bishop of Lichfeld (1868-78). His place in Treaty history, as a political commentator and source of historical information, is recognised. George Selwyn left a large imprint on New Zealand church and society. This collection both honours and critiques a controversial bishop.

For Europeans during the nineteenth century, the Urewera was a remote wilderness; for those who lived there, it was a sheltering heartland. This history documents the first hundred years of the ‘Rohe Pōtae’ (the ‘encircled lands’ of the Urewera) following European contact. After large areas of land were lost, the Urewera became for a brief period an autonomous district, governed by its own leaders. But in 1921–22, the Urewera District Native Reserve was abolished in law. Its very existence became largely forgotten – except in local memory. Recovering this history from a wealth of contemporary documents, many written by Urewera leaders, Encircled Lands contextualises Tūhoe’s quest for a constitutional agreement that restores their authority in their lands.