Abstract:
The primary objectives of this study are to provide an empirical history of New Zealand-Spanish American interactions between 1820 and 1914 and thus add another dimension to New Zealand historiography. Links were once extensive between New Zealand and Spanish America, particularly with the Southern Cone republics. Why a retrospective marginalization of Spanish America should have taken place among New Zealand historians during the twentieth century is the underlying question of the study. Several explanations are put forward. It may have been a consequence of the recolonisation process James Belich has written about. Or it may have been brought about by the under-estimation of Spanish America emanating from Anglo-Saxonism. The approach of the study has not been to write of New Zealand�s relationship with Spanish America as one nation in relation to other (Spanish American) nations. Instead, a history of interactions and linkages arising from the movement of ships, goods, people, animals, plants, know-how, capital and technology across the Pacific in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is presented in nine chapters. The study begins with a review in Chapter 1 of Polynesian-Amerindian contact in prehistory and what European exploration meant for New Zealand in its relationship with Spanish America. Then Valparaiso in Chile, an important Pacific entrepot during the nineteenth century whose mercantile potency reached New Zealand, is the centre of Chapters 2-4. Occurrences in these chapters are understood in an Oceanic context of Pacific connections and the modern world-system model. New Zealand�s association with the Rio de la Plata republics of Argentina and Uruguay in Chapters 5-7 is seen as a Neo-European process, at a time when the Argentinian and Uruguayan economies were rapidly modernizing. Chapter 8 studies New Zealanders in Southern Patagonia and especially how they participated in that region�s developing sheep-farming industry. And Chapter 9 surveys New Zealand�s links north of the Southern Cone countries, and explains those links in terms of the prevailing British Empire. Sub-themes come into play in the New Zealand-Spanish American story, such as the existence of subsystems within the world-system, the British world in Spanish America, trans-Pacific Scottish worlds, the transfer of technology, trading rivalry, and random connections that took New Zealanders to places north of the Southern Cone. These layers derive from analysis of secondary literature on New Zealand and Spanish America, extensive primary research in New Zealand and South America, and family information provided by descendants in New Zealand, South America and Britain.