Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies. Viewed through Māori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the Māori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the “innocent eye.” Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence. In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai’s timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial “others”—outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities.

This book details the interactions between the Seeds of Rangiatea, New Zealand’s Maori people of Polynesian origin, and Europe from 1769 to 1900. It provides a case-study of the way Imperial era contact and colonization negatively affected naturally evolving demographic/epidemiologic transitions and imposed economic conditions that thwarted development by precursor peoples, wherever European expansion occurred. In doing so, it questions the applicability of conventional models for analyses of colonial histories of population/health and of development. The book focuses on, and synthesizes, the most critical parts of the story, the health and population trends, and the economic and social development of Maori. It adopts demographic methodologies, most typically used in developing countries, which allow the mapping of broad changes in Maori society, particularly their survival as a people. The book raises general theoretical questions about how populations react to the introduction of diseases to which they have no natural immunity. Another more general theoretical issue is what happens when one society’s development processes are superseded by those of some more powerful force, whether an imperial power or a modern-day agency, which has ingrained ideas about objectives and strategies for development. Finally, it explores how health and development interact. The Maori experience of contact and colonization, lasting from 1769 to circa 1900, narrated here, is an all too familiar story for many other territories and populations, Natives and former colonists. This book provides a case-study with wider ramifications for theory in colonial history, development studies, demography, anthropology and other fields.

Beyond the Imperial Frontier is an exploration of the different ways Māori and Pākehā ‘fronted’ one another – the zones of contact and encounter – across the nineteenth century. Beginning with a pre-1840 era marked by significant cooperation, Vincent O’Malley details the emergence of a more competitive and conflicted post-Treaty world. As a collected work, these essays also chart the development of a leading New Zealand historian.

New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. The Penguin History of New Zealand, a new book for a new century, tells that story in all its colour and drama. The narrative that emerges in an inclusive one about men and women, Maori and Pakeha. It shows that British motives in colonising New Zealand were essentially humane; and that Maori, far from being passive victims of a 'fatal impact', coped heroically with colonisation and survived by selectively accepting and adapting what Western technology and culture had to offer. This book, a triumphant fruit of careful research, wide reading and judicious assessment, was an unprecedented best-seller from the time of its first publication in 2003.

Decolonisation is a term that alarms some, and gives hope to others. It is an uncomfortable and often bewildering concept for many New Zealanders. This book seeks to demystify decolonisation using illuminating, real-life examples. By exploring the impact of colonisation on Māori and non-Māori alike, Imagining Decolonisation presents a transformative vision of a country that is fairer for all.

Now in paper This immensely readable book, full of drama and humor as well as scholarship, is a watershed in the writing of New Zealand history. In making many new assertions and challenging many historical myths, it seeks to reinterpret our approach to the past. Given New Zealand's small population, short history, and great isolation, the history of the archipelago has been saddled with a reputation for mundanity. According to James Belich, however, it is just these characteristics that make New Zealand "a historian's paradise: a laboratory whose isolation, size, and recency is an advantage, in which the grand themes of world history are often played out more rapidly, more separately, and therefore more discernably, than elsewhere." The first of two planned volumes, Making Peoples begins with the Polynesian settlement and its development into the Maori tribes in the eleventh century. It traces the great encounter between independent Maoridom and expanding Europe from 1642 to 1916, including the foundation of the Pakeha, the neo-Europeans of New Zealand, between the 1830s and the 1880s. It describes the forging of a neo-Polynesia and a neo-Britain and the traumatic interaction between them. The author carefully examines the myths and realities that drove the colonialization process and suggests a new "living" version of one of the most critical and controversial documents in New Zealand's history, the Treaty of Waitangi, frequently descibed as New Zealand's Magna Carta. The construction of peoples, Maori and Pakeha, is a recurring theme: the response of each to the great shift from extractive to sustainable economics; their relationship with their Hawaikis, or ancestors, with each other, and with myth. Essential reading for anyone interested in New Zealand history and in the history of new societies in general.

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

Vaggioli (an Italian monk, and one of the first Benedictine priests to be sent to New Zealand) published this history in 1896. Drawing on first-hand accounts, he describes the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Taranaki wars, the war in Waitkato. He also recorded details of the lives and customs of the Maori people he was evangelising and presents criticisms of both Protestantism and British Colonisation. This is the book's first translation into English.