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.

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.

What would a history of New Zealand look like that rejected Thomas Carlyle’s definition of history as ‘the biography of great men’, and focused instead on the experiences of women? One that shifted the angle of vision and examined the stages of this country’s development from the points of view of wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts? That considered their lives as distinct from (though often unwillingly influenced by) those of history’s ‘great men’? In her ground-breaking History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes provides just such a history. This is more than an account of women in New Zealand, from those who arrived on the first waka to the Grammy and Man Booker Prize-winning young women of the current decade. It is a comprehensive history of New Zealand seen through a female lens. Brookes argues that while European men erected the political scaffolding to create a small nation, women created the infrastructure necessary for colonial society to succeed. Concepts of home, marriage and family brought by settler women, and integral to the developing state, transformed the lives of Māori women. The small scale of New Zealand society facilitated rapid change so that, by the twenty-first century, women are no longer defined by family contexts. In her long-awaited book, Barbara Brookes traces the factors that drove that change. Her lively narrative draws on a wide variety of sources to map the importance in women’s lives not just of legal and economic changes, but of smaller joys, such as the arrival of a piano from England, or the freedom of riding a bicycle.