The Taranaki War was a global news event that elicited debates in Great Britain over Maori rights and the shape of the colonial project in New Zealand. Originating within a dispute between rival indigenous Maori hapu (clan) groups over a land sale to the Crown, the Taranaki War from 1860 to 1861 sputtered over the course of a year and ended in a stalemate between British military forces and Maori insurgents. Though militarily inconclusive, the Taranaki War has received particular attention both as the catalyst for a series of conflicts fought between Maori and the Crown across the 1860s, which have become known as the New Zealand Wars, and as a crucial moment in which the Crown breached the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand's founding covenant. This article reconsiders the role of Governor Thomas Gore Browne during this conflict. In recent narratives, Browne has been portrayed as a pawn of settler society and as a figure obsessed with securing British sovereignty in New Zealand with force.
In contrast, this article argues that humanitarianism was at the center of the Taranaki War. Browne's humanitarian worldview led him into the Taranaki War, while subsequent debates over the legitimacy of the conflict were defined by their appeals in defense of Maori rights. The Taranaki War garnered considerable attention within Great Britain, and colonists in New Zealand were anxious not to alienate metropolitan Britons with an interest in Maori welfare. This general usage of humanitarian racial discourses was encouraged by perceptions of metropolitan surveillance, New Zealand's prominence within networks of imperial communication, and the onus to administrate the Maori with justice. By highlighting the centrality of humanitarianism to the Taranaki War, this study also responds to an influential body of work that has associated the mid-nineteenth century with a decline in the popularity of humanitarianism across the British Empire.Footnote 1
According to this chronology of decline, the abolition of slavery and the publication of the Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) in 1837 marked the highpoint of humanitarians' political influence. A long sequence of crises facilitated the subsequent weakening in popularity of humanitarianism, including the Matale Rebellion in Ceylon in 1848, the Xhosa cattle killings of 1856–57, the Santhal insurrection of 1855–56, the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, and the New Zealand Wars of 1860–72. These events shook the British Empire, hardening racial attitudes and encouraging the acceptance of scientific racial theories that stressed immutable racial difference. Coming hard on the heels of the Indian Rebellion, the Taranaki War invigorated debates in Great Britain over the financial cost of empire and the repercussions of colonization for indigenous peoples. But in the same spirit as Anne O'Brien's recent article “Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia,” I complicate this narrative of decline by illustrating the ongoing utility and broad usage of humanitarianism.Footnote 2
This reexamination draws on the wartime diaries and correspondence of Browne and his spouse, Harriet Louisa, alongside the published pamphlets of both opponents and proponents of the Taranaki War. Harriet Louisa's two diaries from 1860–61 have previously been ignored, but they are especially valuable. Harriet Louisa wrote almost exclusively about New Zealand's political milieu. She was a consummate lobbyist and utilized her public persona to advance Browne's career. Like Charlotte Macdonald in her analysis of Sarah Selwyn, the spouse of George Selwyn, the Anglican bishop of New Zealand, Harriet Louisa's diaries present “a working example of the dynamics of connection by which the imperial world came to be constituted in and across diverse spaces and communities, via patronage, social and personal networks, as well as systems of governance.”Footnote 3 They also reveal a private world of colonial politicking that occurred outside the Legislative Assembly's chambers, facilitated by sociability and hospitality, amid networks cultivated by both men and women. Given the official exclusionary nature of mid-nineteenth-century politics, it is also not surprising that Harriet Louisa's enthusiasm for politicking was tempered with anxiety regarding the impropriety of her activism—championing Browne's perspective was “dangerous.”Footnote 4
Humanitarianism and the Colonization of New Zealand
By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “humanitarian” had become associated with an interest in protecting vulnerable groups and improving human welfare. The origins of humanitarianism lay in both the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Britain's evangelical revival. As Thomas Laqueur and Karen Halttunen have shown, the antecedents of humanitarianism's preoccupation with social reform originated in the eighteenth century's “culture of sensibility.”Footnote 5 This culture of sensibility drew upon the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and redefined physical pain as objectionable, characterizing sympathy and compassion for previously despised elements of society as the tenets of a virtuous character. As D. W. Bebbington has shown, Britain's “Eighteenth-Century revival,” with its focus on both the evangelization of foreign unbelievers and the abolition of slavery, also had roots in the Enlightenment principles of “benevolence, happiness, and liberty.”Footnote 6 So with the success of the abolitionist campaign, metropolitan humanitarians like Thomas Fowell Buxton became interested in reforming the excesses of British colonialism in order to preserve the “atonement” that Great Britain had achieved.Footnote 7 Most prominently, Buxton chaired the 1835–37 Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines (in British settlements), which examined the dire consequences of British colonization across the world and suggested how British settlement might occur with the least possible ill effects for indigenous peoples. The Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) established an expectation to treat indigenous peoples justly and took for granted that indigenous peoples could achieve civilizing reform.
The hopes of humanitarians for civilizing reform were informed by both a monogenist belief in the common origins of all human races and the Scottish Enlightenment theory that humanity enjoyed great potential for improvement.Footnote 8 This stadial theory of history identified human development over time within four recognizable stages predicated upon distinctive modes of subsistence. Stadial theorists like Adam Smith identified agriculture, commerce, and property as signifiers of civilization, taking for granted that Maori achievements in these areas boded well for their potential civilizing reform along the lines achieved by England's antecedent races.Footnote 9 Thus humanitarians conceptualized Christian conversion to entail both a spiritual and a material transformation, with the British liberal political economy and emphasis on self-improvement functioning as the template for indigenous progress.
This humanitarian ethos infused debates over colonization in the late 1830s. For example, members of the Church Missionary Society who had been resident in New Zealand since 1814 reiterated the concerns of the Aborigines report in their opposition to British expansion, arguing that the establishment of a settler society would hasten the demise of the Maori people.Footnote 10 In opposition, the New Zealand Company's (NZC) advocates for systematic colonization, including Edward Gibbon Wakefield, John Ward, and Montague Hawtrey, argued that the NZC's very purpose was to benefit the Maori people by facilitating their racial amalgamation with settlers. In their presettlement prospectus, the proponents of the NZC outlined their plans to avoid the separation of races that had hampered previous experiences of British settlement by intermixing Maori reserves and colonial settlements and maintaining the social order of Maori through special land grants to native leaders.Footnote 11 But in 1840 the Colonial Office intervened before the NZC could act, convinced, as Tony Ballantyne argues, “that the annexation of New Zealand and its formal incorporation into the empire was the most effective means of ‘protecting’ Maori.”Footnote 12 The Treaty of Waitangi signed by Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson and about five hundred Maori rangatira (chiefly leaders) established British sovereignty and at the same time recognized Maori customary rights to their territory in New Zealand. As this article will show, however, debates over the nature of Maori sovereignty that had been preserved by the treaty lay at the heart of the Taranaki War and hinged upon divergent English and Maori translations. In any case, both advocates and critics of colonization in New Zealand framed their arguments with reference to Maori welfare. The key difference between debaters lay in their attitudes toward the benefits of racial separation versus rapid assimilation.
As Damon Ieremia Salesa has recently argued, the NZC's humanitarian mandate has not been taken seriously because it failed spectacularly; the reality of Maori-settler relations never matched the naiveté of NZC propaganda.Footnote 13 At the same time, however, the humanitarian program of racial amalgamation as imagined by the NZC became enshrined as a policy objective of both the Colonial Office and colonial executives in New Zealand during the 1840s and 1850s. Articulated most clearly within the Crown's bilingual publication Te Karere Maori, or The Maori Messenger, this campaign did not officially encourage the intermarriage of Maori with British colonists but rather sought to convince Maori to embrace all aspects of British culture—religious, material, and economic—while taking for granted that Maori were amenable to cultural innovation because so many had converted to Christianity.Footnote 14
Likewise, an analysis of colonial newspapers from New Zealand during the late 1850s and early 1860s reveals that the usage of humanitarian racial discourses was not limited to the Crown or missionary humanitarians. Instead, editors representing both rhetorical and evangelical strands of humanitarianism articulated and debated its principles publicly. By rhetorical humanitarianism, I mean the strategic use of humanitarian language to promote colonists' interests even as the need for indigenous peoples to be protected was asserted. By evangelical humanitarianism, I am identifying a powerful strand of humanitarian thought that developed out of missionary work and was driven by a commitment to protect all indigenous peoples, but especially those who had accepted Christianity. I argue that rhetorical humanitarians' employment of humanitarian language, often against evangelical humanitarians, reflected editors' anxieties related to metropolitan surveillance and the understanding that colonial executives operated with an implicit humanitarian mandate. Whereas the humanitarian philosophy that infused the Aborigines report emphasized the bodily suffering and potential of indigenous peoples, the humanitarian philosophy in general usage within New Zealand's mid-nineteenth-century colonial print culture focused more closely on assessing Maori civilizing reform and the benefits of separation versus assimilation. These humanitarian discussions were not esoteric, though. Throughout the 1850s after Governor George Grey's 1852 Constitution Act empowered responsible government within New Zealand, debates over the control of the Native Department and the Crown's monopoly over land purchases from Maori centered on whether colonial executives or colonists were best equipped to carry out a policy of racial amalgamation. Humanitarian discourses, then, were central to political debates over the shape of colonial development.
This is not to say that New Zealand did not feature opposing voices to humanitarianism. Alan Lester has shown how in the 1840s the colonial newspaper the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle blamed missionary humanitarians for inciting Maori to violence in the context of the Wairau incident, a conflict in June 1843 between Ngati Toa Maori and NZC settlers that resulted in the deaths of twenty-one colonists and four Maori.Footnote 15 The Nelson Examiner sprang from a NZC community and probably represented a cross-section of colonial society aligned with the company's interests. In his article, Lester analyzes this newspaper alongside other examples from Australia and the Cape Colony to illustrate how settlers employed print networks to critique the efforts of missionary humanitarians to protect indigenous peoples. Likewise, in the late 1850s, Charles Southwell's Auckland Examiner attacked “Humanity-mongers” as “the curse of the colony.”Footnote 16 Inspired by Thomas Carlyle's 1849 attack against former black slaves, Southwell derided Maori Christians: “Boshee [Maori] is still three parts animal; and though much preached at, cannot be preached out of Pigdom.”Footnote 17 However, the Nelson Examiner and the Auckland Examiner were not representative of New Zealand's press.
Southwell's racial vitriol remained at the margins, censored by other colonial editors. Indeed, the Auckland Examiner collapsed from a lack of public support when the Taranaki War began in 1860 at the supposed height of racial antagonism following the Indian Rebellion. In contrast, New Zealand's most popular and influential papers, such as Auckland's Southern Cross and the New Zealander, showcased humanitarian editorial perspectives in the late 1850s and throughout the Taranaki War. Even the Taranaki Herald, a newspaper centered in New Plymouth and a strong supporter of settler rights over Maori interests, was compelled to support the Taranaki War within a humanitarian framework.Footnote 18 The New Zealand press, then, was not fractured between proponents and critics of humanitarianism but rather featured rival variants of both rhetorical and evangelical humanitarianism. Alongside its political import, the popularity of humanitarian language owed much to two additional factors: first, Maori agency as expressed through engagement with Christianity and an ongoing threat of violence inspired the respect of colonists; and second, New Zealand's prominent location within imperial networks of news transmission led colonists to believe that metropolitan Britons surveilled local political discourses, vigilant for any abrogation of Maori rights.Footnote 19 Just as Antoinette Burton has recently emphasized how metropolitan Britons followed events in New Zealand closely in the mid-nineteenth century, the corollary of this attention became manifest in colonists' anxiety.Footnote 20 In this context, humanitarian discourses functioned as an important language to bolster local colonialism and veil the repercussions of Maori power.
Humanitarianism, however, has not been central to the historiography of the New Zealand Wars. For the last half century, this active field of scholarship has been characterized by an ongoing debate over whether the avarice of colonists for Maori land or colonial governors' imperialist ambitions to defend British sovereignty propelled the conflicts of the 1860s.Footnote 21 The New Zealand Wars, and especially the Taranaki War, have also continued to remain relevant subjects of historical inquiry through the work of the Waitangi Tribunal. Established in 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry that is charged with the investigation of claims brought by Maori relating to the Crown's historic breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. Indeed, the Treaty of Waitangi occupies an iconic position within contemporary New Zealand as both a symbol of the nation's historic bicultural origins and a guiding influence to ongoing legislation. The tribunal's work is grounded in the colonial period and has garnered criticism for its unrealistic expectations of the Crown's historic practice.Footnote 22 Most recently, Lachy Paterson, Lyndsay Head, and Danny Keenan have reflected on Maori resistance to colonialism and the significance that Maori invested in the defense of their mana (prestige, authority, or spiritual power).Footnote 23 Both Keith Sinclair and Alan Ward have conceptualized humanitarians as marginal figures on the fringes of New Zealand's colonial society, which was unified in its growing racial antagonism against expressions of Maori independence.Footnote 24 This view recognizes the significance of humanitarian critiques, especially of the Taranaki War, but ignores the broad usage and utility of humanitarian philosophy to both opponents and proponents of the New Zealand Wars.
Thomas Gore Browne's Taranaki War
Thomas Gore Browne is the least well known of New Zealand's colonial executives and is best remembered for his errors of judgment. Browne was appointed the fourth governor of New Zealand in 1855 when he was forty-eight years old. He was a former career soldier with service in India and had previously governed St. Helena following his marriage to Harriet Louisa in 1851. During the first five years of his administration, he faced the challenge of implementing New Zealand's 1852 Constitution Act. On the basis of advice from prominent local humanitarians, Browne reserved control over the Native Department in 1855. This decision to limit the General Assembly's powers reflected Browne's perception that many colonial legislators “know as little of the New Zealanders as they do of the Japanese . . . talk rubbish on the subject and what is more, refuse or grudge the smallest support.”Footnote 25 In turn, stymied colonial ministries refused to legislate funding for the Native Department, arguing that colonists should not pay for the administration of Maori, over which they had no control. In aligning himself with local humanitarians, Browne continued the legacy established by the former governors Robert Fitzroy and Grey, who had also balanced Maori interests against the demands of an expansionist settler society.Footnote 26 Browne's reliance on Anglican clerics and missionaries reflected their esteem within Maori society and the significant Maori membership within the Anglican denomination.Footnote 27 Browne never became proficient in the Maori language or Maori culture like Grey, yet his commitment to maintain control over Maori reflected a sense of responsibility from the Colonial Office to govern within a humanitarian ethos.
As Browne sailed from New Zealand in October 1861, he reflected on two and a half years of disappointment.Footnote 28 It had begun in March 1859 when he had visited the province of Taranaki to initiate an important shift in policy. Considered “the sore place of the Colony,” Taranaki had been marred by contention between British colonists and Maori since New Zealand's inception.Footnote 29 These tensions originated in part from the long-lasting effects of the inter-iwi (tribe) Musket Wars of the 1830s. Following James Cook's voyages to New Zealand at the end of the eighteenth century, New Zealand had become a station for European and American whalers. As James Belich has argued, these maritime traders carried on a vigorous trade in muskets, transforming local tribal conflicts into large-scale wars that ranged across both the North and the South Islands of New Zealand.Footnote 30 The Taranaki region was particularly devastated. Successive invasions by Waikato Maori from the central North Island displaced most of the local Te Ati Awa population and subsequently complicated the NZC's attempts to purchase land in 1840. Indeed, the NZC agent Colonel William Wakefield elicited controversy when he purchased vast territories in Taranaki from multiple Maori sellers.Footnote 31 In 1844 New Zealand's second governor, Robert Fitzroy, stoked the anger of colonists when he concurred with Chief Protector of Aborigines George Clarke Sr. that the NZC had not negotiated with the rightful Maori land owners.Footnote 32 Here Fitzroy overturned the ruling of Commissioner William Spain to recognize the NZC's claims. In the end, colonists lost access to sixty thousand acres of Maori land, including the highly sought after Waitara district, located just north of Taranaki's capital, New Plymouth, where settlers had originally wished to establish themselves. This legacy of violence, displacement, and controversy haunted settler relations with Maori and then framed debates over the Taranaki War's legitimacy in 1860–61.
During the 1850s, while other North Island provinces like Auckland and Wellington purchased hundreds of thousands of acres of Maori territory, no similar large-scale land sales occurred in Taranaki.Footnote 33 Colonists in New Plymouth felt hemmed in. Their bitterness stemmed from the belief that Maori territory lay in waste, unused and unsold for selfish reasons.Footnote 34 At the same time, too, colonists witnessed periodic episodes of Maori intertribal violence that occurred following the return of local Te Ati Awa to their customary territories in the late 1840s. These disagreements over a series of land sales pitted rival Te Ati Awa hapu groups against each other.Footnote 35 Worth recognizing here is that Maori hapu and iwi held the rights or mana of the land collectively. Individual Maori could receive, use, and pass on land rights as an inheritance, but their rights were subject to collective authority. Land sales to the Crown, then, depended upon the difficult task of achieving the consensus of Maori kin groups. During Te Ati Awa conflicts, and especially in 1858, colonists appealed to Browne for military intervention.Footnote 36 These requests were not supported. As Browne remarked to Native Secretary C. W. Richmond in 1858, “[T]he people at Taranaki appear to think we have the power and means of protecting them which we really do not possess.”Footnote 37 British sovereignty did not extend beyond the town limits of the many scattered British communities in this period.Footnote 38
In 1859, however, Browne signaled a shift away from nonengagement. Meeting first with Taranaki Maori leaders on 8 March, Browne addressed the issues of local crime and land sales. Regarding Maori crime, Browne stated that he was “determined that the peace of the settlers should no longer be disturbed by evil-doers.”Footnote 39 Turning to the topic of land, Browne encouraged his Maori listeners to sell their surplus lands, stating that “he would never consent to buy land without an undisputed title. He would not permit any one to interfere in the sale of land, unless he owned part of it.”Footnote 40 In response, Te Teira Manuka, a local leader of the Puke-Kowhatu hapu of Te Ati Awa, immediately offered to sell his lands at Waitara. In reply, though, another more preeminent Te Ati Awa leader, Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, stated: “Listen, Governor. Notwithstanding Teira's offer I will not permit the sale of Waitara to the Pakeha. Waitara is in my hands, I will not give it up.”Footnote 41 Now Te Rangitake was a leader of great influence and authority who had previously supported the Crown but was committed to maintaining control over the customary territory of the Te Ati Awa iwi. Following this statement, Te Rangitake had abruptly left the public meeting with his followers, leaving Browne to tentatively accept Te Teira's offer pending an investigation.
Browne immediately recognized the significance of Te Teira's offer. In a dispatch to the Duke of Newcastle on 29 March 1859, he remarked that there seemed to be little doubt regarding Te Teira's right to Waitara and that he was committed to defend the land purchase in the face of likely violent opposition because “any recognition of such a power as that assumed by William King [Te Rangitake] would therefore be unjust to both races, because it would be the means of keeping millions of acres waste and out of cultivation.”Footnote 42 As Te Rangitake continued his opposition over the course of 1859 and early 1860, the stage was set for a confrontation that was defined by Browne's perceived defense of the rights of both colonists and Maori.
Even today, aspects of the Waitara purchase remain shrouded in mystery. Did Te Teira's attempt to sell lands at Waitara constitute an assertion of his own mana? What role did personal antagonism between Te Teira and Te Rangitake play? Ann Parsonson has argued that Te Teira's actions at Waitara represented an attempt at revenge against Te Rangitake for his role in thwarting him in a dispute over a woman.Footnote 43 Conflicts within Te Ati Awa were central to the Waitara purchase, but they are the least studied aspects of the Taranaki War. Maori intertribal violence disrupted Maori-Pakeha (European) binaries, unsettling mid-nineteenth-century pamphleteers and contemporary historians. A biography of Te Teira remains to be written.Footnote 44
However, rather than overawing Te Rangitake, Browne's use of military force to enforce the Waitara purchase precipitated a war. The first battle between British forces and Te Ati Awa insurgents at Te Kohia pa (fortification) on 17 March 1860 had an inconclusive result and set the tone for the subsequent military campaign. The British military could not achieve a decisive victory, and the war dragged on and on. Taranaki colonists spent the war in New Plymouth in a state of siege while surrounding farmland was laid waste.Footnote 45 The Taranaki War then closed with an unsatisfactory peace in April 1861. Adding to his discomfort, Browne's political allies in the House of Representatives were defeated in July 1861, forcing him to work with William Fox, one of his sharpest critics. But perhaps most disappointingly, the Colonial Office recalled him just as he had been about to challenge the Kingitanga.Footnote 46 The Kingitanga was a Maori political movement that had elected their own king in 1858 as a symbol of its commitment to end land sales with the Crown and to implement an alternative code of laws. In the fallout of the Taranaki War, Browne identified the Kingitanga as the most important threat to British colonization and had been mobilizing British forces for a confrontation.Footnote 47
Bitter confusion marked his recall too. When Browne had received a forwarded telegram message—“New Zealand Governor reappointed”—on Friday, 26 July 1861, he had celebrated his own reappointment and the vindication of his wartime administration.Footnote 48 But the actual arrival of the mail packet by sail on late Monday afternoon, 29 July 1861, brought a rude surprise. George Grey, not Browne, had been reappointed. Harriet Louisa recorded in her diary that the news left Browne “humiliated and dispirited,” considering his replacement to be “a humiliating concession to the Maories.”Footnote 49 Both of Auckland's most prominent newspapers, the New Zealander and the Southern Cross, welcomed Grey, confident in his ability to reconcile Maori to the Crown.Footnote 50 But in Browne's own mind, the successes of Grey had stemmed more from generous financial resources and a lack of political opposition than his personal charisma.Footnote 51 In contrast, Browne had always been stymied by New Zealand's colonial government. The popular perception of Grey's superiority was deeply frustrating.
Yet Browne did not lament the Waitara purchase in his reflections aboard ship but reaffirmed the justice of his opposition to Te Rangitake.Footnote 52 Browne regretted the error of not ordering a commission of inquiry that would have “disarmed many opponents.”Footnote 53 Browne also rued his former pride. He had mistakenly believed that he could end “Maori difficulties by a vigorous and decisive act.”Footnote 54 The Waitara purchase had represented an opportunity to substantiate the authority of the Crown over Maori and achieve settler lobbyists' demands for land in New Plymouth. Browne concluded, “I was not supported.”Footnote 55 The war had not been lost on the battlefield but through his failure to win approval for his policy.
I suspect that Browne regretted most how his former Anglican allies had become his fiercest critics. Indeed, opposition to the Taranaki War had emerged almost immediately from prominent Anglicans, including Bishop Selwyn, Archdeacon Hadfield, Bishop of Wellington Charles Abraham, and former chief justice of New Zealand Sir William Martin. These were the same men upon whom Browne had relied to frame his Maori policy and who functioned as important cultural intermediaries, valued for both their knowledge and their influence. Indeed, vocal critics like Hadfield and Selwyn had close ties to Te Rangitake and other rebel Te Ati Awa through their shared membership in the Anglican Church. They believed Te Rangitake was justified in his opposition to the Waitara purchase and that Browne had acted rashly. Following the initiation of the Taranaki War, these men drew upon their considerable influence in local and metropolitan networks to criticize Browne. But in the eyes of many, the leaders of the local Anglican Church acted treasonously by defending Maori rebels.
Clerical opposition was particularly challenging for the Brownes because their opponents had been their traditional allies. As Harriet Louisa remarked in August 1860, their “old allies'” opposition made her “suspect the paucity of our cause.”Footnote 56 Again in October 1860, in the context of Bishop Selwyn's charge that Browne intended to destroy the Maori, Harriet Louisa noted: “It is sad having all true good men against us.”Footnote 57 The clergy's reputation also added weight to their opinions: “The violent opposition of the clergy becomes very hurtful, in the first place it must have its weight with outsiders. As the clergy from their character must be supposed to judge from high motives and there is a sort of confidence due to their opinions.”Footnote 58 As Browne described in private correspondence to the Duke of Newcastle, the break with Martin and other Anglican critics was made all the more difficult by the fact that he had always “endeavoured to work with and through them.”Footnote 59 The legislation that Browne supported reinforces this point.
In 1860, legislation to create an independent Native Council that would manage Maori Affairs in coordination with the governor and New Zealand's Representative Assembly came before both the Imperial and the Colonial legislatures. Browne had drafted the proposed bill with the help of Martin, Selwyn, and Attorney General William Swainson, and intended to staff the Native Council with Maori experts such as Martin.Footnote 60 The legislation was introduced to the British Parliament at the worst moment, however, and garnered fierce criticism amid the Taranaki debacle. Critics in both Great Britain and New Zealand blamed Browne for the initiation of the Taranaki War to decry the colonial government's lack of control over the Native Department.Footnote 61 The furor left the Brownes alienated from everyone: “[A]ll the world is against us. The Bishop party on account of the war and the Assembly on account of Gore's referring a scheme for the management of the natives to be passed by the imperial government.”Footnote 62 Browne was too closely associated with his former allies, and their published opposition represented a significant threat.
On 25 January 1861 Browne made a rare public statement in the New Zealand Gazette. Underlining the power of “opinion,” Browne criticized the opposition of the press to the Taranaki War. While recognizing the right “of every British subject to discuss, criticize, and censure the acts of Government,” Browne argued that the wartime environment rendered “the unrestrained use of such a right” as “dangerous to the community.”Footnote 63 Here Browne acknowledged the implications of Maori access to colonial print culture. By the mid-nineteenth century, many Maori were literate in their own language and also engaged with the colonial press, a fact that led some local editors to decry antagonistic racial language that might incite Maori violence.Footnote 64 But according to Browne, the danger related to the relative lack of Maori cultural sophistication; Maori were incapable of discerning between the free right of colonists to express dissent and the illegal military resistance of insurgents. In its opposition, the press itself had become an agent of Maori rebellion. The editor of the Southern Cross, though, interpreted Browne's demand as a sign of weakness: “It would lead lookers-on to believe that His Excellency fears discussion, and apprehends that his position is not tenable in the eyes of the world.”Footnote 65
While the New Zealand Gazette proclamation addressed the press generally, Browne also had his message personally delivered to Sir Martin.Footnote 66 In late 1860 Martin had published The Taranaki Question.Footnote 67 This 152-page pamphlet provided a comprehensive description of Maori customary land tenure; it also repudiated the legality of the Waitara purchase and Browne's rationale for initiating the Taranaki War. It had been sent to political representatives in both New Zealand and Great Britain, and according to rumor, selected extracts had been translated and distributed among Maori.Footnote 68 When Browne's New Zealand Gazette article appeared, Martin was just about to publish another pamphlet. This second publication rebutted the pamphlets of C. W. Richmond and Francis Dillon Bell, Browne's allies within the Stafford Ministry who had published replies to Martin's thesis.Footnote 69
Browne's effort to gag Martin reflected his anxiety that published opposition might have harmful repercussions. But while the New Zealand Gazette article highlighted Maori resistance, Browne's correspondence reveals his concern for the metropolitan audience of Martin. The day after learning of The Taranaki Question on 3 December 1860, Browne sent a voluminous reply to the Colonial Office.Footnote 70 Describing this message, Browne stated: “I send home by this Mail a lengthy report on the Tribal title to land among the N.Z. natives and on the native Chief W.K.'s claim to interfere at the Waitara. I have been so bitterly attacked by the Episcopal party in this Colony and they have sent home so many gross misstatements on the subject that I am anxious to have this report laid before Parliament as being the only way in which I can answer such attacks.”Footnote 71 Browne's dispatch drew upon the previously published opinions of his Anglican critics and attacked the crux of Martin's pamphlet by proving that there were “no fixed rules” to guide the government in its negotiations for Maori land.Footnote 72
In private correspondence, Browne complained how Martin had allowed a month to elapse before alerting him of his pamphlet's existence and its dispatch to Great Britain.Footnote 73 New Zealand's geographic isolation meant that The Taranaki Question reached Great Britain significantly ahead of Browne's hastily written reply. This head start gave Martin's pamphlet a vital monopoly. The ability to communicate first and shape the initial perspectives of readers in a transimperial debate was a significant advantage. Far more than the personal attacks made by Browne's more outspoken critics, Martin's measured refutation represented both a breach between personal friends and the damning opposition of a figure esteemed in both New Zealand and Great Britain. Worse yet, Browne had previously described Martin to the Colonial Office as a man who “may always be trusted to give information on native affairs.”Footnote 74
Browne fought back in two ways. First, when his Anglican opponents requested that he forward letters describing their opposition to his policy to the Colonial Office, Browne always dispatched alongside letters of support by members of the Stafford Ministry.Footnote 75 Second, Browne frequently sent home petitions of colonists' support as representations of public opinion, implicitly critiquing the lack of public support for his opponents.Footnote 76 Likewise, when Maori from the community of Otaki in Wellington Province requested Browne forward a petition to the Colonial Office demanding his recall and censuring his actions in Taranaki, he challenged its authenticity, forwarding evidence that suggested that Hadfield had secretly authored this petition.Footnote 77
However, Browne's private correspondence reveals a deep distrust for the very evidence he cited. Writing privately to Chichester Fortescue of the Colonial Office in November 1860, Browne stated that “[p]ublic opinion in a Colony can never be depended on for a moment.”Footnote 78 Indeed, Browne associated the enthusiasm of colonists with a hope that he might reverse the humanitarian tenets that had marked his administration of Maori: “Public meetings have been held and addresses have been showered upon me, but very many of those who have piqued them entertain hopes and expectations which will certainly be disappointed, for I have no intention of reversing the policy I have so steadily adhered to.”Footnote 79 Browne took seriously his role as “a guardian and Trustee for the native race.”Footnote 80 He had no intention of favoring colonists over Maori. What I would suggest, then, is that Browne felt compelled to call attention to colonists' memorials of support as manifestations of colonial public opinion because he feared the metropolitan influence of his Anglican opponents. Dispatches to the Colonial Office were public documents, and they represented one of the few respectable tools at his disposal to justify his actions. As Harriet Louisa remarked in March 1861, she too felt compelled to take an “active part” in promoting Browne's perspective because “there is no one else to put things in their true light.”Footnote 81 For this purpose, Harriet Louisa penned her own pamphlet supporting Browne's actions, which was distributed privately.Footnote 82
The Anglican clergy's partnership with Fox in the General Assembly made the rupture with Browne all the more difficult. According to Browne, Anglican clerics had perceived Fox's party as their “bitterest opponents” prior to the Taranaki War.Footnote 83 Thus the Brownes interpreted the alliance with Fox as expedient and unprincipled. But the bitterness of the Brownes was mirrored by their Anglican opponents. In the privately distributed pamphlet Extracts of letters from New Zealand on the war question, the spouses of prominent Anglican clerics detailed the emotional turmoil caused by the Taranaki War. Like Harriet Browne in her own pamphlet, here Sarah Selwyn, Mary Martin, and Caroline Abraham broke convention by lambasting Browne. What roiled Mary Martin the most was that Browne had pledged “himself to a course of action before he consulted the oldest and most independent men here.”Footnote 84 Caroline Abraham repeated this theme:
One feels that the Governor has been led into a much wider and deeper question than he was aware of when he made his declaration, and when he still more foolishly resolved to stick to it, because he had made it; and one cannot help feeling that he was wrong in never seeking information at least, if not counsel, of those best qualified to give it. One feels sorry for him—for he has not intended to do the wrong, or to make the mischief which follows on it; but we must blame him too, for the responsibility of going to war is a heavy one, and he might have known more if he had sought it.Footnote 85
This pamphlet stressed how New Zealand's Anglican clerics had been caught off guard and felt betrayed by their supposed apprentice.
Throughout the Taranaki War, the Brownes feared the censure of the Colonial Office via the arrival of the English mail, experienced heartache from the hostile local press, and paid close attention to the danger of a potential Maori attack on Auckland by Kingitanga forces.Footnote 86 The couple's reflections also illustrate how wartime debates disrupted their close relations with New Zealand's community of Anglican humanitarians. Prior to the Taranaki War, Charles Southwell's Auckland Examiner had accused Browne of favoring both missionaries and Maori.Footnote 87 He had been correct. Likely, Browne wished that his critics would have acted as John Morgan did. Morgan was one of the few Church Missionary Society missionaries to support Browne's war policy and provided important intelligence regarding the movement of Kingitanga forces during the Taranaki War.Footnote 88 Yet, the very commitment to Maori that drew Browne to the Anglican clerics also guided their opposition. So if Browne and his former Anglican allies shared a commitment to Maori welfare, what differentiated their perspectives?
Taranaki War Pamphleteering
Frederick Alonzo Carrington referred to the Treaty of Waitangi as the “incubus of New Zealand” in his 1860 pamphlet.Footnote 89 He also alleged that the Crown's recognition of Maori ownership over unoccupied “wastelands” breached God's commandment to transform the earth.Footnote 90 Carrington had been the Plymouth Company's chief surveyor in the 1840s, and his hostility to Maori treaty rights probably represented the opinion of many colonists.Footnote 91 But during the Taranaki War, neither the critics of Browne nor his defenders articulated a similar disregard for the Treaty of Waitangi or antagonistic attitude toward Maori. It was simply too impolitic. The remaining portion of this article considers the humanitarian themes within the fifteen pamphlets that emerged from both opponents and proponents of the Waitara purchase.Footnote 92
The wartime pamphlets were crafted in the context of both parliamentary and press debates over the Waitara purchase and the Taranaki War. This transimperial dialogue occurred across time and space as reams of war reportage were transmitted to Great Britain, resonating within influential metropolitan papers and the Houses of Parliament.Footnote 93 Pamphleteers also crafted their narratives in reference to one another, even while varying in tone and focus. Archdeacon Hadfield, the author of three pamphlets, provided the harshest personal attacks against Browne.Footnote 94 Pursuing his own political manifesto, Fox stressed the necessity of transferring control over the Native Department to the Legislative Assembly.Footnote 95 Martin provided the most comprehensive explanation of Maori property tenure, drawing on his experience as the colony's former chief justice.Footnote 96 Conversely, Browne's political allies F. D. Bell, C. W. Richmond, and F. Whitaker challenged the accuracy of Martin's general principles of Maori land tenure.Footnote 97 Both James Busby and George Clarke Sr. debated Martin's interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and the nature of Maori rights.Footnote 98
The Waitara purchase brought to boil long-simmering disputes that had divided New Zealand's settler society from its initiation. At their heart, these were debates over the nature of Maori customary rights. Indeed, the pamphleteers were caught up in describing the Maori world—as it had been before colonization began and the implications of treaty making in 1840. The pamphleteers disagreed on the chiefly stature of Te Rangitake versus Te Teira, the repercussions of the 1830 invasion of Taranaki by Waikato Maori during the Musket Wars, the correctness of Governor Fitzroy's disqualification of the NZC's original land purchases in Taranaki, and the exact nature of Maori chiefly rights preserved by the Treaty of Waitangi.
The opponents of Browne asserted that Te Rangitake was the paramount chief of Te Ati Awa and that the Treaty of Waitangi sanctioned his right to veto the Waitara purchase on the behalf of his iwi.Footnote 99 Related to this argument was the belief that the Te Ati Awa iwi had never lost their claims to Taranaki through the invasion of the region by Waikato Maori because this iwi had never occupied the region, a prerequisite for Maori claims to territory by the right of conquest, or take raupatu. For this reason, Fitzroy had been correct to disallow the NZC's land purchase in Taranaki because the company's payment to Waikato Maori had no meaning. Thus, when Martin summarized the Taranaki War as “a land quarrel,” he explicitly attacked Browne's contention that the Taranaki War represented a defense of British sovereignty.Footnote 100 The Waitara purchase was a dispute over legal rights and obligations, and the use of military force was a gross overreaction. Browne erred by pursuing a land sale with an individual Maori landowner who lacked the right to dispose of communally owned property. This was an attempt to circumvent the customary authority of Maori rangatira and a breach of the treaty.Footnote 101
Browne's allies argued that the Waitara purchase followed the precedent set by all other land sales in New Zealand, whereby the Crown undertook negotiations with only the rightful owners of Maori territories—in this case, Te Teira and the hapu he represented. It was not a new policy.Footnote 102 Further, Browne's allies argued that the historic territorial rights of the Te Ati Awa iwi had been disrupted by the invasion of Waikato Maori in 1830. The NZC's purchases of land in Taranaki had been valid and appropriately recognized by Commissioner William Spain before Fitzroy wrongly disallowed them.Footnote 103 According to this rationale, Te Rangitake had no substantial proprietary interest in the Waitara block nor did the Treaty of Waitangi recognize a chiefly veto that he could have employed if he had been the paramount chief of Te Ati Awa.Footnote 104 Browne's opposition to Te Rangitake, then, represented a defense of both British sovereignty and the chiefly authority of Te Teira against Te Rangitake's illegal opposition on behalf of a land league.
Cutting through this rhetoric, historian Michael Belgrave argues that Browne did act with naiveté.Footnote 105 Prior to the confrontation with Te Rangitake, the Crown had been judicious in its land-purchasing policy, avoiding disputed land where it could not be guaranteed possession or where violence might occur. The Waitara purchase was a new policy, even if Browne may not have known this, because it established a ready context for conflict. According to Belgrave, the critics of Browne oversimplified their definitions of customary Maori title, overstating the constitutional and political autonomy of Maori tribes.Footnote 106 Indeed, both opponents and proponents of the Waitara purchase “understated the complexity of relationships between rangatira, tribal communities and the land in order to argue that rights could be alienated and Maori absorbed into a civilised European world.”Footnote 107 All the pamphlet writers assessed Maori cultural practice with a misplaced certainty, failing to recognize how colonialism had both consolidated and transformed Maori cultural practice. The agents involved in the Waitara purchase—Browne, Te Teira, and Te Rangitake—were attempting something innovative by testing the limits of their authority.Footnote 108
Harriet Louisa believed that Browne's opponents were more successful than his allies in winning the public relations battle over the Taranaki War.Footnote 109 This trend has continued across the twentieth century.Footnote 110 For example, quite recently The Taranaki Report has been unequivocal in its indictment of Browne.Footnote 111 This document was commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal in 1996 to assess the Crown's breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi and closely assesses Browne's motivations for initiating the Waitara purchase and the origins of the Taranaki War. It argues that Browne's pursuit of the Waitara purchase represented an attempt to undercut Maori chiefly authority through a new land-purchasing policy that recognized only individualized Maori title.Footnote 112 Indeed, the report writers argue that the New Plymouth colonists had convinced Browne to discard his former recognition of Maori communal property rights.Footnote 113 The writers also take several points for granted: that Te Rangitake's paramount chiefly authority over Te Ati Awa was obvious and that Browne's endorsement of the benefits of the individualization of Maori title meant that he would utilize the Waitara purchase to impose a new land-purchase policy.Footnote 114
Important evidence calls into question this theory of Browne's duplicity. In 1857, Browne had criticized the land hunger of settlers as “wicked” and “unreasonable.”Footnote 115 Then in 1859 he had repudiated a campaign in Auckland to individualize Maori title. Browne had opposed Hugh Carleton, a local member of New Zealand's Legislative Assembly and the editor of an influential newspaper, the Southern Cross, in his Direct Purchase campaign, which sought to remove the Crown's monopoly over land purchases with Maori. According to Carleton, the creation of a single system of property rights for both Maori and colonists was the best means to prevent the extinction of Maori and raise “them to an absolute equality with Europeans.”Footnote 116 Browne, however, saw through this rhetorical humanitarianism, emphasizing his reticence to risk the impoverishment of Maori by land speculators.Footnote 117 All evidence suggests that Browne's support for the Waitara purchase stemmed from an actual belief that Te Rangitake had no proprietary interest in the Waitara block and that Te Teira represented his own hapu rather than being an individual claimant—information that had been provided to him by the Crown's agents in Taranaki.Footnote 118
This argument is supported by Harriet Louisa's description of a meeting on 24 July 1860 between Browne, Chief Land Commissioner Donald McLean, and members of Edward William Stafford's ministry.Footnote 119 At this meeting, Browne anxiously questioned McLean as to whether Te Rangitake had a valid claim to Waitara and was less than impressed with McLean's equivocal replies. These were not the actions of a confident cabal, but rather reflected Browne's anxiety that “things looked fishy.”Footnote 120 Browne trusted his subordinates overmuch, and his use of military force was preemptive and unjust. But the way in which The Taranaki Report lumps Browne together with land-hungry New Plymouth colonists does not recognize the imperatives that framed his actions. The Taranaki Report assumes that Browne perceived the Waitara purchase and Te Rangitake's opposition with knowledge comparable to our own and then conspired against Maori.
The answer is simpler than a conspiracy. Browne was comfortable with the use of coercion as a diplomatic strategy, and he sought a means to concretely establish British authority over Maori. Legal historian Damen Ward's recent study of Browne's proposed Native Offenders Bill, which was unsuccessfully put forward in 1856 and 1860, illustrates this point.Footnote 121 Through this legislation, Browne proposed a carrot and stick approach to Maori policy, which would have allowed the Crown to punish Maori by banning communication or commerce within an outlawed district. His critics considered this bill to be an example of “European ‘despotism’ rather than British constitutional traditions” because it infringed upon the liberty of friend and foe alike.Footnote 122 Through the Waitara purchase, Browne believed that he could intimidate Te Rangitake into acquiescing because he occupied the moral and legal high ground. This rash action was informed by Browne's knowledge of Maori culture and his assessment of Te Rangitake's character, beliefs that were informed by his humanitarian worldview.
Returning to the frames of reference that defined the views of both opponents and proponents of the Waitara purchase, most pamphleteers articulated their fidelity to the Treaty of Waitangi but differed in their assessments of Maori custom.Footnote 123 For Martin, Te Rangitake's objection to the Waitara purchase originated in the treaty's preservation of both Maori communal property rights and the customary rights of Maori chiefs.
The Treaty of Waitangi carefully reserved to the Natives all then existing rights of property. It recognised the existence of Tribes and Chiefs, and dealt with them as such. It assured to them “full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess, so long as it is their pleasure to retain the same.” This Tribal right is clearly a right of property, and it is expressly recognised and protected by the Treaty of Waitangi. That Treaty neither enlarged nor restricted the then existing rights of property. It simply left them as they were. At that time, the alleged right of an individual member of a Tribe to alienate a portion of the land of the Tribe was wholly unknown.Footnote 124
According to Martin, the treaty had enfolded Maori customary law into the British legal landscape. In a vein familiar to contemporary historical interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi, Martin defended the tribal right of Maori chiefs through a precise definition of the treaty's parallel English and Maori meanings alongside an analysis of the actual implications of the British recognition of Maori leadership.Footnote 125 In so doing, Martin himself codified a system of Maori laws. This interpretation, though, assumed that a clear hierarchy of Maori leadership existed in Taranaki and denied that customary practices had changed since 1840. In defending Maori treaty rights, Martin established that both an English and a Maori code of laws were in operation in New Zealand.Footnote 126
In opposition, James Busby argued that Martin's arguments were inventions, writing, “Sir. W. Martin ascribes to the natives rights which they never possessed, and claims for them privileges to which they have not a shadow of title.”Footnote 127 According to Busby, pre-European Maori custom toward land ownership had been undeveloped and evolved through interactions with Europeans: “In New Zealand, law had no existence.”Footnote 128 There had been only one law before Europeans—“that of the strong arm.”Footnote 129 As Lindsey MacDonald has recently observed, here Busby invoked Lockean political philosophy to conclude that Maori had been living in a “state of nature” without law or property rights prior to European contact.Footnote 130 To Busby, then, Te Rangitake's opposition to Te Teira was a reassertion of pretreaty Maori custom, the coercion of one chief by another through force.Footnote 131
Just as Busby responded to Martin, so too did an infuriated Clarke repudiate Busby. Clarke observed that no one would have paid attention to Busby's pamphlet had he not claimed to be a superior witness of New Zealand history than Martin.Footnote 132 Busby asserted his expertise on the basis of his long-time residence in New Zealand since 1833, his experience as the official British resident until 1840, and his purported role in drafting the Treaty of Waitangi.Footnote 133 Clarke, who had worked as a Church Missionary Society missionary in New Zealand since 1824, took umbrage, writing that Busby neither had an expert knowledge of the Maori language nor had he traveled the length and breadth of New Zealand as Martin had.Footnote 134 Most emphatically, though, Clarke attacked Busby's characterization of Maori precolonial culture as an anarchical blank slate: “It is beyond dispute that the natives had rights; that no one but Mr. Busby has ever questioned those rights, and that had not the British government acknowledged the rights of the aboriginal inhabitants of the soil, the Treaty of Waitangi would never have been agreed to.”Footnote 135 Here Clarke characterized Maori as partners in the creation of British New Zealand and emphasized how the content of the treaty reflected Maori understandings of their rights. As Clarke remarked sarcastically, Busby was more than aware that if he had attempted to claim a Maori resource prior to the Treaty of Waitangi, “he would have very soon have been taught to acknowledge their rights; however unwilling to take a lesson.”Footnote 136 Busby was “in error on every point in which he opposes Sir William Martin's statements and views.”Footnote 137
Yet Busby's pamphlet was significant. He represented a knowledgeable interlocutor of the Treaty of Waitangi to whom Browne could turn following his break with Martin. Indeed, Browne endorsed Busby's opinions so strongly that he personally offered to pay for the pamphlet's publication.Footnote 138 We can see this reliance on Busby within Browne's detailed summary of Maori land tenure for the Colonial Office and within the pamphlet of his brother, Harold Browne, which was compiled in Great Britain from published sources provided by Browne. Harold Browne's assessment of Maori precolonial society owed much to Busby:
All notions of property among savages are lax and vague: among Englishmen they are singularly exact. An inexperienced Englishman is therefore peculiarly unfitted to deal with Maori rights. If, for instance, he learns that individual title, title of an individual proprietor, is seldom, if ever, recognized in New Zealand, he may readily conclude that there is a definite recognition of tribal title, that the title is vested in a tribe, not in a single owner. If he hears of a chief exercising a power of veto over the sale of lands, he falls back on notions of feudal superiority and seigniorial rights. But the truth is, that such definite principles are principles which have grown up with our European civilization, and that they do not belong to the peculiarly wild condition of society, in which New Zealand was forty years ago.Footnote 139
In this passage, Harold Browne emphasized the “wild condition” of precontact Maori society, arguing that it was misleading to characterize Maori land ownership with referents from English history. Maori were not proto-English; therefore, precedents from English history could not be relied on to interpret Maori custom. Indeed, utilizing examples from English history to describe parallels to Maori communal land tenure was exactly the strategy that Martin had employed to contextualize Te Rangitake's claim to Waitara on behalf of Te Ati Awa. Both Browne and his brother believed that “[t]he Maories had no law, but the law of the strongest.”Footnote 140 This view accorded little merit to Maori society.
Here we see how divergent assessments of Maori precolonial sophistication represented the most significant difference between Browne and his Anglican opponents. While Martin defined a clear system of Maori property rights, Browne and his supporters doubted whether such a system could have existed at all. It is safe to conclude that Browne shared a monogenist worldview with his Anglican opponents, which accorded spiritual equality to Maori and Britons alike. But the big tent of mid-nineteenth-century humanitarianism left much room for debate concerning the cultural sophistication of indigenous peoples. At one extreme, some humanitarians rejected all aspects of Maori culture, advocating their complete assimilation; alternatively, other humanitarians recognized some positive Maori cultural attributes and envisioned that the best features of Maori would be maintained in the future.
Clarke was correct that Busby's knowledge of Maori did not equal Martin's. Neither did Browne's. The Anglican critics of Browne tended to have more experience of engagement with Maori people and correspondingly more respect for aspects of Maori culture. Browne never held Maori rangatira with the esteem that his evangelical humanitarian allies did, and his subsequent endorsement of Busby reflected his own particular stadial view of Maori cultural development, which accorded merit to acts of cultural transformation but held little regard for Maori cultural practices that did not parallel English precedents. Further evidence of Browne's stadial worldview can be seen within several articles he authored for Te Karere Maori, which detailed the lessons of England's historical development as a paradigm for Maori development.Footnote 141 As Mark Hickford has shown, both Browne and Te Rangitake felt slighted by each other's failure to acknowledge their rightful authority, and the resulting miscommunication contributed to the Taranaki War's initiation.Footnote 142 It is not controversial to state that Browne did not take Te Rangitake seriously or recognize the complexity of a Maori worldview. However, what we must also understand is that Browne's assessment of Maori cultural inferiority also shaped his perceptions of Maori vulnerability and empowered his own executive mandate. Browne believed that the Waitara purchase embodied his responsibility to protect Maori. The Taranaki War began because of Browne's particular variant of evangelical humanitarianism, not in spite of it.
Conclusions
Important recent work by Lindsey MacDonald and Mark Hickford has argued that debates over the Waitara purchase were essentially arguments over the degree to which Maori iwis had retained their sovereignty under the aegis of the Treaty of Waitangi.Footnote 143 These constitutional histories illuminate how English law constrained interpretations of Maori custom, but they do not dwell on the personality or worldview of Browne. They also do not detail why the ideological points of difference between pamphleteers were so small. However, it is only when we acknowledge the broad usage of humanitarian discourses that we can understand why the reportage of the Taranaki War left metropolitan commentators so confused and unable to discern between rival accounts of Maori history or customary title.Footnote 144 Indeed, over the course of 1860–61, writers in The Times and Saturday Review came to condemn Browne and accused colonists of a “nigger despising temper.”Footnote 145 The credibility of Browne's critics exceeded his own, and appeals on behalf of Maori struck a chord, especially among Britons concerned about imperial expenditures.
The Taranaki War marked the height of humanitarian language's popularity rather than its nadir. True, Anglican clerics were unable to stop the Taranaki War, but what we must remember is that the conflict caught colonists by surprise. Once a resort to arms was made, the only issue that Anglican clerics could legitimately contest related to the war's justification. In this struggle they achieved remarkable success, and some colonists believed that the political influence of Anglican clerics had resulted in the recall of Browne.Footnote 146 It certainly appeared to Harriet Louisa and Browne that their opponents had defeated them.Footnote 147
Though not the subject of this article, it is evident that humanitarian discourses remained prevalent following the outbreak of war between Waikato Kingitanga and British forces in 1863. As Damon Salesa has recently argued, Grey's pursuit of dual campaigns, one preparing for a military conflict and the other implementing a program of new institutions for Maori, was not incompatible.Footnote 148 Salesa's point is that violence itself became viewed by colonists as an agent with which to pursue racial amalgamation in the 1860s. Likewise, Browne conceptualized military force as an appropriate tool to protect the rights of colonists and Maori. Here it is worth recognizing John Stenhouse's argument regarding the general support of Anglican clerics for Grey and the British war effort in 1863, that evangelical humanitarians were opponents of injustice, not British sovereignty, and that they considered Kingitanga a credible military threat to British colonization.Footnote 149 The war in Waikato did not signal the death of humanitarianism in New Zealand as James Belich, Catherine Hall, and Alan Lester have supposed.Footnote 150 Instead, humanitarianism and humanitarian discourses continued to resonate, influencing, for example, the Maori Representation Act of 1867, which enfranchised all Maori men over the age of twenty-one and created four Maori seats within New Zealand's General Assembly. As Tony Ballantyne has shown, too, the popularity of Aryan racial theories in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, which identified the common Indocentric racial origins of both Maori and England's antecedent peoples, continued the legacy of humanitarianism and provided a tangible basis for what colonists perceived to be the privileged status of Maori in comparison to other indigenous peoples.Footnote 151
This narrative has several implications. It calls into question the accepted timeline of humanitarianism's decline throughout the empire. A range of competing humanitarian discourses flourished in colonial New Zealand, buoyed by the political climate in which the colony was formed, Maori engagement with Christianity, colonists' insecurity, and New Zealand's prominent location within networks of imperial communication. New Zealand was very different from Elizabeth Elbourne's and Andrew Bank's description of the Cape Colony, where wars between settlers and local indigenous peoples contributed to the local decline of humanitarian policy by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 152 At the same time, too, this article resonates with other recent work that has illustrated the continued popularity of humanitarianism.
Varied forms of humanitarianism, for example, were articulated in Vancouver Island in the late 1850s and early 1860s, as colonists articulated support for both the recognition of First Nations title and alleged that the eviction and racial isolation of First Nations from the colonial capital of Victoria would facilitate their civilizing reform.Footnote 153 In Victoria, humanitarian sentiments appear to have been linked with colonists' anxiety related to the threat of First Nations violence and ebbed in popularity as this threat decreased. Likewise, Anne O'Brien has recently shown how humanitarianism did not disappear from Australia following the 1830s but became informed in subsequent decades by paternalism; Aborigines were transformed from victims in need of justice to objects of charity.Footnote 154 This research is suggestive of the links among humanitarianism, colonists' anxiety, and the threat of indigenous violence. Future work, then, must continue to rethink both who employed humanitarian discourses and how humanitarian discourses undergirded rather than merely critiqued colonialism.
Finally, we must recognize that the utility of humanitarianism lay in the common ability of British persons to assess cultural difference according to the principles of stadial theory and the fluidity of racial and cultural categories. Both humanitarianism and stadial theory reinforced the imposition of racial hierarchies across the British Empire, often legitimizing the abrogation of indigenous peoples' rights in the name of protection. This evidence for the popularity of a broad spectrum of humanitarian discourses fits well with D. W. Bebbington's argument that the 1850s and 1860s were the highpoint of evangelicalism in Great Britain.Footnote 155 Humanitarian themes were less effectual in protecting indigenous peoples in the late 1850s and early 1860s because both evangelical and rhetorical humanitarians employed common discursive frameworks and often both agreed to limit the legal rights of indigenous peoples on the basis of their perceived lack of cultural sophistication.
