In early twenty-first century New Zealand, national history is enjoying a new popularity. If sales figures can be relied on, the late Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland, 2003) has been a phenomenal commercial success. Since then, Matthew Wright's Reed Illustrated History of New Zealand (Auckland, 2004) and Tom Brooking's The History of New Zealand (Westport, CT, 2004) have appeared, the latter aimed specifically at the international student market. Even prior to the arrival of King's record-breaking volume, the field was already well-covered, with James Belich's two volumes, Making Peoples (Auckland, 1996) and Paradise Reforged (Auckland, 2001), Ranginui Walker's Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou—Struggle without End (Auckland, 1990, 2nd ed., 2004), the revised version of Keith Sinclair's The History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth, 2000), and the two editions of The Oxford History of New Zealand, published in 1981 and 1992, respectively. The appearance of so many national narratives within such a relatively short time begs the question as to why. In postcolonial New Zealand, it would be fair to say there is a good deal of public anxiety about its past, which has in turn fueled a reexamination of the ways that Europeans came to occupy New Zealand and make claims to continued occupancy. Contemporary issues around race and ideals of equality, a reinvigorated critique of New Zealand's “nuclear free” status, and the ongoing challenges wrought by globalization have exposed a deep sense of unease about history and its relationship to the present. At the heart of this disquiet is the status of national identity and concerns over national exceptionality.

Philippa Mein Smith's lively and engaging A Concise History of New Zealand is the latest general history to wrestle with these and other issues. Mein Smith, a historian at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, has produced a text that is, in many respects, head and shoulders above its competitors. While it has an identifiable Canterbury bias (the source of many examples in the book), Mein Smith clearly knows her target audiences and has produced a text that successfully bridges the gap between student and “general” readers, although I am curious to know what differentiates a “concise history” from a single-volume general history such as those mentioned above.

A Concise History of New Zealand does not attempt to offer an alternative interpretation of New Zealand history; instead it is a careful synthesis of the “story” of New Zealand—the isolated archipelago and last habitable landmass colonized by human beings in the southern Pacific—intertwined with recent research on gender, race, environment, and social and cultural history, among other topics. However, this is not a story of emerging national identity or uniqueness; rather, New Zealand is constantly situated in its Pacific, as well as its provincial Australasian, context. There is a strong comparative premise running through the book, no doubt an outcome of the author's longer-term research on the historical relationship and interconnections between New Zealand and its larger neighbor, Australia. Globalization and its antithesis, regionalism, also loom large throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where there is a constant dialectic between internal change and external pressures. The entry of married women into the workforce in the later twentieth century and the local Women's Liberation Movement are therefore part of broader international trends. Mein Smith is also keen to interrogate certain myths that have assumed a quasi-religious status in New Zealand and carefully unpicks these old shibboleths.

The main concerns of the book are reflected in the structure, which follows a clear chronology. The first two of the total of ten chapters are devoted to pre-European Aotearoa New Zealand: refreshingly, it is not until the third chapter that we reach the declaration of British sovereignty in 1840 and organized European settlement. Roughly half of the chapters deal with the twentieth century where periodization is determined more by internal than external events, thus highlighting New Zealand's growing sense of independence. But as noted earlier, this is not a tired narrative of national maturity and postsettler progress: on the contrary, the book is highly skeptical of such claims and, in keeping with its main arguments, constantly emphasizes New Zealand's awareness of its extraterritorial and transnational connections. Mein Smith succinctly captures this attitude when she observes: “Globalisation … demanded new approaches to issues at the heart of how people identify with place and community. Despite the pain of constant experiment, New Zealanders generally embraced the process with alacrity as a way of adjusting to their country's size, remoteness from the rest of the world and slim resources. Globalisation encouraged a broader outlook” (216).

One of the chief attributes of Mein Smith's Concise History is that it engages with and acknowledges the breadth of recent scholarship in the discipline. Indeed, Mein Smith makes a point of isolating lacunae in existing general histories and addressing these by introducing new critical literature. With this text, New Zealand joins the ranks of other nations in the Cambridge Concise Histories series, including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Bolivia, and Brazil. Yet the book is not entirely without its problems. The glossary and time line, while rather conventional, are nonetheless a useful addition—as is the “guide to further reading.” However, the absence of footnotes is not compensated by the essay-style “sources of quotations” located at the end of the text. Surely publishers do not still believe that “general readers” are deterred by footnotes? This minor quibble aside, I shall be recommending this book to my students not only because generally it is sensibly arranged and convincingly argued, but because it relates the story of New Zealand in a way that makes the past seem not only relevant, but essential, to understanding the present. In modern New Zealand, where issues of social injustice remain high on the current political agenda, such a reminder is both timely and instructive.