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

Ned Fletcher's 'Slippery' Treaty

 

 

I'm happy to say that Part One of my abridged review of Ned Fletcher's book became the second-most popular piece yesterday at the Newsroom site.

Check that out here: Ned's 'Slippery' Treaty. Some snippets:

**"Fletcher’s will quickly become the favoured mainstream interpretation of the Treaty. But this doesn’t mean it’s correct."

**" It was in Chapter 19 that I began making notations under the heading “Slippery.” 

**" Pumuka, chief of the Roroa Tribe, says: 'I wish to have two fathers – thou and Busby, and the missionaries.' From the latter two he and his colleagues have already learned 'Christianity and the Law'…It’s this that these smart fellows, eager for modern learning, are asking for more of. For the protection of law, not for a bag of sweets and a paternalistic pat on the head. 

**"Fletcher has his work cut out for him in making words seem what they’re not. He admits himself on page 526, as he nears his work’s end, that '[t]he English draft of the Treaty contains no explicit recognition of Maori self-government and custom.' Which is true, but it’s the opposite of the conclusion he has been labouring for the previous 525 pages to prove."

And now, on Waitangi Day, Newsroom has just posted Part Two of the abridged review: Ned's 'Puzzling' Treaty. Let's see if we can get this one to Number One! Some snippets from Part 2:

** "Ned argues the Treaty, the English version, promises eternal self-government to Maori... The entire scaffolding of Fletcher’s argument for separate Māori jurisdiction or law as a permanent thing falls to the ground however when one realises that Stephen, and the Colonial Office, did not intend such a state of affairs to be permanent. They expected continual progress towards their end goal of full equality."

** "In the Treaty’s only written references to protection, it never appears without the word 'rights.'... So what does the written word tell us then about the nature of the protection being offered in the Treaty?"

** "If the Treaty is about 'protection' of Māori, as Fletcher concludes, then as the Preamble makes very plain that was to manifest as 'Protect[ion of] their just Rights and Property.' Which seems vastly different to Fletcher’s conclusion that it must lead to inter-tribal self-government."

** That said, if there is a right to permanent self-government in the Treaty, then it is that of which John Locke spoke: which is the individual right to govern oneself free of let or hindrance by others – this self-governance being the source of all freedom. In libertarian terms, all one requires from a legal authority for this self-governance to function is to be protected in one’s genuine rights, for coercion to be outlawed and to be otherwise left alone by that authority. Thereafter, all human interaction becomes voluntary.
    "Would that this were the meaning one could draw from either Treaty, or Tiriti. Or from today’s lawmakers."

PS: If you'd like the full review of Ned Fletcher's book, The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, you can download it here.

'The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi' - BOOK REVIEW [PDF]

 

Click to download the full PDF version

Welcome to readers of Newsroom, where a condensed version of this review has just appeared:

For the full book review of Ned Fletcher's 'English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi' — the complete "17,000 word opus" including footnotes and more history, along with an extended discussion of rights and rangitiratanga and more books to write — I invite you to download the full PDF version here.

Or to read it online, and comment, beginning here.

And of course, feel free to stay and look around. You could start over there on the right, with the 'Popular Posts' of the recent (and not-so-recent) past ...

POSTSCRIPT 4: 'Protection,' Duties and 'Rights' in Normanby's Instructions

Following on from my book review of Ned Fletcher's English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, this is POSTSCRIPT 3: Excerpts from Normanby's Instructions to Hobson, as drafted by James Stephen, dated 14 August, 1839

KEY WORDS/CONCEPTS HIGHLIGHTED: Protection, Rights, Duties/Object of Your Mission, Gradualism

"The acquaintance which your service in Her Majesty's Navy has enabled you to obtain with the state of society in New Zealand relieves me from the necessity of entering on any explanations on that subject. It is sufficient that I should generally notice the fact, that a very considerable body of Her Majesty's subjects have already established their residence and effected settlements there, and that many persons in this kingdom have formed themselves into a society, having for its object the acquisition of land, and the removal of emigrants to those Islands. ...

The necessity for the interposition of the Government has, however, become too evident to admit of any further inaction. ... The spirit of adventure having thus been effectually roused, it can no longer be doubted that an extensive settlement of British subjects will be rapidly established in New Zealand; and that, unless protected and restrained by necessary laws and institutions, they will repeat, unchecked, in that quarter of the globe, the same process of war and spoliation under which uncivilized tribes have almost invariably disappeared as often as they have been brought into the immediate vicinity of emigrants from the nations of Christendom. To mitigate and, if possible, to avert these disasters, and to rescue the emigrants themselves from the evils of a lawless state of society, it has been resolved to adopt the most effective measures for establishing amongst them a settled form of civil government. To accomplish this design is the principal object of your mission.

I have already stated that we acknowledge New Zealand as a sovereign and independent state, so far at least as it is possible to make that acknowledgment in favour of a people composed of numerous, dispersed, and petty tribes, who possess few political relations to each other, and are incompetent to act, or even to deliberate, in concert. But the admission of their rights, though inevitably qualified by this consideration, is binding on the faith of the British Crown. ...

Believing, however, that their own welfare would, under the circumstances I have mentioned, be best promoted by the surrender to Her Majesty of a right now so precarious, and little more than nominal, and persuaded that the benefits of British protection, and of laws administered by British judges, would far more than compensate for the sacrifice by the Natives of a national independence which they are no longer able to maintain, Her Majesty's Government have resolved to authorize you to treat with the aborigines of New Zealand for the recognition of Her Majesty's sovereign authority over the whole or any parts of those Islands which they may be willing to place under Her Majesty's dominion. ...

Especially you will point out to them the dangers to which they may be exposed by the residence amongst them of settlers amenable to no laws or tribunals of their own, and the impossibility of Her Majesty's extending to them any effectual protection unless the Queen be acknowledged as the sovereign of their country, or at least of those districts within or adjacent to which Her Majesty's subjects may acquire lands or habitations ...

It is further necessary that the chiefs should be induced, if possible, to contract with you, as representing Her Majesty, that henceforward no lands shall be ceded, either gratuitously or otherwise, except to the Crown of Great Britain. ... Extensive acquisitions of such lands have undoubtedly been already obtained, and it is probable that, before your arrival, a great addition will have been made to them. The embarrassments occasioned by such claims will demand your earliest and most careful attention. ... 

[I]it will be your duty to obtain, by fair and equal contracts with the Natives, the cession to the Crown of such waste lands as may be progressively required for the occupation of settlers resorting to New Zealand. All such contracts should be made by yourself, through the intervention of an officer expressly appointed to watch over the interests of the aborigines as their protector. The re-sales of the first purchases that may be made will provide the funds necessary for future acquisitions ... the price to be paid to the Natives by the local Government will bear an exceedingly small proportion to the price for which the same lands will be re-sold by the Government to the settlers....

The acquisition of land by the Crown for the future settlement of British subjects must be confined to such districts as the Natives can alienate without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves. To secure the observance of this, will be one of the first duties of their official protector....

There are yet other duties owing to the aborigines of New Zealand, which may be all comprised in the comprehensive expression of promoting their civilization,—understanding by that term whatever relates to the religious, intellectual, and social advancement of mankind. For their religious instruction, liberal provision has already been made by the zeal of the missionaries and of the missionary societies in this kingdom; and it will be at once the most important and the most grateful of your duties to this ignorant race of men to afford the utmost encouragement, protection, and support, to their Christian teachers. ... The establishment of schools for the education of the aborigines in the elements of literature will be another object of your solicitude; and until they can be brought within the pale of civilized life, and trained to the adoption of its habits, they must be carefully defended in the observance of their own customs, so far as these are compatible with the universal maxims of humanity and morals. But the savage practices of human sacrifice, and of cannibalism, must be promptly and decisively interdicted. Such atrocities, under whatever plea of religion they may take place, are not to be tolerated within any part of the dominions of the British Crown.

BOOK REVIEW: 'The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi' by Ned Fletcher

WAY BACK IN THE LATE 1830s, these small islands down at the bottom of the South Pacific had eyes on them from the other side of the world. From that distance, it was looking to two parties in particular as “a part of the Australian frontier” that cried out for the conquering. “For it was at once the favourite of the systematic colonisers” (who wished to buy land and have occupied as much of it as they could sell) and at the same time it was also “the favourite of the missionary societies” – who wished to delay colonisation while they imparted to those living here the rudiments of “religious improvement and civilisation.”[1]

The officials at Britain’s Colonial Office eventually recognised that it might be their role to mediate between these two competing “conceptions of Imperialism.” Sympathising with the latter group, yet kicked abruptly into action by the deeds of the former, their solution was a Treaty between their Queen Victoria and the New Zealand natives to whom her uncle had granted his protection four years before. “[T]he real aim” of this Treaty says one historian “was to transfer from individuals and voluntary associations to the Imperial Government the responsibility for the colonisation of New Zealand,” making it their business to “mediate with authority between colonists and natives.”[2]

Until now, the Treaty has been studied primarily in its Māori version, Te Tiriti, with the English text considered to be either lost or “unknowable” or irrevocably irreconcilable with the Māori text. A 2022 book that has been making waves aims to overturn all that. That book, The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher, is a monumental but worthwhile read.

I made time over the summer break to read it, and I’m glad I did. Thoroughly researched and fully documented, Fletcher’s The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi is quite simply the new interpretation of the Treaty with which we are all going to have to wrestle -- so it’s as well you get to grips with it as soon as you can.

It shouldn't be a chore. It's a joy to read – and like all books by Bridget Williams Books it is beautifully presented. Some of the author’s turns of phrase are delightful – about James Busby, for instance, we read that he was something of the Mr Micawbers, remaining optimistic throughout his time here as British Resident “that his latest dispatch would convince the Colonial Office to agree with his views, and that vindication would be received with the next mail.” And his eye for a juicy quote is well honed: on the Marquess of Normanby, whose instructions to Hobson formed the basis of the Treaty, Fletcher tells us it was said at his death that he was “one of the men who are clever boys and nothing more. There was, in his early life, a promise of excellence, both literary and political, but the promise has never been fulfilled.”[3] And on those instructions themselves, he says “Trevor Williams was hardly exaggerating when he wrote that Normanby contributed only his signature to Hobson’s instructions.”[4]

The story is worth telling and Fletcher makes it easy to follow. The book’s structure ably leads the reader through the tale of how and by whom (and why) the Treaty was written – Parts One and Two (respectively ‘The British Empire’ and ‘The Path to British Intervention in New Zealand’) give the full context that led to its production; Part Three (‘Making a Treaty’) takes us though its drafting and signing; and Part Four (Contesting the Treaty’) outlines developments since.

He has chapters on the history and developement of the British Empire and the Colonial Office, chapters on “British sovereignty and native government” in Canada, Australia, and other territories comparing threatment and Treaties there, and chapters on post-Treaty debates here and elsewhere that help illuminate what the English text means. All of which are thoroughly documented, well explained, and fascinating – especially important in that it places NZ’s colonisation and Treaty in context with those elsewhere in the Empire and beyond.

To my mind he could usefully have added one more chapter: a historically-based discussion on the development of and the mid-nineteenth century understanding of individual rights and property rights, both so important in understanding the Treaty context – and what exactly the framers would have meant by the word “rights.” 

Two points in particular from such a chapter would, in my estimation, have changed his own concluding chapter which he so boldly titles ‘The Meaning of the Treaty’ [emphasis mine]. The first would be the deterioration in the understanding of individual rights, from their high point in the time of the Enlightenment, most especially as they were applied and articulated by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson (neither of whom merit a mention by Fletcher), down to the time of our Treaty when they were already under attack. The second is the consequent confusion (both in his text and the Treaty’s) over invidual and so-called “collective” rights, leaving unclear precisely what rights (and whose) are to be protected. In lieu of this “missing chapter” I’ve added a short section below expanding on those two points.

That said, with 528 pages of text (plus notes and Appendices) his argument seems well buttressed. And for the most part (at least until page 329, see below) it is well made. Since it overturns much previous thinking, it needs to be. In short, what Fletcher argues is that the Māori and English texts do reconcile; and that what was promised to Rangatira in both languages was continuing self-government. The first argument – and it is meticulously litigated -- overturns the scholarship and teaching of more than fifty years; the second emerges more as opinion, and will be much debated in coming years.

FLETCHER IS A SCION OF THE Fletcher family, son of Hugh and former Chief Justice Sian Elias, so his book – the product of a well-earned doctoral thesis -- would undoubtedly have made an impact even if it weren’t the well-researched tome that it is. The story he tells is through the eyes of both the lawyer he trained as, and the historian he became as he wrote it – with “the forensic exactitude I would expect of a Crown prosecutor who is at heart a historian” says Justice Joe Williams - the legal insights allowing him to challenge other historians on ground of which most had either made too little use, or were too unaware. 

What he gives us is a much fuller history of the ideas and people behind the words that were so widely debated around these islands in 1840. 

And blinking into the limelight steps the true author of Normanby’s instructions to Hobson, the Colonial Office lynchpin James Stephen – shy, high-minded, highly intelligent, married into the Christian Missionary Society who were already active here, and already accomplished (it is said that it was he who wrote, in just 48 hours, the 1933 Bill outlawing slavery in the British Empire). Fletcher makes plain that it is Stephen, along with Hobson and the aforementioned Busby, who must be recognised as the Treaty’s three undisputed framers. It was the Stephen the intellectual, through his written instructions to Hobson, (over the signature of the then Colonial Secretary the Marquess of Normanby), who was most responsible for 

• the Treaty’s Preamble (recognising and offering protection to the just Rights and Property of Māori, and laws alike to the Native Population and to Her Subjects); 
• for its First Article (asking that they cede sovereignty so that this might happen); and 
• for the second half of Article Two (setting out the new government’s monopoly right in purchasing such lands of which Māori chieftains “may be disposed to alienate at such prices as may be agreed upon”).

These were the ideas that the Colonial Office most wished embraced by the signatories, that would allow Consul Hobson to become Lieutenant-Governor Hobson "of such territory that might be ceded" and to ensure Imperial control of colonisation.

It was Busby who took Hobson’s notes based on Stephen’s instructions – declaring them “not calculated to achieve the desired object” – and added what to Stephen's exalted mind might have been implicit but was important to make explicit: the fuller property rights protection in the Preamble and in Article Two (confirming “the full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties, which they may collectively or individually possess”), and the commitment to Māori in Article Three that they might enjoy “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”[5]

It was Hobson, Fletcher documents, who brought the full text together again before passing it to missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward (said to have been the ace translator of the Ngapuhi dialect) to translate into Māori for signing. 

If New Zealand does have founding fathers on the British side, then these five -- along with “abductor and mystagogue” Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the driving force behind the New Zealand Company – would be leading figures in that Hall of Fame.

Fletcher ably brings out their contributions to what is said to be New Zealand’s founding document. This is among the book’s most valuable aspects, especially so for the as-yet little-acknowledged Stephen.

Important too is both Fletcher’s re-creation on pages 324-25 of ‘THE FINAL ENGLISH TEXT’ and his highlighting, on pages 480-81, of what translator Henry Williams “explained to the Natives” about the Treaty “and how they understood it.”[6] These should become the standard presentations of the English text, usurping more modern, ideologically-influenced translations.

Also notable is his lawyers-eye view of how poorly used and understood American case law was in colonial New Zealand and since. In fairness, the timeliness and accuracy of legal reporting at a time of slow and unreliable communication was not all it could be. But this failure is particularly important it the case of Johnson v M’Intosh ­­ -- oft then and since used to deny underlying Māori rights in land. Fletcher shows convincingly how this case especially was “misapplied to New Zealand circumstances and that their misuse was compounded by selective reading and misunderstandings of their effect.”[7] The ultimate result of this was, perhaps, the infamous 1877 case of Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington (in which the Treaty was declared a “simple nullity”) and the gradual erosion of understanding of what the Treaty’s property rights protection meant for all New Zealanders.

A related and equally helpful point is his mature discussion (and general demolition) of the relevance to New Zealand law of the doctrine of discovery made famous by Emmerich de Vattel, unaccountably argued for today too often as the basis on which New Zealand was settled. Fletcher gives James Stephen himself the job of demolishing the idea of its influence at this time, Stephen reacting to news of the Treaty’s signing saying it gave proof, “if proof were wanting, how much wiser was the course taken negotiating for a Cession of the Sovereignty, than would have been the course of relying on the proceedings of Captain Cook [i.e., his claims of possession by discovery], or the language of Vattel, in opposition to our own Statute Book.”[8]

So there is much to like. Fletcher’s is a new view, one that needs to be wrestled with. For decades now, the understanding of the Treaty/Tiriti has been framed by Ruth Ross’s argument that the two versions are irreconcilable, Claudia Orange’s position that Te Tiriti sets up an ongoing relationship between government and Rangatira, and the Court of Appeal’s declaration that this relationship is “akin to a partnership.” 

Fletcher both builds on and challenges this paternalistic framing. (And he ignores the recent controversy over “sovereignty” as being too soon to comment). The principal conclusions of his thesis are, in his words:

1. that rather than being at odds, the English and the Māori texts of the Treaty reconcile;
2. that British intervention in New Zealand in 1840 was to establish government over British settlers, for the protection of Māori;
3. further, that British settlement was to be promoted only to the extent that Māori protection was not compromised;
4. that Māori tribal government and custom were to be maintained, and British sovereignty was not seen as inconsistent with this plurality in government and law;
5. And that Māori were recognised as full owners of their lands, whether or not occupied by them, according to custom.[9]

These propositions, he claims, are what was offered and agreed to.

Propositions 1 and 5 can be agreed to and readily affirmed. It is Propositions 2 to 4 where Fletcher's radicalism quietly hits the road. Ever since Labour’s He Puapua document we’ve been debating co-governance – and then along comes Fletcher to tell us that the Treaty, the English version, insists upon a plurality of government, with colonial government only ever to be over settlers – with that government's primary aim being the continuing and ongoing protection of Māori. This is wild stuff indeed.

Bugger "partnership" -- this races past that and heads straight for the heady uplands of paternalism without end!

One senses however that, with an Introduction by Supreme Court Justice Joe Williams and endorsements already by the likes of senior historian Tony Ballantyne and former Waitangi Tribunal chair Eddie Durie, that Fletcher’s will quickly become the favoured mainstream interpretation of the Treaty.

But this doesn’t mean it’s correct....

DOWNLOAD THE FULL REVIEW HERE [pdf], or READ ON BELOW ...

=> PART TWO: Errors and Omissions

=> PART THREE: Getting Slippery With It

=> PART FOUR: Cultural Change Takes Time

=> PART FIVE: Getting Rights Right

=> CONCLUSION: Rangatiratanga as Liberty

---

[1] W.P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, Frank Cass & Co., London, (1930), 1966, p. 103

[2] Morrell, pp 130-131

[3] Ned Fletcher, The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, (2022), p. 102, quoting (unattrib.) ‘Our Weekly Gossip,’ The Athenaum, No. 1866, (Aug 1, 1863), p. 150

[4] Fletcher, p. 103, quoting Trevor Williams, ‘James Stephens and British Intervention in New Zealand,’ Journal of Modern History, 13, 1 (1941), p. 25

[5] See below for the relevance of this. This is consistent with Ayn Rand’s view that, by the mid-nineteenth century, when the Treaty was being written, property rights in the sense of those written about by John Locke were at best assumed but rarely if ever fully defended. And they were also increasingly under attack, no less so than from Jeremy Bentham who declared property rights to be “nonsense on stilts.” Little wonder then that Stephen, who “must be classed among [Bentham’s] utilitarians” (Knaplund, p. 15), overlooked in his drafted instructions to Hobson any reference to rights beyond an “admission” of the rights of sovereignty already acknowledged in the 1835 Declaration of Independence. 

[6] Fletcher, p. 480

[7] Fletcher, p. 359

[8] Colonial Office minutes, 9 & 10 July 1840, CO 209/6, 33b. Quoted by Fletcher, p. 340. And yes, there is a distinction to be drawn between those areas of these islands in which discovery was claimed as the basis of sovereignty, most especially the South Island, but these are fully discussed in the text. And no, as Fletcher makes clear these claims didn’t rely on Vattel.

[9] Fletcher, p. 17