When Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, he brought with him not merely the usual assortment of disease, hard tack, and questionable hygiene, but something far more dangerous: Enlightenment Ideas.
The Enlightenment was the remarkable 18th-century project of applying reason to every corner of human experience, which had produced not just better mathematics and worse wigs, but also a fully worked-out theory of why some peoples were more civilised than others, and what the civilised were obliged to do about it.
Cook and his companion, Joseph Banks, were men of the Age of Reason, which meant they believed that through careful observation and rational thought, one could understand the Universal Laws by which God had organised everything into neat little boxes. This was thanks largely to Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who had recently invented the brilliant system of classifying every living thing into aforesaid mentioned neat little boxes - Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order—you get the idea. Linnaeus was essentially the 18th-century equivalent of that friend who turns every pub conversation into a TED talk.
The problem was that Linnaeus also classified humans into races with characteristics that were... let's just say they've aged like milk left out in the sun. But never mind that now, we're being Scientific!
The Noble Savage (A Very Confusing Concept That No One Could Agree On)
The fashionable intellectuals of Europe were having a tremendous argument about whether indigenous peoples were Noble Savages (unspoiled by civilisation, running about in nature like sexy woodland elves, as per Jean-Jacques Rousseau) or simply Ignoble Savages (rather uncouth and needing a jolly good dose of civilisation, as per everyone's racist uncle and a system of classification called stadial - Google it).
Rousseau, like that uncle always wants to share his opinion, had never been anywhere, you understand. He'd just sat in France having opinions about people he'd never met, which is a proud philosophical tradition that continues to this day. His basic thesis was that civilisation had ruined humanity, and that people living in their "natural state" were morally superior because they hadn't been corrupted by property ownership, social hierarchies, having to make small talk at dinner parties and Instagram. He called this theoretical perfect human the Noble Savage. The problem with the Noble Savage theory is that it requires Indigenous people to not be, you know, actual people. They had to be mystical symbols of humanity's lost innocence, which is rather a lot to ask of someone who's just trying to get on with their Tuesday.
Enter the Evangelicals (Stage Right, Singing Hymns Very Loudly)
Back in Britain, a group of wealthy, earnest Christians were having what could only be described as a collective spiritual crisis. Known as the Clapham Sect (or "the Saints," depending on whether you were one of them or found them insufferable), they gathered around William Wilberforce and his friends at Clapham Common, just south of London, to discuss how to save everyone's souls while drinking expensive tea (without sugar).
These evangelical Anglicans had, after years of relentless campaigning, petitioning, lobbying, arguing, publishing, annoying absolutely everybody, succeeded, in 1807, in abolishing the British slave trade. This was a remarkable achievement, and it is difficult to overstate how hard it was won or how genuinely good it was. The problem was, having achieved this Good Thing, they were rather at loose ends. You can't just abolish the slave trade and then sit back and have a nice retirement. What to do with all that surplus beneficence? Inventing the RSPCA is fine but you need another enormous moral crusade to occupy your time and justify the suspicion that you're better than everyone else.
Enter: missionary work and colonial reform. If you can't bring enslaved people home, you can bring Jesus to them. The Clapham Sect were influenced by the idea that Britain needed "moral purpose" to atone for the slave trade, and that spreading Christianity and "civilisation" abroad was their divine calling. They founded the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799, which promptly decided that New Zealand was the second most important place in the world to send missionaries (after West Africa, which says something rather alarming about their risk assessment).
Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain to New South Wales (where he'd earned the charming nickname "the flogging parson" for demonstrating a degree of enthusiasm for corporal punishment that even his contemporaries found somewhat at odds with the Sermon on the Mount - see our column on Early Missionaries And All That), became convinced that the Māori people urgently needed to hear about Jesus. In 1814, he went to tell them.
The Colonial Office Gets Involved (Very, Very Reluctantly)
Before the first British settlers peered over the rail at Port Nicholson, a great deal of thinking had already been done on their behalf — most of it in Edinburgh drawing rooms and London coffeehouses, by men who had never left Europe and had no particular intention of doing so. Some of this thinking was evident in how the Colonial Office reacted to the New Zealand problem.
By the 1830s, things were getting messy in New Zealand. Europeans were buying land through transactions that made used car salesmen look ethical, missionaries were writing increasingly frantic letters complaining about said transactions, lawless whalers and traders. Various people were trading toi moko to European collectors, which everyone suddenly agreed was a Bad Thing—though notably after they'd already bought quite a few for their museums.
The Colonial Office in London, perpetually understaffed with only 25 people trying to run a quarter of the globe (which is ambitious even by British standards), didn't particularly want another expensive colony. They were already struggling to manage the ones they had. New Zealand? On the other side of the planet! Do you have any idea how long the memos would take to get there?
Their ideal colony was "a source of trade and a depository for paupers, convicts – or missionaries." Basically: make us rich, take our problems, don't cost us money. New Zealand was threatening to be the opposite of all of these things.
However, the humanitarian movement was becoming impossible to ignore. In 1837, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines published a devastating 600-page report that was basically one long, documented "Oh God, What Have We Done?" It meticulously catalogued the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples across the British Empire. India? Well … railways are a plus! Canada? Terrible. Australia? Worse. Southern Africa? Don't even ask. As with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it made people ask where the darkness was actually located.
The report inspired the founding of the Aborigines' Protection Society, which aimed to "ensure the health and well-being and the sovereign, legal and religious rights of the indigenous peoples." This was a genuinely noble goal, though one can't help noticing it came after several centuries of not doing any of those things. Better late than never, though the indigenous peoples in question might have some thoughts on the timing. Civilising these people, however, was still on the table.
Key figures at the Colonial Office included James Stephen, an evangelical Christian and CMS committee member who became under-secretary in 1836, and Lord Glenelg (Charles Grant), another humanitarian evangelical who was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. These men wanted to avoid in New Zealand the catastrophic outcomes they'd seen in North America and Australia, where indigenous populations had been decimated.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Criminal Mastermind Turned Social Planner (What Could Go Wrong?)
It is about now in our story that we regrettably have to introduce Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who in 1826 had been imprisoned for three years for kidnapping and forcibly marrying a 15-year-old heiress. So far, so unconscionable.
While sitting in Newgate Prison contemplating his crimes (one assumes), he read political economy and emerged with a brilliant theory of Systematic Colonisation. He founded the New Zealand Company in the late 1830s to put his theories into practice. The problem—and, apart from the Shawshank Redemption, there's always a problem with brilliant schemes hatched in prison—was that Wakefield's plan required buying vast amounts of land cheaply from Māori and then selling it expensively to British settlers.
But this was Systematic Colonisation, which meant it was Scientific, which meant it was fine. You can't argue with Science! Even if the Science is "buy low, sell high, hope no one notices you're colonising their country." His brother William rushed to New Zealand in 1839 to purchase as much land as humanly possible before the Treaty of Waitangi could make such purchases illegal.
The Great Convergence of Good Intentions
So far we have assembled a cast of earnest reformers, reluctant bureaucrats, and at least one thoroughly reformed criminal with a worrying fondness for “scientific” land deals. And so we arrive at the moment where all this very clever thinking was about to be unleashed on an entirely unsuspecting set of islands. It is, as these things so often are, the point where excellent intentions, impressive vocabulary, scientific methods and a great many well-thumbed books prepare to collide with reality. That point sits serenely on a beach in the Bay of Islands, confidently, decisively, and with just the faintest hint that absolutely nothing will go as planned.
The word that tied together all of the strands we’ve described was 'improvement.' It was everywhere in the colonial vocabulary of the 1830s and 1840s — in the prospectuses of the New Zealand Company, in the speeches of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in the despatches of the Colonial Office. To improve land was to cultivate it, drain it, fence it, make it productive in the European agricultural sense. To improve a people was much the same: to introduce Christianity, literacy, commerce, and habits of industry. Improvement was what Enlightenment thought had decided history was for.
And so, by 1840, all the following streams of thought converged on poor unsuspecting Aotearoa New Zealand:
- The Enlightenment contributed: rational scientific inquiry, classification of peoples and races (often in disturbingly hierarchical ways), and the belief that through reason, everything could be improved and organised.
- The Evangelical Humanitarians contributed: missionary zeal, genuine concern for indigenous welfare (combined with cultural imperialism), the belief that Christianity and British civilization were inherently Good Things (if not one and the same) that should be shared.
- The Economists contributed: Wakefield's theories about land prices, labour markets, and creating prosperous settlements through scientific principles.
- British Imperial Policy contributed: perhaps what can best be described as typically British — going with the flow, no fixed agenda, hoping for the best, trade is important.
The Result: The Treaty of Waitangi, translated by missionaries who had learned te reo Māori but perhaps not enough to translate complex legal concepts about sovereignty, was signed in 1840.
Key Thinkers in This Intellectual Soup
- Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778): Swedish naturalist who gave us the brilliant system for classifying everything, including, unfortunately, humans into races with characteristics that... let's just say we don't use his racial classifications anymore.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): French philosopher who invented the Noble Savage concept while never leaving France, then was shocked when real people didn't behave like his imaginary idealised version.
- William Wilberforce (1759-1833): Led the decades-long campaign to abolish slavery, proving that earnest Christians with political connections could actually achieve Good Things when they’re really committed to annoying everyone in Parliament.
- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832): Utilitarian philosopher who believed in "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," which sounds lovely until you realise someone has to decide who counts in that number.
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): Political economist who took Wakefield's ideas seriously, which really makes you wonder about the rest of his philosophy.
- Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845): MP who chaired the 1837 committee on indigenous peoples and founded the Aborigines' Protection Society after finally noticing what the Empire had been up to all this time.
The Verdict (or: How to Fail Successfully)
Were Cook, Banks, the missionaries, and the Colonial Office do-gooders trying to do a Good Thing in their different ways? Yes, absolutely. Did they have noble intentions about protecting Māori rights and preventing the atrocities that had occurred elsewhere? Also yes, hand on heart. Was Edward Gibbon Wakefield a visionary social planner or a criminal speculator who found a legal way to continue being terrible? Both! Somehow. Did any of this prevent the New Zealand Wars, land confiscations, and the near-destruction of Māori society? Tragically, catastrophically, no (but it might pay to look at the people who took over after 1845 rather than the characters in the Treaty translation and signing, looking at you Governor Grey).
The unsettling thing about all of this is, everyone involved was convinced they were on the right side of history. They were well-intentioned and scientifically rigorous about it all. They had theories. They'd done research. They'd read books. They’d consumed coffee in numerous coffee houses. They had Latin mottos and excellent footnotes.
Reality, as is its wont, had not done its homework.