The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

This week I gave a paper at the New Zealand Historical Association biennial conference, held at the University of Otago. My paper explored the understandings of British parliamentarians as to the impact of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 on Maori communities. Here is the abstract: Asked to nominate the point at which relations between Maori and Pakeha had really begun to turn sour in the nineteenth century, many historians would likely nominate the passage of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852. As Chichester Fortescue famously told the House of Commons in 1861, from the time of the 1852 Act the governor had been ‘[o]bliged to act under a Constitution which appeared to have been framed in forgetfulness of the existence of large native tribes within the dominions to which it was intended to apply’. With the benefit of hindsight it is all too easy to assume that ‘absent-minded imperialists’ really had forgotten their obligations to Maori. But a close analysis of British Parl...