Britain's rise as a global power was achieved in relatively few decades after the loss of the American colonies, and the importance of British navigation and British commerce are often emphasized. Even as the thirteen colonies were becoming restive, James Cook was prosecuting his great voyages of discovery, a major consequence of which was the establishment of British influence, and eventually imperial power, in the Southwest Pacific.

New Zealand Maori are an East Polynesian people whose ancestors colonized New Zealand between eight and ten centuries ago. Maori social and economic organization was based upon kin groups claiming descent from important ancestors and exercising carefully defined rights over natural resources in specific territories, combining cultivation with extensive hunting and gathering. Maori society was highly competitive, and the Maori capacity and predilection for trade and adaptation were remarked upon by Europeans from Cook onward. New Zealand's potential as a supply base for oceanic shipping and a source of maritime commodities was likewise emphasized by Cook and that influential gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks. These factors were not absent from the official mind when a convict settlement was implanted on the east coast of Australia in 1788, and they were crucial in Maori involvement in a Pacific and global economy from that time.

Chiefs of Industry covers the period from the late eighteenth century to about 1860. In the early part of the period Maori enterprise concentrated on supplying, and allowing the taking of, timber, flax, water, fish, and the new foodstuffs potatoes and pork to European ships. There was a technological revolution in which Maori were avidly involved, notably with the introduction of iron tools but in fact with the whole range of European technologies including, notoriously, firearms; an agricultural revolution saw Maori rapidly taking up introduced crops. Many younger Maori men became active in Pacific shipping, either as crew or even as shipowners.

The agents of European influence before formal colonization were variously New South Wales colonial officials; British, American, French, and Australian mariners, sealers, and whalers; and evangelical missionaries. Tribal chieftainship had always depended on a capacity to defend and advance tribal interests; this continued in new circumstances, and chiefs found their positions requiring considerable entrepreneurial capacity. Entrepreneurship and accumulation, indeed, were not individual but collective both in organization and in rewards. Much of the existing literature on this period is anthropological and emphasizes cultural encounter; Petrie's conceptualization around themes of entrepreneurship is very helpful, and she has mastered, and synthesized, a very wide range of often fragmentary material in both the English and Maori languages.

Missionaries were usually willing to supply technological and agricultural advice as a means of demonstrating the merits of capitalism and Christianity. Some missionaries, however, disliked Maori commercial endeavor, believing it distracted Maori from religion and prevented their assimilation into European society as what was regarded as their proper station, agricultural laborers. After the incorporation of New Zealand into the British Empire in 1840, various official agendas also emerged. European towns from 1840, and the Australian gold rushes after 1851, provided significant markets for Maori agriculture. There was considerable enthusiasm among central North Island tribes, in particular, for flour mills, and Petrie's research shows how government and other European assistance in this regard was not always honestly given. Indeed, it was often conditional on land alienation. For all that, tribal combinations to build flour mills and coastal trading ships anticipated settler dairy cooperatives half a century later.

Maori enterprise weakened after 1860, clearly due to a number of factors. Maori were swamped by a tide of immigration after 1860, and this more than anything else weakened their position. Maori lacked the capital to support the shift from sail to steam in coastal shipping and the greater mechanization of the economy after 1860. Added to demographic disadvantage was the very rapid alienation of land, in the South Island after 1845 and in the north after 1863. To say that settler attitudes hardened after 1860 would be an understatement in that decade of war. While Petrie generally presents her account as a straightforward historical narrative (and it is all the better for that), there are significant implications for contemporary society as the settlement of historical grievances again places large assets under tribal management and ownership.

Just as the tide of emigration to New Zealand in the 1860s and ’70s displaced Maori landholding and enterprise, it created massive opportunities for the newcomers. Age of Enterprise discusses entrepreneurship in Pakeha (i.e., European) New Zealand, concentrating on the period from 1880 to 1910, which could be described as the takeoff of the New Zealand economy. Against some recent and older discussions that have suggested a dependent and almost incipiently sclerotic regime, Hunter emphasizes the role of the entrepreneur, and his discussion is a sustained defense of initiative internal to the colony and to the energy and skill of entrepreneurs.

There are two principal arguments. The first is that the orthodoxy of a Long Depression, from 1878 until 1895, is much overrated in the New Zealand case at least, and the long-run evidence is convincing on this point. The second is that, contrary to a Chandlerian fixation on large-scale managerial capitalism and the consequent criticism of the family enterprise, the New Zealand economy was dominated by small proprietors and family firms and that this resulted in sustained economic growth. The Pakeha population increased with extraordinary rapidity during the 1860s and, particularly, the 1870s. In the latter decade the net gain through migration alone was 135,000, and while many were assisted immigrants, many were also self-funded. The latter, of course, dominated the entrepreneurial class.

The core of the study is a database of 133 entrepreneurs; in a lengthy discussion Hunter defends excluding farmers from the category. Although a study of nonfarm business is perfectly legitimate, farmers can and should be included as entrepreneurs since their business relies on investment, judgment, and risk as much as any brewer or foundry man. Moreover, of course, farming was the basis of the New Zealand economy. Many well-chosen examples demonstrate the characteristics of the colonial entrepreneur: they were usually from (lower?) middle-class origins, with a training through apprenticeship or commercial experience gained usually before emigration; they did not establish their own businesses immediately on arrival but took the time to gain colonial experience and form loose networks. Self-employment began on a small scale, relying on personal savings or, frequently, pooling resources in a small partnership. Growth was slow and steady, financed by reinvestment of profits. In general, what emerges implies that colonial entrepreneurs continued to operate in the same ways as did the provincial British middle classes from which they had sprung (and farmers operated in exactly the same way as urban entrepreneurs).

State policy was important, particularly in the very large expenditure on infrastructural development after 1870, which stimulated both demand and technological development (Hunter might also have noted the fundamental importance of state power in dispossessing Maori of their lands as a prelude to the development of European capitalism). Hunter also argues that fiscal policy was important; tariffs, although aimed at revenue rather than protection, did assist manufacturing, and he extols the virtues of light taxation. This low-tax paradise was also a high-public-spending paradise, a paradox implicitly admitted and which was resolved by borrowing.

From the early 1880s refrigeration transformed the colonial economy. Dispersed entrepreneurial networks helped New Zealand avoid the oligopolies of the River Plate; Hunter correctly emphasizes the flow-on effects of freezing works and dairy factories in transport, shipping, and especially the engineering trades. Here, though, the omission of farmers from consideration is noticeable, for many farmers were promoters of and shareholders in meat and dairy cooperatives. Although the argument of Age of Enterprise properly emphasizes local entrepreneurship, the very reliance of the economy on British capital and British markets, particularly for foodstuffs, gave local entrepreneurship a globalized foundation.

The great strength of Age of Enterprise is the author's focus on the concept of entrepreneurship, as it has emerged in economic theory. It would be unfair to criticize a scholar of management for not addressing all the concerns of a social historian, but his work might have considered the family dimensions of entrepreneurial culture a little more. Some readers might wish for more discussion of, or be prompted to reflect on, the British background of these entrepreneurs; the tone of discussion sometimes casts entrepreneurs in a slightly more heroic mould than many historians would do. There is a useful exercise in modeling the life cycle of the colonial entrepreneur, although again perhaps this is slightly more oriented to students of management than of history. This discussion of small-scale but successful enterprise, however, usefully reinforces some British and American studies that have emphasized the viability of the family firm in contexts as diverse as Britain and the American West.

The two books read alongside each other make important contributions to our understanding of a British settler colony. Their nearly simultaneous publication, by the same university press, emphasizes their complementarity. Taken together, these works provide a valuable narrative of early and successful entrepreneurship by the indigenous Maori and its displacement by an expanding British middle class. That there were losers as well as winners in nineteenth-century British expansion is an obvious point, but one well made explicitly by Petrie and implicitly by Hunter.