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The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa
Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.
This book reveals the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint-stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.
By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anticolonial struggle today.
This book reveals the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint-stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.
By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anticolonial struggle today.
- GenresNonfiction
171 pages, Paperback
Published July 29, 2023
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About the author
Catherine Comyn
1 bookCatherine Comyn is an ESRA researcher and PhD candidate in the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College London. Her work explores intersections of finance and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming.
Bio from publisher's website
Bio from publisher's website
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 4, 2024
A great material history of the colonisation of Aotearoa that centers the role of financial instruments and techniques.
Contra-familiar histories of this colonisation that starts at the signing of the Treaty/te Tiriti, this book starts with the role the New Zealand Company played in colonisation not just without the explicit sanction of the Crown, but in direct defiance of it. The role of the joint-stock company and how its structure was created for the expressed purpose of being able to withstand the much higher risks of international colonisation (compared to more localised economic endeavours). That the joint-stock company as a structure marked the first time non-state supported joint financial ventures were able to be carried out with the support of great numbers of people that were not personally known to each other was interesting to consider. The author also drew attention to the joint histories of colonisation from the 17th to 19th centuries and the development and use of the joint-stock companies for these colonial projects (e.g., the probably more world-renowned Dutch East India Company), I wish there was more about this. You really get the sense from Chapters 2-5 that the initial "selling" of land, then the purchasing of it, and materialising these land claims, and then the transfer of all these "bought" land to the Crown were all just.. absolutely blundered through: with the sales of hundreds of thousands of acres of land to speculators and intended colonisers before the Company had ANY material basis for the land at all, and then the buying of land off Maori with couple of potatoes (apparently literally), with alienation of land being not even a conceputally possible thing for te ao Maori ignored, and then the materialising of claims just straight up being a couple of guys putting down wooden pegs around the land that was supposedly "sold". More than the moral indignity of it -- of: imagine you're just here living off the land that exist in relation to, and some guy just comes and puts a stick of wood down and says "hey you can't be here that's mine now" -- I'm honestly mad I held some sort of image that this was somehow a systematic process for so long. Like: come on, THIS is why New Zealand exists??? THIS is why we can't have land back??
Part of the point is, the state could have very easily reversed all these claims to the land, and they made a very deliberate choice, among other actions by bailing the Company out with public money, to capitalise on the opportunity opened up by the New Zealand Company without their initial need to intervene, and the author does a very good job of making this clear.
The next Chapter (chapter 6) discusses how the colonial project was now given more force to carry on under the control of the state from 1840s onwards. The practice of buying land cheaply off Maori and then reselling at great capital gains, which were then used to further fund colonial expansion in Aotearoa, was carried on from the practices of the New Zealand Company. Except unlike with the Company, the state had arms to back its claims up.
The use of taxes during this time was also grounded well in its political intentions and implications. Along with discussions around the Native Land Acts and the setting up of the Native Land Court in Chapter 7, and the Dog Registration Act in Chapter 8, the author illuminates well how finance was explicitly used in 1: the alienation of land from Maori, 2: the proletarianisation of Maori and thus assimilation into European ways of life/ontology.
Simply, what happens is this:
1. Maori are legally required for various reasons to pay the colonial administration -- whether that'd be indirectly through customs tax on goods Maori were disproportionately targeted to consume, requirements of hiring government appoint land surveyors, or paying the Dog Tax.
2. Since Maori often had no access to cash in their communities, given their lack of need for it prior to 1840s, they had to sell the very thing Europeans wanted from them: land. They were able to sell land under their guardianship despite te ao Maori not having any notions of ownership relations with land because Pakeha institutions had set up infrastructures that enabled this possibility: through processes that transformed Maori who had relations with Land to shared owners of land who each individually controlled a section that can then be bought and sold.
3. Maori without land to work and sustain off of had to begin selling the only thing they still possessed: their labour power, to Pakeha capitalists. Entering into these capitalist relations also necessarily entails their beginning to rely on various other institutions which white workers had to in Britain.
This book is not fatalistic however, and in the last few chapters the author specifically highlights various ways Maori have used finance and financial instruments to resist the colonial project, te Peeke o Aotearoa (the bank of Aotearoa set up by Maori to gain financial independence from the colonial administration and finance their own government) I thought was a particularly great example. In the conclusion, ongoing ways financial systems are continuing the process of colonisation and transformation of land relations to property relations are also brought up, I think I'll be able to be more attentive to these things now that I've read this book.
Contra-familiar histories of this colonisation that starts at the signing of the Treaty/te Tiriti, this book starts with the role the New Zealand Company played in colonisation not just without the explicit sanction of the Crown, but in direct defiance of it. The role of the joint-stock company and how its structure was created for the expressed purpose of being able to withstand the much higher risks of international colonisation (compared to more localised economic endeavours). That the joint-stock company as a structure marked the first time non-state supported joint financial ventures were able to be carried out with the support of great numbers of people that were not personally known to each other was interesting to consider. The author also drew attention to the joint histories of colonisation from the 17th to 19th centuries and the development and use of the joint-stock companies for these colonial projects (e.g., the probably more world-renowned Dutch East India Company), I wish there was more about this. You really get the sense from Chapters 2-5 that the initial "selling" of land, then the purchasing of it, and materialising these land claims, and then the transfer of all these "bought" land to the Crown were all just.. absolutely blundered through: with the sales of hundreds of thousands of acres of land to speculators and intended colonisers before the Company had ANY material basis for the land at all, and then the buying of land off Maori with couple of potatoes (apparently literally), with alienation of land being not even a conceputally possible thing for te ao Maori ignored, and then the materialising of claims just straight up being a couple of guys putting down wooden pegs around the land that was supposedly "sold". More than the moral indignity of it -- of: imagine you're just here living off the land that exist in relation to, and some guy just comes and puts a stick of wood down and says "hey you can't be here that's mine now" -- I'm honestly mad I held some sort of image that this was somehow a systematic process for so long. Like: come on, THIS is why New Zealand exists??? THIS is why we can't have land back??
Part of the point is, the state could have very easily reversed all these claims to the land, and they made a very deliberate choice, among other actions by bailing the Company out with public money, to capitalise on the opportunity opened up by the New Zealand Company without their initial need to intervene, and the author does a very good job of making this clear.
The next Chapter (chapter 6) discusses how the colonial project was now given more force to carry on under the control of the state from 1840s onwards. The practice of buying land cheaply off Maori and then reselling at great capital gains, which were then used to further fund colonial expansion in Aotearoa, was carried on from the practices of the New Zealand Company. Except unlike with the Company, the state had arms to back its claims up.
The use of taxes during this time was also grounded well in its political intentions and implications. Along with discussions around the Native Land Acts and the setting up of the Native Land Court in Chapter 7, and the Dog Registration Act in Chapter 8, the author illuminates well how finance was explicitly used in 1: the alienation of land from Maori, 2: the proletarianisation of Maori and thus assimilation into European ways of life/ontology.
Simply, what happens is this:
1. Maori are legally required for various reasons to pay the colonial administration -- whether that'd be indirectly through customs tax on goods Maori were disproportionately targeted to consume, requirements of hiring government appoint land surveyors, or paying the Dog Tax.
2. Since Maori often had no access to cash in their communities, given their lack of need for it prior to 1840s, they had to sell the very thing Europeans wanted from them: land. They were able to sell land under their guardianship despite te ao Maori not having any notions of ownership relations with land because Pakeha institutions had set up infrastructures that enabled this possibility: through processes that transformed Maori who had relations with Land to shared owners of land who each individually controlled a section that can then be bought and sold.
3. Maori without land to work and sustain off of had to begin selling the only thing they still possessed: their labour power, to Pakeha capitalists. Entering into these capitalist relations also necessarily entails their beginning to rely on various other institutions which white workers had to in Britain.
This book is not fatalistic however, and in the last few chapters the author specifically highlights various ways Maori have used finance and financial instruments to resist the colonial project, te Peeke o Aotearoa (the bank of Aotearoa set up by Maori to gain financial independence from the colonial administration and finance their own government) I thought was a particularly great example. In the conclusion, ongoing ways financial systems are continuing the process of colonisation and transformation of land relations to property relations are also brought up, I think I'll be able to be more attentive to these things now that I've read this book.
January 31, 2024
NICE COVER?...
3.5 Stars!
Much of this centres on the behaviour of the bankrupt New Zealand Company and Edward Gibbon Wakefield and to a lesser extent his brothers. Wakefield was a man already carrying a dark past with him, having already been imprisoned for kidnapping a 15 year old girl. But like many of the criminal class he soon made a lot of money and of course slithered his way into parliament, the ultimate haven for gentlemen of his ilk.
This really gets into the meat of the political and economic history behind the founding of NZ. It shows the many ways in which the British elite imposed an illegal colonial cartography upon the existing Maori landscape, even extending to the financialisation of the sea and its resources which was contrary to how the natives viewed or used these communal waters.
There soon emerged serious problems with absentee buyers and speculators who merely wanted to flip the land for profit, which still remains one of the most popular Kiwi past-times today. We learn about the Wairau Valley massacre generated by NZ Co’s duplicitous land deeds, which led to the killing of 22 British settlers and 4 Maori. Thanks to the bad press from this and other land issues and problems elsewhere, they really struggled to sell more land, particularly in the Nelson region,
“By June 1841, 326 of the initial 1,100 allotments issued for sale in February had sold. Of these just 42 were purchased by parties who intended to emigrate in Nelson.”
So this was a really interesting read, particularly in the earlier stages and overall Comyn has done a good job of this and made the history both absorbing and accessible and this makes an ideal introduction to what still remains a dark and murky chapter in NZ’s history.
3.5 Stars!
Much of this centres on the behaviour of the bankrupt New Zealand Company and Edward Gibbon Wakefield and to a lesser extent his brothers. Wakefield was a man already carrying a dark past with him, having already been imprisoned for kidnapping a 15 year old girl. But like many of the criminal class he soon made a lot of money and of course slithered his way into parliament, the ultimate haven for gentlemen of his ilk.
This really gets into the meat of the political and economic history behind the founding of NZ. It shows the many ways in which the British elite imposed an illegal colonial cartography upon the existing Maori landscape, even extending to the financialisation of the sea and its resources which was contrary to how the natives viewed or used these communal waters.
There soon emerged serious problems with absentee buyers and speculators who merely wanted to flip the land for profit, which still remains one of the most popular Kiwi past-times today. We learn about the Wairau Valley massacre generated by NZ Co’s duplicitous land deeds, which led to the killing of 22 British settlers and 4 Maori. Thanks to the bad press from this and other land issues and problems elsewhere, they really struggled to sell more land, particularly in the Nelson region,
“By June 1841, 326 of the initial 1,100 allotments issued for sale in February had sold. Of these just 42 were purchased by parties who intended to emigrate in Nelson.”
So this was a really interesting read, particularly in the earlier stages and overall Comyn has done a good job of this and made the history both absorbing and accessible and this makes an ideal introduction to what still remains a dark and murky chapter in NZ’s history.
August 4, 2025
Add this to the NZ history and economics curriculum right now
June 18, 2025
This is a much needed perspective for Aotearoa to catch up on. It’s both utterly shocking and unsurprising to see the greed and irresponsibility of capitalists at the forefront of colonisation in this country. It’s a difficult read, but such an important one all the same. Couldnt recommend it enough
January 12, 2025
Incredibly well researched and counterintuitive to our western way of thinking
So many sins and crimes perpetrated on the Maori people of NZ through the use of financial instruments and western finance models
Wow.
So many sins and crimes perpetrated on the Maori people of NZ through the use of financial instruments and western finance models
Wow.
December 4, 2024
Concise and insightful economic analysis of colonisation
June 22, 2025
a must read for anyone wanting a clear cut understanding of colonisation in this part of the world
August 1, 2025
straight up the best book I've ever read
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews