At the Margin of Empire: John Webster and Hokianga, 1841-1900

Abstract

In recent years, settlers have largely disappeared from histories of the colonisation of New Zealand, at least in frontier settings. This has been the result of an unwillingness on the part of Pakeha academics to study people who were recast as colonisers following the rise of postcolonial discourses from the 1970s, as well as the Treaty of Waitangi claims settlement process which has re-constituted the Maori-Pakeha relationship as a relationship between Maori and the Crown in which settlers play little part. This thesis reintroduces settlers as central players in colonialism. But it does not seek to replace the binary of Crown-Maori with settler-Maori. Instead, it offers a reading of nineteenth-century New Zealand history that foregrounds daily interaction and personal entanglement between Maori and Pakeha as important sites of change. Its central figure is John Webster, a settler who came to New Zealand in 1841 and whose ideas of race, formed during his adolescence in Britain, coalesced in an imperial identity that dictated he should dominate the indigenous people with whom he came into contact. Webster spent most of the next 60 years in Hokianga, where he found his ambition to assert political dominance over his Maori neighbours continually thwarted. Hokianga escaped the full impact of the political forces usually associated with colonisation, such as war and confiscation, but its reliance on the international timber trade meant it did not escape economic change. It was in this arena that Webster made an impact. Looking at Webster’s experience at the centre Hokianga’s timber trade, and contrasting it with his political ambition to be seen as someone who could control Maori, provides a way of understanding how change came to Hokianga not through Pakeha political domination, or through watershed moments of violence and confrontation, but through a gradual shift in the economic balance of power based around personal connections and networks. It also offers a way of seeing the role empire played in this shift. Webster’s local impact was also based on global networks of trade. They connected Hokianga to the wider world and Maori and Pakeha to each other. His story contributes to New Zealand’s colonial historiography and to the wider historiography of empire by presenting a vision of colonial interaction that emphasises the role of connection rather than political domination and social separation, and which focuses on the power of the personal and quotidian in the global reach of empire.