Book of the Week: The humanitarian struggle

2026-02-18 - 16:05

Some decades ago, a colleague was presenting a paper on the peripheral labour force—today we call it the ‘precariat’—to a room of economists. One economist made some penetrating observations indicating someone well-schooled in the history of ideas and able to apply them creatively to a contemporary issue. “Who is that?” “John Lepper, the new senior economist of the Bank of New Zealand; just arrived from overseas.” Thus Lepper began his long career as a significant New Zealand economist. His latest contribution is his two-volume book Land and Money, which provides a detailed account of the evolution of land policy and financial institutions in New Zealand and Australia (mainly New South Wales) between the 1770s and 1920s. It follows his 2011 book, An Enquiry into the Ideology and Reality of Market and Market System which challenged the traditional view that markets and market systems are ‘natural’. Scholars will both value this new book with its original insights and descriptions and challenge some of its propositions. The overall thesis is summarised by Rex Fairburn, from his poem “One Race, One Flag”, published in The Dominion, in 1938: Smith a refugee from the Black Country suffers the insults of the foreman that his family may live in the discomfort to which they are accustomed with deductions by the Commissioner of Taxes. ..Smith is an English immigrant. Consider the curious fate of the English immigrant: his wages were taken from him and exported to the colonies; sated with abstinence, gorged with deprivation, he followed them: to be confronted on arrival with the ghost of his back wages, a load of debt; the bond of kinship, the heritage of Empire. The poem illustrates the theory, first set out in John Hobson’s 1902 classic study, Imperialism, that British colonial settlement was driven by capitalist expansion. It is a vent-for-surplus theory, in which new markets for surplus capital and labour were sought in colonies of settlement. Lepper argues those settlements became colonial dependencies, while their first peoples suffered. That ‘prosperous servitude’ shaped their experience to this day, although Lepper finishes his narrative a century ago. The issue of capital flows and their political consequences has been a major gap in our understanding of the evolution of New Zealand. There are some fragmentary contributions but they are insufficient to pull together a comprehensive account. The database of aggregate capital flows simply does not exist. Lepper’s book makes a major and invaluable contribution to filling the lacuna by a detailed account of the evolution of the financial system; a bank in the middle of the nineteenth century is a rather different entity from a bank today. (But we still lack the aggregate data.) The book begins by asking: why colonise Australasia? Lepper attributes it solely, or mainly, to the need to find new outlets for surplus domestic capital. Monocausal explanations in history are always dangerous. Other explanations include British fear of French imperialism, a concern to regulate British citizens who were spreading around the globe, the need to secure supplies of critical resources, a place to house the burgeoning prison population given that the US had been shut off, and humanitarian intentions towards the welfare of the first peoples. Lepper does not go into any detail about these alternatives. He may be right that capitalist imperialism was the most important, but the others played their part in a concatenation of causes. His ‘it is difficult to accept that British colonial policy was significantly inspired by humanitarian principles’ seems excessive. The evidence indicates that when colonial secretary James Stephen was pressured by them, the British government responded sympathetically. (A little mentioned fact is that Stephen was the grandfather of Virginia Woolf.) Lepper did not have the advantage of access to Erik Olssen’s just-published The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769-1860, which makes a compelling case for the significance of the humanitarian element in British colonial policy. Nor did Olssen have access to Lepper’s book. These new books are potentially two key contributions to how historians – and eventually the public – may envisage the development of Aotearoa New Zealand, with its tensions between the humanitarian and commercial pressures which exist to this day. The Rogernomes tried to overwhelm humanitarians by adopting commercial solutions whenever they could. Despite their impressive success in setting up a new economic framework, they never totally quenched the humanitarian vision in the population, although its subsequent struggle to reverse (some of) the commercialisation has hardly been successful. Jacinda Ardern, the most humanitarian of the subsequent Prime Ministers tried, failed and resigned. The pressures go back to the beginning of the European governing of the country. Daniel Pollen, who was at the signing of Te Tiriti and a Premier in 1875 and 1876, told the Legislative Council in 1863, “I was present when the Treaty of Waitangi was proposed and an attentive listener to all that passed. I heard Her Majesty’s representatives arguing, explaining, promising to the natives, pledging the faith of the Queen and of the British people to the due observance of it, giving upon the honour of an English gentleman the broadest interpretation of the words in which the Treaty was couched.” He went on to say that the good intentions disappeared shortly after it was signed. In fact the commercialisation pressures were by people who never signed up to the humanitarian ambitions and were pursuing business interests which required their ownership of land. That meant the transfer of the possession of land from the Māori form of ownership (allodial – the Anglo-Saxon arrangement in which there was no authority above the ‘owner’) to the English common law form, in which ownership of land is based on William the Conqueror’s feudal doctrine that the sovereign was the absolute owner of all land; others’ rights came from the Crown. Land was no longer to be a taonga; it was a balance sheet asset. The notion of land as a taonga continues to haunt even the Pākehā . It is the spirit which underpins the Overseas Investment Act, which restricts overseas ownership of New Zealand land although commercial pressures mean there are numerous exceptions. Māori agencies – corporates, trusts and the like – hold land on the basis they will never dispose of it but the value of their land is included in their financial balance sheets, which assumes that potentially the land can be sold. (Treaty settlements pay a lot of attention to iwi acquiring rangatiratanga of the land in their rohe.) Not all humanitarians were sensitive to the difference. They reconciled it with a belief that the best future for Māori was to join the capitalist market economy – to become brown (Christian) Brits. Believing the transformation was progressive, they were often oblivious to its impact on Māori. Lepper, who gives a lot of welcome attention to the law as it relates to the financial sector which depends heavily on property ownership, details much of this story of land alienation, especially the Native Land Acts of the 1850s and 1860s, which privatised and commercialised the ownership of land, memories of events too often overshadowed by the macho excitement of the New Zealand Wars and the resulting confiscations. Woody Guthrie sang, “Some rob you with a six gun; some with a fountain pen.” Perhaps we do not give enough attention to the fountain pen; law is tedious. The lands legislation may well have been more destructive to the integrity of Māori society than warfare. The defeated were still able to function as a community, albeit with less land but with a grievance that added to their solidarity. The settlement acts divided Māori within and between hapū, alienating much land by voluntary sales but also to pay for the consequential litigation. Lepper traces this process (but not quite in the way an anthropologist might). The implication is that it was not only capitalist greed which was destructive to Māoridom. The intentions of the humanitarians were not always sensitive to the particularities of Māori society. Not only did the missionaries override Māori religion. They could be as casual about Māori culture generally, where they were equally convinced of the superiority of British practices. (Another destructive force which is frequently underplayed is demographics. They are not in Lepper’s remit, but European diseases killed an immunologically virgin population more than warfare did, as well as markedly reducing Māori fertility.) The book marches towards a conclusion that the transfer of land to settlers, the establishment of financial institutions and the dependence on overseas capital led to ‘prosperous servitude’ – an affluent neo-colony. Despite his book being about commercial pressures, the underlying Lepper vision is humanitarian. He challenges our colonial creation myth for – ignoring the degree to which first peoples were marginalised; – ignoring the contribution of women; – simplifying the role of land; – paying insufficient attention to ‘massive government borrowing’; – proclaiming an egalitarian society with little attempt to describe or account for its many inequalities; – paying no account to the changing international political economy. Land and Money does not set out the alternatives that its analysis might suggest. Its purpose is to set economic history foundations for others to think through the consequences. Land and Money: How Britain colonised Australasia in the long 19th century by John Lepper (2 volumes, Kerr Publishing) costs AUD$67 for Vol 1, and AUD$50 for Vol 2, or eBook AU$11 each, available online at Booktopia and Waterstones but not currently stocked at any local book sellers.