'The Myth of the Cession of Māori Sovereignty' [sic]

 

A piece from a Dr Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown is doing the rounds again. It's called 'The Myth of the Cession of Māori Sovereignty' -- and argues (unsurprisingly) that "to accept that Māori surrendered sovereignty when they signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840 requires 'a profound suspension of disbelief'."

So I figured I'd fisk the Fitzmaurice-Brown fiction.

Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown [whose opinion piece excerpts appear in blue] is a law lecturer at the university formerly known as Victoria University of Wellington. Unlike him, I'll begin by defining my terms -- or at least the most important one: "Sovereignty":

Sovereignty is the supreme authority of a state or governing body to rule itself without interference from outside powers. It typically includes a few core elements: 

• Political authority – the recognised right to make and enforce laws within a territory
• Independence – freedom from control or dictation by other states or entities
• Territorial integrity – authority over a defined geographic area
• Self-determination – the capacity of a people or government to decide their own political status and course

So this is what's contested. And the opinion piece by Fitzmaurice-Brown begins with some of those basic assumption, especially those last four:

Moana Jackson once said that to accept that Māori surrendered sovereignty when they signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840 required “a profound suspension of disbelief.” As he put it, no country anywhere in the world has ever guarded its independence for hundreds of years only to then relinquish it. He argued that “to assume that is what our people did flies in the face of human history, let alone Māori history, where the notion of giving away the authority to make independent decisions is not just culturally inconceivable, it is politically impossible.”

But there's an immediate problem. He talks about a "country" that "guarded its independence." A country? What country? There was no "country" here to claim independence, let alone to guard it. For hundreds of years -- those years that Jackson claims was spent "guarding" independence -- Māori was set against Māori as each tribe, iwi and hapu struggled, not for independence but for safety. For survival. If anything were guarded here it was tribal claims -- and, more accurately, they were not guarded but contested -- heavily contested. Tell the Te Rauparaha of 1820, for example, that he was guarding the independence of these islands and he would have laughed; he was not trying to guard the "country" as he warred his way from Kawhai to Kaiapoi, but to exterminate his enemies. 

In a series of islands with no visible outsiders, even the idea of a "country" would have been absurd -- you might even say it would require “a profound suspension of disbelief.”

There is no historical disgrace in societies contesting territory over each other-- but for the sake of peace and prosperity and everything that's wroth living for, they do need to get over it. For centuries, Europe endured that struggle. The idea of "sovereignty," which Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown leaps over so quickly, came from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which ended the massively destructive Thirty Years' War in Europe. The idea came from it that religious authority behind a throne, which created these endless wars, must be replaced with something "better": an idea of nationhood in which each state held supreme authority within its own territory — with no higher power (pope, emperor, or otherwise) entitled to override it.

In this idea, sovereignty was not contested, it was recognised -- even in its breach. Inter-tribal or inter-religious battles were replaced with a recognition of some kind of right. And some kind of peace flowed therefrom.

If we drill down a level, that right to rule within a given territorial area came from the idea that the people within that territory were not subjects, but citizens, each of them holding some kind of rights. As this idea became better understood, it was realised that sovereignty is not a primary, freestanding right of "the state" or "the nation" as an entity in itself — it is a derivative right. It exists only because, and only to the extent that it does. protect the individual rights of the people living under that government. In other words: Sovereignty is downstream of individual rights, not the other way around.

This has a sharp corollary that we should spell out explicitly: sovereignty is conditional on being a rights-respecting government.

We are already several miles from Moana Jackson's historical assumptions. Territorial authority for him comes not from the consent of the ruled, but from the point of a taiha. 

But even if we've disproved the idea that there was one "country" here to cede authority, we're still left with his claim that those several tribal leaders who did control territory here -- not by right, but by military power -- would not have given away that gradually crumbling authority. Whay would they when they were (apparently) all-powerful within their fiefdoms. Fitzmaurice-Brown cites Margaret Mutu in support of this idea:

Professor Margaret Mutu [he says] has pointed out the huge amount of evidence that casts further doubt on the myth of the cession of sovereignty. She states, for example, that in 1840 the Māori population numbered about 80,000, while the settler population numbered about 2,000. That the former would give up their sovereignty to the latter seems overwhelmingly unlikely. In some parts of the country, there were single-figure numbers of settlers when Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed.

And this is true, of course. And unanswerable ... unless you go back to that realisation that the territorial authority of each tribe and tribal leader was continually contested. Signing Te Tiriti was not simply handing over the sovereignty of 80,000 Māori to 2,00 settlers for unfathomable reasons. It was an exchange: giving up the notion of continuing and ongoing territorial struggle (highlighted by the horrific self-inflicted Butchers' Bill experienced under the Musket Wars) for this new idea promulgated mostly by missionaries (however imperfectly) of peace within a given territorial area.

The rangatira who signed Te Tiriti were the modernisers of their day. As Lyndsay Head explains, their signatures ceding sovereignty were entirely rational:

"In the 1830s northern Māori sought meaning in their post-contact experience through understanding how the foreigners ordered their world. This was a period of rational and intellectual response to European culture in which Christian teaching became a political primer for change. Consciously replaying the conversion of the barbarians, the missionaries taught that peace was the condition of political and social modernity — that is, of a European-style society.
    "This impacted heavily on culture, because tribal histories were almost exclusively histories of war. Fighting was central to the social identity of Māori. [It set] up peace as the condition of modernity ...
    "Their attention to the missionaries, and subsequent support for a treaty with the British, was not without history, but a response to lived change. By this reading, then, a possible basis of Māori citizenship was rational choice.
    "The rationality of the chiefs has been obscured by the rationality of the British side of the Treaty, which entirely dominates the literature."

It would be nice if that rationality were respected rather than brushed over by the likes of Mutu and Fitzmaurice-Brown.

He continues however:

Nevertheless, the idea that Māori ceded sovereignty in 1840 has been unquestioned by many New Zealanders for much of our country’s history. In large part this has been because of the appearance of the term in the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi. Article 1 of the Treaty states that Māori signatories ceded “all the rights and powers of sovereignty” to the ‘Queen of England’. Case closed, right?

Well, no. The English text of the Treaty of Waitangi was never actually signed on February 6 at Waitangi, with every signatory on that day signing their name to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the text in te reo Māori. Subsequently around the country, about 500 Māori leaders added their name to Te Tiriti, but about 92 percent of those leaders signed the Māori text. ...

So, what does the text in te reo actually say?

Instead of mentioning ‘sovereignty’ (as the English text does), article 1 of the Māori text gives the Queen of England the power of “kāwanatanga”, a transliteration of the English term ‘government’ or ‘governance’. Kāwanatanga was likely intended as a far more limited form of authority, primarily aimed at enabling the Crown to control and discipline its own settlers (who were largely beyond the control of the English legal system in Aotearoa).

Mr FB is right, of course. Rangatira signed the te reo text, after they heard an explanation of it by the translator Henry Williams. Several of those rangatira were readers, but even those wholly reliant on Williams would have heard him say, in describing the Treaty's Article 1, that "the chiefs shall surrender to the Queen for ever the Government of the country, for the preservation of order and peace." That was from the description of his translated speech which Henry Williams wrote about to Bishop Selwyn, 12 July 1847 [reproduced in Hugh Carleton's The Life of Henry Williams]. 

Of course, they would have heard it in te reo, in which Williams translated the word "Government" as "kawanatanga katoa."  That little word katoa is rarely mentioned by today's revisionists. And with good reason. Because, as Ewen McQueen observes, "it means complete, all-encompassing, totally, without exception." 

It’s no wonder [that in 1840] it focussed the minds of the chiefs on the issue of Crown authority. ...   

    Nowhere in the historical records do we find any indication that either the chiefs or the Pākehā protagonists understood anything other than that Kāwanatanga katoa meant the Crown was being established as the pre-eminent governing authority in the land. ...

    Te Kawenata Hou' (the 'Māori New Testament') ... would have had significant influence on how the chiefs understood the Treaty. ... In 'Te Kawenata Hou' the term rangatira is a general term for leadership. In contrast kawana is a very specific term used to denote governors who represent the authority of kings.   To use [the] example of Pilate – as the kawana (governor) he represented the sovereignty of the Roman empire in Jerusalem. He had the authority to tax and to execute judgement. The local Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus crucified had to get his permission. Those leaders are described in Te Kawenata Hou as rangatira. From this the chiefs at Waitangi would have quickly understood what was being proposed in the Treaty. And it certainly did not involve them retaining 'absolute sovereignty'."

But, as everyone from Hugh Kawaharu to Matthew Hooton to Margarat Mutu to Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown would counter, what about "Article 2 of the te reo text [which] guaranteed that Māori would continue to be able to exercise 'tino rangatiratanga' over their whenua, kainga, and taonga katoa – translated by Sir Hugh Kawharu as their lands, their villages, and all their treasures. 

This is the closest the te reo text gets to mentioning sovereignty [says Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown], but in the te reo text it is a power reserved for Māori, not for the Crown.

Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown lectures in law, but appears ignorant of even the first principles of the subject. In law, an earlier Article (which often sets the fuller context) generally takes precedence over later articles. And if Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown were to read that earlier Article, he would see those words "kawanatanga katoa," i.e., complete Government, which the te reo text (as translated by Te Tiriti's first translator) says "the chiefs shall surrender to the Queen for ever." 

Why would they do that? As answer, the Article continues: "For the preservation of order and peace."

If you don't have Hugh Carleton's Life of Henry Williams (and why would you, it's poor reading even for historians) you can read Williams's transliteration of the te reo text on page 481 of Ned Fletcher's tome. Perhaps Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown could read (or re-read) it? Because it contains in only a few words the counter to the first two of his opinion piece's main points.

He continues however. 

The evidence against the cession myth is further bolstered by another document, signed in 1835 – He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tirene: the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand. Generally referred to just as He Whakaputanga, it is an assertion of Māori mana, sovereignty, and independence, addressed primarily to an international audience ...

This is a pathetic claim, evidence only of the ability to grasp at straws. The Declaration was the idea of James Busby, the British Resident here desperate for something to do. Written by him, signed by thirty-four northern chiefs, it was formally acknowledged by the Crown in May 1836.  

What did it say? 

It asserted that sovereign power and authority in the land (‘Ko te Kingitanga ko te mana i te w[h]enua’) resided with Te Whakaminenga, the Confederation of United Tribes, and that no foreigners could make laws. Te Whakaminenga was to meet at Waitangi each autumn to frame laws ....

Te Whakaminenga, the Confederation of United Tribes, in which sovereignty was supposed to reside, never met to "frame laws" -- in fact it never met again. As the NZ History site acknowledges, For many,  the Declaration was primarily a matter for Ngāpuhi, who were ninety percent of the signatories. For any other rangatira to travel to Ngāpuhi territory for any reason in 1835 was still to take your life in your hands, so it's not surprising no more came of it. Historian Paul Moon sees it as a ‘regional goodwill agreement rather than a national document of truly constitutional significance.'" 

It's only significance, having been recognised by the British Crown, was to ensure that any lingering claim to sovereignty derived from the Declaration was firmly expunged by Te Tiriti -- which is precisely the opposite of Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown's argument.

Persistent as ever, however, he continues:

More recent scholarship suggests the cession of sovereignty (in the sense of all-encompassing power, including over Māori) may not have even been intended in the English text. That is a debate for another day ...

Indeed, that alleged "recent scholarship" by Ned Fletcher is when I entered that debate in two opinion pieces at Newsroom not so long ago.

... but in the meantime, the myth of the cession of sovereignty persists. ... To return to Moana Jackson’s words about the suspension of disbelief, I would add that believing Māori ceded sovereignty in 1840 also requires a suspension of humanity. Put yourself in the shoes of the actual rangatira who signed Te Tiriti. If you assume the humanity of those leaders, if you assume they were intelligent, competent, and humane, you can’t possibly reach the conclusion that they just gave away everything that mattered to them and their people. It’s hard to think otherwise unless you believe Māori were unintelligent, incompetent, and inhumane.

Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown began his opinion piece essentially suggesting that to see Māori ceding sovereignty made you dumb. To that he now adds that it makes you racist. What a vile person he must be.

If you assume the humanity of those leaders, if you assume they were intelligent, competent, and humane [he says, to repeat], you can’t possibly reach the conclusion that they just gave away everything that mattered to them and their people.

And of you think otherwise, he implies, you're a racist. Is this the lowest of the low? Of course an honest person can reach that conclusion. To cite just Lyndsay Head above, she argues it was precisely the intelligence, competence, and humanity of these modernising rangatira that recognised Māori citizenship within a British legal paradigm was, in 1840, a completely rational choice. 

Does Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown answer that? Of course not.

Lyndsay Head's argument is only reinforced by what the signatories themselves were reported to have said in that first signing (as we can read in Colenso's account), and what they said about their signing two decades later in Kohimarama -- what Claudia Orange once called the renewal of a Covenant.

The Kohimarama Conference began with then Governor Gore Browne recalling to those assembled (including more than 100 rangatira from Ngāpuhi in the north to Ngai Tahu in the south, who by then were mostly competent in English, and who could also enjoy translations into to reo):

On assuming the Sovereignty of New Zealand Her Majesty extended to her Maori subjects her Royal protection, engaging to defend New Zealand and the Maori people from all aggressions by any foreign power, and imparting to them all the rights and privileges of British subjects; and she confirmed and guaranteed to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand, and to the respective families and individuals thereof, the full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and estates, forests, fisheries, and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess, so long as it is their wish to retain the same in their possession.
    In return for these advantages the Chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi ceded for themselves and their people to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which they collectively or individually possessed or might be supposed to exercise or possess.

The astute reader will notice that these are almost exactly the words to which Mr Fitzmurice-Brown objects -- that is to say, almost a recapitulation of the Treaty terms. No one rose to object.

The Conference itself concluded on 10 August 1860 with rangatira gathered there giving unanimous agreement that:

the several Chiefs, members thereof, are pledged to each other to do nothing inconsistent with their declared recognition of the Queen's sovereignty and of the union of the two races ... [16] 

It was Apirana Ngata six decades later who reminded Māori that 

The Government placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty [mana] and the authority to make laws. ... it made the one law for the Maori and the Pakeha. If you think these things are wrong and bad then blame our ancestors who gave away their rights in the days when they were powerful.
    Those ancestors were not stupid. They knew what they were about, and and had a pretty fair idea of what they were promised.

But perhaps they knew less about what they were agreeing to and signing than geniuses like Mr Fitzmaurice-Brown, and the intellectual giants who are sharing his work on social media.

No, native schools did not ban te reo

 While considering Elizabeth Rata's recent Research Report into the History of New Zealand Education -- which I recommend, by the way -- I remembered a long-ago 'Cue Card' that appeared here on the topic of Education, contrasting liberal, conservative, and libertarian views on the subject:

The 'liberal' view [of education] is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education has shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure.  

The view of conservatives is generally that public education needs to be made more efficient. With more efficiency, they say, 'delivery' of education will be better.

Libertarians however maintain that state education is all too efficient: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the state’s chosen values. After generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe' and politically correct -- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good and for forty-two percent of whom the reading of a bus timetable or the operation of a simple appliance is beyond them.

In previous decades the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture. Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctination doesn't.

The government's recently chosen values are "fairness, opportunity and security." We know that because [then-Prime Minister] Helen Clark said so. Orwell would have recognised these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training. "What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," says Ms Clark in the same speech, acknowledging that this is the way to make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula. 

Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.

They still don't.

But I made an error in the above 'Cue Card,' which Ms Rata's Report neatly corrects.

It is of course a historical fact that it's wasn't so much that the state banned the speaking of Māori in schools. What actually happened, as she reports, is that from George Grey's Education Ordinance of 1847 on, Māori were insisting that their children be taught in English, the lingua franca of the day. This is from Māori parents, Māori politicians, and Māori tribal leaders.

This is unsurprising. English was the entry into 19th century industrial technology – metallurgy for the new era of factories, rail, road and steamships, animal husbandry for livestock farming, and soil cultivation for grain and fruit production. Older crafts included leatherwork and blacksmithing. Combined with the English language, technological knowledge added to the already established Māori involvement in national and international business and trade.

The 1858 Native Schools Act continued the 1847 Ordinance's requirement for English language and industrial training. ...

The purpose of the Native village schools was to ensure that children would be bilingual: Māori at home and in the community and English acquired at school. English was a foreign language to many children so second language teaching methods and English content was used.

These were schools located in Māori villages, at the specific request of Māori elders, often with Māori parents attending classes as well, And in those "native schools" as they were called 

W. Rolleston, first inspector of Native Schools ... noted [in 1867] widespread dissatisfaction with the syllabus and with Māori as the language of instruction.

There was too much of the Bible taught, and too little of other subjects. They were taught moreover in their own language, whereas what they wished to learn was English.

The 1867 Native Schools Act directly addressed these concerns. Māori Members of Parliament supported implementing the Act. Karaitiana Takamoana (Eastern Maori) noted that the missionaries had been teaching the children –

“for many years, and the children are not educated. They have only taught them in the Maori language. The whole of the Maoris in this Island request that the Government should give instructions that the Maoris should be taught in English only”

Four more petitions to Parliament followed: In 1876 from Te Hakairo and 336 others; in 1877 from Renata Renata Kawepo and 790 others; and in 1877 from Riripi Ropata and 200 others. 

The schools gently prised education from the hands of missionaries into those of the state. They were funded by the taxpayer, with control of government funding and the school management transferred to village committees "at least 5 who are elected annually by parents of the children at the school." But above all:

The [Native Schools] Act required teacher competency, English language instruction, and syllabus quality:

The English language and the ordinary subjects of primary English education [said the Native Schools Act, 1867, S. 21] are taught by a competent teacher and that the instruction is carried on in the English language as far as practicable.

In short, while training Māori in English was one of the state's chosen values, it was at the express invitation of Māori parents, patriarchs, and politicians -- and was not to the exclusion of the Māori language itself.

* * * * 

Ms Rata discusses this topic and much more in a fascinating podcast interview with the NZ Initiative's Michael Johnston:

State of the Nation address on behalf of the Honesty Party

"My fellow New Zealanders, whether citizens, residents or those just passing through en route to Australian pastures, it gives me little pleasure to deliver this State of the Nation address on behalf of the Honesty Party because the State of the Nation is, to use a variety of technical terms, knackered, stuffed, buggered.

"While I am sure many of you use far more less technical terms, we can all agree, in the spirit of total honesty that this great party proudly stands for and embraces, that the country is not what it was nor indeed what it claims to be – and hasn’t been for decades.

"The Honesty Party recognises that our problems and issues as a country predate Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. Muldoonism was a failed experiment in populist authoritarianism and economics that failed to adjust to a rapidly changing world. What was once the (if briefly) wealthiest country in the world had already begun its decline and fall. The long snooze of the Holyoake years had set the tone of a ‘steady as she goes’ mentality, one that too often has meant the ship of state has steadily gone aground on the rocks of despair and desperation.

"The basis of our economy is one that no other first world nation has decided upon. A primary-production exporting economy to which we have added tourism, an overinflated housing market and high levels of immigration sets us apart, for a reason. New Zealand used to be the social laboratory of the word; today in all honesty we could say New Zealand is the economic laboratory in how to over promise and under deliver. ...

"New Zealand has suffered from low productivity for over half a century because of the economic, societal and educational basis of our nation. When we had a Productivity Commission to determine what we could do, we decided to ignore it and then disestablish it because what it suggested was deemed too problematic and too politically unproductive.

"But just as we were declining and failing under a First Past the Post electoral system, there is no indication that our shift to MMP has actually improved things in the areas that count. ...

"The state of the nation is one that all of us need to take responsibility for, but we too often prefer not to."

~ Dr. Mike Grimshaw from his post 'State of the Nation Address: The Honesty Party (An exercise in political honesty)'

New Zealand: A Nation of the Enlightenment

 

 “It is sometimes forgotten that New Zealand, as a neo-European society, is a securely post-Enlightenment society…. a very particular example of post- Enlightenment experimental practice…. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment … [argued] that men were governed by interest if not reason and that those interests could be orchestrated for beneficent purposes….

    “[W]e still live in a world first codified then, a world seen as 'a unified and self-sufficient Nature, governed by orderly laws, and including man within itself as part of Nature'….

    “Such a view underwrote 'the autonomy and sovereignty of knowledge'…. Thereafter the world was to be located and constituted through knowledge….

    “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century economic and moral progress would be widely considered fruits of knowledge. The myth of the Garden of Eden, where knowledge brings the Fall, had been stood on its head.”

~ Erik Olssen^[1]

By the late-1600s, centuries of Scholasticism inquiring into how many angels could dance on the head of a pin finally gave way under the weight of logical argument and experimental observation to a new world of reason, and all the accumulated rubbish of centuries were cleared away. The relentless force of Aristotelian logic, unleashed by Thomas Aquinas, had levered open the dungeon doors and let in the fresh air that swept away the dank miasma of the Dark Ages in which Europe had been enveloped[2], and the sweet breath of a New Age blew across Europe. 

The apostles of this New Age pushed back against the Edenic Myth of man as a fallen being fated only to grief and suffering in this world of crosses and graves, and saw instead a world guided by reason in which human life here on earth was perfectible.

A hard-won victory, it became the Age of Enlightenment, out of which New Zealand was born. It was no accident that the Age of Enlightenment became known more familiarly as The Age of Reason.

"The Enlightenment developed those features of the modern world that many now take largely for granted—liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation. All four of those institutions depend upon confidence in the power of reason. 

"Political and economic liberalism depend upon confidence that individuals can run their own lives. One gives political power and economic freedom to individuals only to the extent one thinks they are capable of using it wisely. That confidence in individuals is fundamentally a confidence in the power of reason—reason being the means by which individuals can come to know their world, plan their lives, and interact socially the way that reasonable people do—by trade, discussion, and the force of argument. 

 "Science and technology more obviously depend upon confidence in the power of reason. Scientific method is an increasingly refined application of reason to understanding nature. Trusting science’s results cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting one’s life to its technological products. 

"Institutionalising confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment. 

"One indication of this is that of the thousands of brilliant and hardworking individuals who made the Enlightenment happen, the three men, all of them English, most often identified as being most influential in making the Enlightenment possible are: Francis Bacon, for his work on empiricism and scientific method; Isaac Newton, for his work on physics; and John Locke, for his work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Confidence in the power of reason underlay all of their achievements. Their analyses and arguments carried the day, and it was the framework that they developed that provided the intellectual basis for every major development in the eighteenth century.[3]

Francis Bacon who, in the seventeenth century, was the prime author of the reversal of the Edenic myth, has been described as “the patron saint of New Zealand intellectuals in the nineteenth century.”[4] If the United States was born as the ‘The Nation of the Enlightenment,’[5] as philosopher Leonard Peikoff argues in his chapter of that title, then, New Zealand can lay claim to being at least a Nation of the Enlightenment. 

Where Galileo had faced the Inquisition for daring to put the evidence of his own eyes above the fantasies of the Roman Church, writers, essayists and “natural philosophers” across Europe were now listening to the hard sense of philosophers like John Locke, who argued that nothing comes into the mind at all except by way of the senses.[6]  

“The mind of a newborn infant was like an ‘empty cabinet,’ a tabula rasa, or a piece of ‘white paper,’ and knowledge was acquired only by experience, that is to say through the five senses… Through exercise of judgement and habitual association of ideas, complex ideas could be built up, such as those of order, beauty or liberty. The idea of freedom thus arose from the fact that a person felt able to act or desist from acting when he chose.”[7]

This was an emancipation of the mind, and of life on this earth: where, before, philosophers and theologians directed their thoughts and inquiries toward life after death, scientists and philosophers now directed their inquiries —rationally—towards the phenomena of this earth, and to making life on this earth better. 

For the first time since the Romans, knowledge now supplanted faith. And for the first time since the Greeks, knowledge would be directed towards human flourishing. “Lockean empiricism pointed the way to advances in scientific investigation.”[8] And in a short time scientific investigation and the resulting technological revolution began to make human flourishing possible.

“The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularise the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the build-up toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present…

    “Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.

    “In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature . . . . Men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.” [9]

Common Sense

The New Zealander prides himself on his common sense—that “settled truth can be attained by observation”[10] and are “knowable and graspable by our own experience.”[11]

For the most part this is held so assuredly that “to reason against the [evidence of sense and memory] is absurd”; these are held as “first principles, and as such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense.” [12]

This was the argument of the enlightened Scotsman Thomas Reid, whose “last phrase stuck” and came to New Zealand with Scottish settlers. “It helped to produce a cultural type that some consider typically American, but which is just as much Scottish” and equally applies here: “an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose.”[13]

“The teachings of these Scots became known as the philosophy of Common Sense: it was the real basis of the Scottish Enlightenment,”[14] and probably our own. The basis too for Scots-American Thomas Jefferson’s idea of “self-evident truths” in his Declaration of Independence.[15]

Freedom, Revolution + Rights

If Locke’s 1690 Essay liberated thought and made a philosophical revolution possible, it was his involvement in a 1688 revolution that made political freedom possible. In 1688 a monarchical coup deposed a Scottish king and replaced him with an Anglo-Dutch husband and wife team. It would have been just another sordid game of thrones if not for the political document the coup-leaders imposed on the new monarchs. A Bill of Rights.

Rights themselves were a new invention. For centuries it was an idea that was struggling to be born; that to be human being, and to live and flourish as a human, required the right to carry out the necessary actions to sustain that human life. This dawning realisation came itself as a quiet revolution. Arriving with a thud, as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was the crowning idea that rulers did not grant these rights – that the job of these rulers (and their only legitimate job) was to recognise these natural rights and to use their power to protect them. Anything beyond that, said John Locke in his great written justification for that Revolution that have rung down through the centuries, “is power beyond right”:

"As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to….

"It is a mistake to think this fault is proper only to monarchies. Other forms of government are liable to it as well…

"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another’s harm.

Even in the Parliament that this Glorious Revolution set up in the name of this new pollical freedom, even when only a handful of prosperous adult Englishman were legally entitled to vote, the deliberations were still “conducted in Lockean terms. Politicians of all persuasions found that they could hardly speak without using the great words that Locke had given them: property, right, legitimacy and revolution.”[16] This was the true birth of political liberalism that would flower in the nineteenth century.

Property and the State of Nature

Recognising that property existed, John Locke hypothesised an origin story for how property rights emerged. His original condition is a hypothetical “state of nature,’ from which land and other resources are extracted from the common pool by the original owner, who removes it from the State that Nature provided it, mixes his labour with it, and joins it to something already owned.[17] We thereby make it property, he says. 

“For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.”[18]

Remembering of course that “‘labour’ in this context means production”: specifically creating valuable products from bare matter, and turning worthless land into real estate.[19]

And also remembering that recognising property rights “creates the conditions by which men can rise above subsistence-level living in the state of nature and thereby transcend the ‘enough and as good’ proviso on original acquisition, (noting that ‘he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind’).”[20]

The account is not of course a full defence of property rights. That would have to wait too long. But it begins an account of how we might think about property rights, how law should best protect these rights, why property rights matter, and several of their blessings —of which we might list five.

The primary blessing of private property 

"is that people can benefit from their own industry and insulate themselves from the negative effects of others' actions. It is like a set of invisible mirrors that surround individuals, households or firms, reflecting back on them the consequences of their acts. The industrious will reap the benefits of their industry; the frugal the consequences of their frugality; the improvident and the profligate likewise. They receive their due, which is to say they experience justice as a matter of routine."[21]

This great blessing of independence comes from the first four “that cannot easily be realised in a society that lacks the secure, decentralised, private ownership of goods. These are: liberty, justice, peace and prosperity. … [P]rivate property is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for these highly desirable social outcomes.”[22]

 

It was the ability to transform worthless land into valuable property by dramatically increasing production that began setting the world ablaze in the eighteenth century. Thinkers like Adam Smith were drawn to explain it; while feudal landowners from the lowlands of England to the Highlands of Scotland sought to exploit it.

Property and some nonsense called ‘Great Chain of Being’

Seeking to understand and explain how property had come to achieve its blessings, Adam Smith used “state of nature theory” in the same way John Locke did. He recognised that human development has happened, hypothesising therefrom an original condition from which it must have progressed. Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers recognised the blessings of property to be one of the primary drivers of human development—so included its development as a crucial part of their four-stage hypothesis.

Smith, Hume and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers especially were trying to make sense of Scotland’s own rapid progress from clan-ridden barbarism and poverty to the relative wealth and ease developing over the eighteenth century as Scotland won its place as the Enlightenment centre of Europe.[23] Broadly speaking, it’s the progress from goats to sheep, and from collectivism towards individualism. 

In the rude state of nature, humans hunt and gather together, as a tribe or clan group. Goats, or animals like them, then begin to hunt and gather on behalf of individual owners, foraging widely over a nominal commons. The next phase sees individuals beginning to apply conceptual thinking to what they previously gathered, beginning to understand species and seasonal patterns, settling down to plant and to plan ahead.  This brings an agricultural revolution. Smith’s final phase is the stage of “truck and barter,” the age of commerce and the full flowering of the division of labour.[24] Some might call this civilisation.

Some historians describe this hypothesis as “stadial” thinking—either reifying the helpful idea of progress into something allowing condemnation of societies whose cultural development has yet to pass through the necessary stages, or else confusing the hypothesised stages with a formal description. In these hands, “by the later nineteenth century social-Darwinist ideas 'scientifically' classifying humanity into racial groups with fixed traits, and positing a fundamental 'struggle for existence' among these distinct groups, were to eclipse this earlier history.”[25]

Worse, there are historians who cite the idea as just another example of the notion of a “great chain of being”—a fully hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. 

Some contemporary historians claim Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” as an updated basis for this primeval idea, “which ordered species on an evolutionary ladder from the most simple organism to the most complex.” On this foundation, it’s claimed for example that during early Australian colonisation “Australian Aborigines were commonly seen as the lowest people on the Great Chain, and hence as the people most poorly equipped to climb the evolutionary ladder.”[26] Similarly fatuous claims have been made about colonists’ views on Māori here.[27]  

But this is both confusion and simple anachronism. 

First of all, Darwin came to New Zealand in its early days, but it would be years before he published his famous book; and Spencer’s dog-eat-dog idea of development is both too late to have influenced colonists who arrived four decades before, and utterly unlike any model of development based on division of labour.[28] Rather than Darwin and Spencer, “if colonists’ description … reflected any philosopher’s ideas, they could have reflected Hobbes’s or Locke’s or Rousseau’s … as well as any other, as their works were well known during the colonial period.”[29]

Further confusion attends on the over-literal interpretation of Smith’s “four stages,” which is clearly Smith’s attempt “to make sense of Scotland’s political, economic and social transformations in the 18^th century”[30] which focussed on exchanging feudal land-grubbing for pastoral sheep-farming. But these historians are also confused about the ontological status of these stages. For Smith, Hume and Ferguson, they “are simply a pedagogical heuristic, a classification of different kinds of society, and in a sense not dissimilar from Aristotle’s (1877) classification of hunting, pastoral, and agricultural societies in Book I of Politics”:

“The four stages are a taxonomy of different relations between means of production and social, moral, political, and legal institutions, not a model of development from one stage to another. It may not be an accident that Smith tends to use ‘state of society’ rather than ‘stage of society,’ where ‘stage’ is a point, period, or step in a process or development, while ‘state’ refers to the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time.”[31]

And what of calling some of these states “primitive,” simple,’ or “savage”? It’s fatuous to suggest these cultures were called primitive simply because they were “othered.”[32] As Thomas Sowell explains, culture is a machinery for advancing our lives, and like all working machinery it should be judged, and evaluated, by how well it works for those within it.[33] If the cultural machinery is working poorly, is primitive, then one should say so. That’s how technology changes and improves.

We may of course “order” societies on any basis that we please. But they must reflect reality. “Darwin or no Darwin, we are all descended from black Eve,” argues historian Peter Munz, “and every single culture which has ever existed is a departure from the culture of black Eve, whoever she was.”[34] Munz uses the notion 'black Eve’ “metaphorically”[35] to indicate that of us “are descended or transmuted from a common stock,” as Enlightenment thinkers were coming to understand.[36][37]

"There is uncertainty and there is controversy as to the mechanisms of these departures. According to Marx they are powered by the contradictions internal to every society and according to others, they are driven by natural selection, and according to nineteenth-century historians, they result from the developmental law of the progressive stages of evolution: savagery-barbarism-civilization; magic-religion-science; nomadism-pastoralism-agriculture-commerce. Whichever way evolution is propelled, it recognizes cultural diversities, explains them and why they are not final, and provides a legitimate way of ranking them according to their distance from the points of the origin —which must have been in all cases the earliest hominids. All known cultures as well as all unknown ones can be located on this evolutionary scale and their differences can be accounted for in terms of their distance from black Eve. The links between changes in culture and the passage of time are not random. It goes against the entire record of archaeological evidence as well as against all reason to think otherwise and to make out that the world consists of so many cultures which encounter each other on equal terms. Some cultures are farther from black Eve than others; and cultures which have become so thin as to generate universally valid science rather than parochially legitimizing and self-representing chants, are the farthest removed ones.”[38]

 "Whether these initial, early conditions are seen as the conditions of the Garden of Eden or just hunter-gatherer habits can remain a moot point. Some have moved further than others and some, as is well known in Australia, have hardly moved in that direction at all. At any time, some are further removed from those early conditions than others. One can even avoid the word 'advanced' and look upon the whole process entirely in terms of a departure from an initial condition.

“I would suggest, in passing, that one can rank the distance of societies from black Eve according to their exclusiveness. The earliest societies were totally exclusive and would not admit people other than those who belonged to their descent group. Next came societies which would admit people through marriage; and at the other end of the scale, farthest removed from black Eve, there are societies which potentially include anybody who wants to be included. Ranking in these terms is completely neutral and value-free. All it says is that while one cannot 'become' a Maori, one can 'become' a New Zealander, and that, for that reason, there is a structural difference between these two kinds of societies, and that that difference defines the distance of these societies from black Eve and that the actually exclusive structures are earlier than the potentially inclusive structures. Since this criterion is neutral, there can be no question of 'progress', only of progression. If one wants to link such progression to moral considerations, it would probably be more correct to call it a regress than a progress. But whatever criteria one likes to choose, the distances from black Eve can be ascertained because evolution, including cultural evolution, is a reality of life.”[39]

The importance here however of Smith’s hypothetical states is that colonists and Colonial Office theorists used their identification of the state of Māori development (as much or as little as they knew about it) to conjecture over the property rights that should (or shouldn't) be recognised in any new colony there,[40] and to estimate on this basis the area of “waste lands” that might therefore be available for colonial development. Yet while “property in the savage state was deemed to be extremely limited in extent,”[41] this is precisely the opposite of the case, as Smith had already pointed out—the more the call is for hunting and gathering, the wider the field needed to explore. Whereas the more agricultural projects are undertaken, the more concentrated the land required.

The later confusion on this point was as important as it was tragic.

Property Rights are entrepreneurial recognition

    “The relevance of all this to the defence of property rights is straightforward.  If objects’ value is the result of individual efforts, them objects are valuable only because particular individuals have worked in constructive ways to make things serve some ends.  When this realisation is teamed with the egoistic premise that a person is entitled to live for her own benefit, it becomes clear that the value a person creates should be hers to keep and control.  
    “Since human effort creates the value that any object possesses—since individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value—it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value.  If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.”
~ Tara Smith[42]

It was too early yet in history for the insight that it is not “mixing one’s labour” that makes it property, it is adding value.[43] The source of that which is created is ultimately within us.[44] We create new goods, or we add new value to existing land. These goods derive their character as goods, and property as property, by virtue of the ability of these things to benefit human beings. It is not the labour that is recognised as a property right in this new value, whether “mixed” or otherwise, it is the judgement.   

"According to the entrepreneurial model, it is the judgement—no small matter in human affairs where instincts play hardly any role—that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others); and therefore the making of this judgment and acting on it—the alertness and attentiveness of it all—is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational process of forming a judgment is neither automatic nor passive; neither does the process involve more than a minimum overt physical effort, but it is an act of labour nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals. One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a 'first come, first served' basis."[45]

---

[1] Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment,’ NZJH (Vol. 31, No. 2, October 1997), pp198-200

[2] Burgess Laughlin, The Aristotelian Adventure: A Guide to the Greek, Arabic, & Latin Scholars Who Transmitted Aristotle's Logic to the Renaissance, Albert Hale Publishers, 1995; Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995; Andrew Bernstein, ‘The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages,’ Objective Standard, Winter 2006-7, Vol.1 No. 4. 

[3] Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) (Kindle Locations 912-937). Ockham's Razor. Kindle Edition.

^[4] Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment,’ NZJH (Vol. 31, No. 2, October 1997), p200, Olssen recounts that it was Francis Bacon, in the seventeenth century, who was the prime author of the reversal of the Edenic myth. Otago history academic John Stenhouse, in personal communication with Olssen, thus describes Bacon as “the patron saint of New Zealand intellectuals in the nineteenth century.”

^[5] Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels:The End of Freedom in America, Stein & Day, New York, 1982, 101-118.

[6] (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690). 

[7] (Porter, 2000/2001), 63-4

^[8] (Porter, 2000/2001), p. 67

^[9] (Peikoff, 1983), pp. 100-106 passim

[10] (McCosh, 1875), 194

[11] (Herman, 2001), 262

[12] (Reid, 1823),28; (Herman, 2001), 262

[13] (Herman, 2001) 263-4

[14] (Fry, 2025)

[15] (Herman, 2001), 263; (Thompson, 2006), 77 passim

[16] (Van Doren, 1991), p. 222-3

[17] Compare this to Carl Menger’s insightful explanation of how a thing acquires “goods-character” in his ‘General Theory of the Good’ (Menger, 1870 (2004))51-55

[18] (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689), s27, at 287

[19] (Mossoff, 2002) 14

[20]  (Mossoff, 2002) quoting (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689), s37, at 294

[21]  (Bethell, 1999) 162

[22] (Bethell, 1999) 9

[23] See for example (Herman, 2001)

[24] (Smith, (1776) 2003) Book V. More formally the four unique stages of development through which every society must pass are from primitive hunter gathers through sheep herding, to agriculture, to an advanced division of labour. On this see also Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, ([1762–63] 1982), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund—published only after Smith’s death.

[25] (Moloney, 2001) 153

[26] Shayne Breen, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc. Agenda (Australia, 2003) p.140

[27] See for example James Belich, ‘European ideas about Māori,’ Te Ara, (undated) https://teara.govt.nz/en/european-ideas-about-maori/print[accessed 22 Aug 2025]

[28] “As [economist Ludwig] von Mises has shown, the economic competition that takes place under capitalism is radically different than the biological competition that prevails in the animal kingdom. In fact, its character is diametrically opposite. … 

“Totally unlike lions in the jungle, who must compete for a limited supply of animals such as zebras and gazelles, by means of the power of their senses and limbs, producers under capitalism are in competition for a limited supply of dollars in the hands of consumers, which they compete for by means of offering the best and most economical products their minds can devise. Since such competition is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth, there are no genuine long-run losers as the result of it. There are only winners. 

    “The competition of farmers and farm-equipment manufacturers enables the hungry and weak to eat and grow strong; that of pharmaceutical manufacturers enables the sick to recover their health; that of eye-glass and hearing-aid manufacturers enables many who otherwise could not see or hear, to do so. So far from being a competition whose outcome is “the survival of the fittest,” the competition of capitalism is more accurately described as a competition whose outcome is the survival of all, or at least of more and more, for longer and longer and ever better. The only sense in which only the “fittest” survive is that it is the fittest products and fittest methods of production that survive, until replaced by still fitter products and methods of production, with the effects on human survival just described.” [George Reisman, ’13 Examples of the Benevolence of Capitalism,’ Mises Institute blog, 20 Nov. 2028 https://mises.org/mises-daily/13-examples-benevolence-capitalism (accessed 22 Aug 2025)]

[29] John Dawson, Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press (Sydney, 2004) 93-94

[30] John Burrow, ‘Adam Smith and Stadial Theory,’ Adam Smith Works, Jan 19 2020, https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings/adam-smith-and-stadial-theory [accessed 22 Aug 2025]

[31] Maria Pia Pagnelli, ‘Adam Smith And Economic Development In Theory And Practice: A Rejection Of The Stadial Model?’ Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 44, Number 1, March 2022, p. 97

[32] See for example (Moloney, 2001) 154

[33] (Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History, 1998) ix

[34] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 71

[35] Munz here notes W.H. Durham, Coevolution, Stanford, 1991, p. vii. “To speak literally,” he notes, “while it is still uncertain whether there was one single point of origin or more than one (see A.C. Wilson and R.L. Cann, 'The Recent African Genesis of Humans', Scientific American, 266 (1992), pp.22-27 and A.G. Thorne and M.H. Wolpoff, 'The Multiregional Evolution of Humans', ibid., pp.28-33), 'the genetic evidence now seems to favour the monogenesis view': Colin Renfrew, 'Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity', Man, 27 (1992), p.449.

[36] Munz, ibid. p. 71, n. 27

[37] Erik Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769–1860, Auckland University Press, 2025, Chapter 1, especially from “Human nature had become a field of inquiry during the previous two centuries…”

[38] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 71-2

[39] Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress,’ New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 28, Number 1, April 1994, p. 74-75

[40] Smith’s Wealth of Nations for example allows that flocks and crops indicate the “central institution of private property” and “law and order” are in action in some form, whereas “there is scarce any property” recognised for the hunter-gather.

[41] (Moloney, 2001) 155

[42] (Smith T. , 1995)

[43] (Cresswell, Getting property rights right: Mixing my labour?, 2015), (Smith T. , 1995)

[44] (Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, 1996, 1990) 41

[45] (Machan, 2002) 15-16