One of the British Empire's most troubling colonial exports in the 19th-century, James Busby is known as the father of the Australian wine industry, the author of New Zealand's Declaration of Independence and a central figure in the early history of independent New Zealand as its British Resident from 1833 to 1840. Officially the man on the ground for the British government in the volatile society of New Zealand in the 1830s, Busby endeavoured to create his own parliament and act independently of his superiors in London. This put him on a collision course with the British Government, and ultimately destroyed his career. With a reputation as an inept, conceited and increasingly embittered person, this caricature of Busby's character has slipped into the historical bloodstream where it remains to the present day. This book draws on an extensive range of previously-unused archival records to reconstruct Busby's life in much more intimate form, and exposes the back-room plotting that ultimately destroyed his plans for New Zealand. It will alter the way that Britain's colonisation of New Zealand is understood, and will leave readers with an appreciation of how individuals, more than policies, shaped the Empire and its rule.

This mongraph reasserts the primacy of property in political theorising. Arguing that the determination of property rights is part of the justification of the state, MacDonald notes the failure of much current philosophising to take account of this role when setting out the normative arguments for legitimate political authority. MacDonald criticises current philosophical definitions of property as a bundle-of-rights, arguing that for normative purposes, property is a right of exclusion in rem. Thereby MacDonald escapes the interminable moral and legal arguments over property - such as questions of Lockean labour theory, self-ownership, and indigenous historical injustice - that have dominated recent political philosophy. Instead, the book focuses on the failure of libertarian and liberal egalitarian theories of justice to produce a plausible account of both legitimate political authority's right to regulate property, and the principles upon which that regulation ought to occur. The book will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy and theory, especially those engaged in the contemporary ideas of justice, legitimacy and the justification of the state.