"Positions New Zealand within these 'webs of empire', connecting Gore and Chicago, Maori and Asia, India and newspapers, whalers and writing. His work breaks open the narrative of colonisation to offer sharp new perspectives on New Zealand history"--Back cover.

This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally less hereditarian and more populist and agrarian. It also reflected the view that these young and enterprising societies could potentially show Britain the way — if they were protected from internal and external threat. This volume contributes to the increasingly comparative and international literature on the history of eugenics and to several ongoing historiographic debates, especially around issues of race. As white-settler societies, questions related to racial mixing and purity were inescapable, and a notable contribution of this volume is its attention to Indigenous populations, both as targets and on occasion agents of eugenic ideology.

This book tells the story of HMS New Zealand, a battlecruiser paid for by the government of New Zealand at the height of its pro-Imperial ‘jingo’ era in 1909, when Britain’s ally Japan was perceived as a threat in Australasia and the Pacific. Born of the collision between New Zealand’s patriotic dreams and European politics, the tale of HMS New Zealand is further wrapped in the turbulent power-plays at the Admiralty in the years leading up to the First World War. The ship went on to have a distinguished First World War career, when she was present in all three major naval battles – Heligoland, Dogger Bank and Jutland – in the North Sea. The book ‘busts’ many of the myths associated with the ship and her construction, including the intent of the gift, New Zealand’s ability to pay, deployment, and the story behind the piupiu (skirt) and tiki (pendant) that, the crew believed, bestowed special protection upon the vessel. All is inter-woven with the human and social context to create a ‘biography’ of the ship as an expression of human endeavour, in significantly more detail than any of the summaries available in prior accounts. Extensively illustrated, this is a book with appeal to a wide audience, from naval enthusiasts and historians to the general reader with a wider interest in the story of Empire. The use of archival material available only in New Zealand, including the Ship’s Book, adds a dimension and novelty not previously included in histories of this great battlecruiser.

Entanglements of Empire explores the political, cultural and economic entanglements and irrevocable social transformations that resulted from Maori engagements with Protestant missionaries at the most distant edge of the British empire. The first Protestant mission to New Zealand, established in 1814, saw the beginning of complex political, cultural, and economic entanglements with Maori. Entanglements of Empire is a deft reconstruction of the cross-cultural translations of this early period. Misunderstanding was rife: the physical body itself became the most contentious site of cultural engagement, as Maori and missionaries struggled over issues of hygiene, tattooing, clothing, and sexual morality.In this fascinating study, Tony Ballantyne explores the varying understandings of such concepts as civilization, work, time and space, and gender &– and the practical consequences of the struggles over these ideas. The encounters in the classroom, chapel, kitchen, and farmyard worked mutually to affect both the Maori and the English worldviews.Ultimately, the interest in missionary Christianity among influential Maori chiefs had far-reaching consequences for both groups. Concluding in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the new age it ushered in, Ballantyne's book offers important insights into this crucial period of New Zealand history.

The traditional image of New Zealand is one of verdant landscapes with sheep grazing on lush green pastures. Yet this landscape is almost entirely an artificial creation. As Britain became increasingly reliant on its overseas territories for supplies of food and raw material, so all over the Empire indigenous plants were replaced with English grasses to provide the worked up products of pasture - meat, butter, cheese, wool, and hides. In New Zealand this process was carried to an extreme, with forest cleared and swamps drained. How, why and with what consequences did the transformation of New Zealand into these empires of grass occur? 'Seeds of Empire' provides both an exciting appraisal of New Zealand's environmental history and a long overdue exploration of the significance of grass in the processes of sowing empire.

From the 1920s until the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand filled British shop windows, newspaper columns, and cinema screens with “British to the core” Canadian apples, “British to the backbone” New Zealand lamb, and “All British” Australian butter. In remarkable yet forgotten advertising campaigns, prime ministers, touring cricketers, “lady demonstrators,” and even boxing kangaroos were pressed into service to sell more Dominion produce to British shoppers. But as they sold apples and butter, these campaigns also sold a Dominion-styled British identity. Selling Britishness explores the role of commodity marketing in creating Britishness. Dominion settlers considered themselves British and marketed their commodities accordingly. Meanwhile, ambitious Dominion advertising agencies set up shop in London to bring British goods, like Ovaltine, back to the dominions and persuade their fellow citizens to buy British. Conventionally nationalist narratives have posited the growth of independent national identities during the interwar period, though some have suggested imperial sentiment endured. Felicity Barnes takes a new approach, arguing that far from shaking off or relying on any lasting sense of Britishness, Dominion marketing produced it. Selling Britishness shows that when constructing Britishness, advertisers employed imperial hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Consumption worked to bolster colonialism, and advertising extended imperial power into the everyday. Drawing on extensive new archives, Selling Britishness explores a shared British identity constructed by marketers and advertisers during advertising’s golden age.

Colonising New Zealand offers a radically new vision of the basis and process of Britain’s colonisation of New Zealand. It commences by confronting the problems arising from subjective and ever-evolving moral judgements about colonisation and examines the possibility of understanding colonisation beyond the confines of any preoccupations with moral perspectives. It then investigates the motives behind Britain’s imperial expansion, both in a global context and specifically in relation to New Zealand. The nature and reasons for this expansion are deciphered using the model of an organic imperial ecosystem, which involves examining the first cause of all colonisation and which provides a means of understanding why the disparate parts of the colonial system functioned in the ways that they did. Britain’s imperial system did not bring itself into being, and so the notion of the Empire having emerged from a supra-system is assessed, which in turn leads to an exploration of the idea of equilibrium-achievement as the Prime Mover behind all colonisation—something that is borne out in New Zealand’s experience from the late eighteenth century. This work changes profoundly the way New Zealand’s colonisation is interpreted, and provides a framework for reassessing all forms of imperialism.