Abstract:
This article outlines the fraudulent practices of settler traders and land agents who employed alcohol to facilitate the alienation of Māori lands, highlighting the close relationship between Māori, liquor and land loss in nineteenth century New Zealand. Traders and agents developed a range of strategies, forged in Britain, tempered by colonial experience and wielded with deft precision in New Zealand to defraud Māori of their lands. Government efforts to pre-empt and prevent the worst excesses of settler crime proved ineffectual, self-defeating, paternalistic and ultimately unenforceable. Māori came to regard settler practices, the successive failure of legislation to alleviate the problem, and state connections with the liquor industry to be part of a thinly veiled conspiracy to destabilize their communities and alienate their lands. While this conclusion is highly problematic, it is likely that traders and agents had witnessed or were aware of similar practices in the settler colonies of Australia, Canada and North America, and made good use of them in New Zealand to access Māori lands.
