Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
— Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“If I showed my true feelings I would cry; it’s the best country I have been in.”
— George Bernard Shaw, on New Zealand

Suppose you are the British Empire and you have already made one America.

It has gone poorly.

You sent settlers across an ocean. You gave them charters, governors, land, laws, and a theology of English liberty. They became rich, self-governing, litigious, armed, jealous, and eventually ungrateful. They decided that Englishmen had rights, that they were Englishmen, that Parliament was treating them as something less than Englishmen, and therefore that they would stop being Englishmen altogether. They revolted and built a new republic.

A few decades later, chastened and moralising, you try again at the edge of the world.

By this time, you have already founded a new colony in New South Wales. But it was founded as a dump for convict overflow. You want a respectable destination for respectable folks.

Rather than unstructured waves of fleeing and prickly Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and border clans seeking respite, you send select families and missionaries – before the riff-raff whalers, escaped convicts, and grog-sellers make too much of a hash of it.

You do not send them to an empty land. You find a people who are in many ways a mirror of yours: a seafaring warrior people, a people who remember their own arrival to these lands. These Māori are numerous enough, armed enough, coherent enough, and proud enough that they cannot be ignored.

The result is New Zealand.

David Hackett Fischer’s Fairness and Freedom seeks to answer one question: why did two societies with British roots, settler frontiers, representative government, Protestant moral vocabularies, immigrant populations, and expansionist histories end up with such different moral centres? America’s sacred word is freedom. New Zealand’s is fairness. Americans, Fischer says, do not dream of equality; they dream of wealth. They do not want to get even; they want to get ahead. New Zealanders have much deeper communitarian instincts.

“Freedom” can explain the Declaration of Independence, gun rights, the First Amendment, westward settlement, venture capital, private schools, high inequality, religious pluralism, and why every American political faction believes it is oppressed by a different federal agency.

“Fairness” can explain early women’s suffrage, Māori seats in parliament, social democracy, land reform, rugby etiquette, anti-nuclear policy, and why New Zealanders have evolved a sixth sense for detecting someone getting above themselves.

Fischer’s binary is a useful entry point. But what emerges from his book — and from a broader reading of New Zealand history — is something stranger and deeper. The moral centres of these two nations were not so much chosen as seeded: by who came, by when they came, by the dispatch moment in British imperial history, and by the peoples they found waiting on the other side of the ocean. Selection effects all the way down.

What's missing from his analysis is Australia, which pulls like dark matter in his story. New Zealand is often treated as Australia's little sibling, but that is mostly a trick of maps. It is larger than Great Britain and is "near" Australia only in the Pacific sense: Wellington and Canberra are roughly as far apart as London and Moscow. New Zealand was not an Australian appendix. It was a different settler experiment, run at a different imperial moment, against a different indigenous counterparty.

Your impression of New Zealand might be of a small, cuddly nation — a Hobbit town with a minority Polynesian population. You would not be exactly wrong. But it belies a far stranger history. A nation founded on deep Christian convictions, with an almost frenzied military ethos. A nation that was as far as possible from revolting against her mother country, one that clung to its mother country so tightly Britain had to pry Kiwi fingers off when she abandoned her. One that is still working out who it is in the aftermath.

The book itself

After Albion’s Seed, a 500-page anthropology by Fischer is self-recommending. The charm in one on New Zealand is that it’s clearly born of a personal affection from working and living in the country. As happens when travelling, it also freshly illuminates one’s own home country. When both are Anglo-settler colonies with martial native peoples, the comparisons stack quickly.

The book’s greatest weakness is in its subtitle premise: the framing of America and New Zealand as “open” as opposed to “closed” societies. It’s not that often deployed, and when it is it feels like a flattening. For example, Fischer credits the freeness of Western societies with their victories in the world wars. Apparently the soldiers of “open” societies were more flexible in the field and had higher levels of innovation leading to greater advances in weaponry. These arguments are not fleshed out in depth and are not convincing for reasons that go beyond the scope of this review. But they are hardly essential to the book.

Fischer also spends some time upfront on the etymology and history of the ideas of freedom and fairness. The Puritans’ idea of freedom is gorgeous:

“Other Puritans shared John Cotton's idea of "well-ordered liberty," which John Winthrop defined as the liberty to do "that only which is good." Nathaniel Ward, author of the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, wrote that "all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keep away from us." Dissenters were banished on pain of death if they returned. Three Quakers who came back were hanged on Boston Common.”

Did you know the name “maverick” comes from a family of American nonconformists? One Samuel Maverick irritated the Puritans in Massachusetts; a later Samuel Maverick in Texas refused to brand his cattle, giving his name to any animal that bore no man’s mark.

The etymologies of fairness and freedom are fun, but they aren't the engine of the book. The comparison itself is what pops with surprise. Each country comes into focus when held against the other. Reflected in one another they reveal the contours of deep historical differences that led to fundamental differences in character. That is the method this review extends, with Australia added as a third point of triangulation.

The land of birds

New Zealand’s strangeness precedes human settlement. It is the land of the birds.

Once upon a time giant reptiles dominated most continents, until their annihilation by meteorite. Then followed the age of mammals. New Zealand formed an entirely different island ecosystem deep within the Pacific Ocean. With no snakes or large mammals this island paradise generated bird species of endless size and variety. Birds who knew only a world without ambush.

What a paradise it must have been to its first human inhabitants, the Māori, who landed on its shores around the late 13th century. While Genghis Khan had recently left the largest contiguous land empire in history and King Edward I (Longshanks) quelled rebellions in his domain, the Māori set foot on a vast land populated by flightless birds with no defensive instinct against them or the dogs and rats they brought. Many were wiped out. (More bird species died out after the Europeans arrived. In one case, perhaps fanciful, a single lighthouse keeper’s cat wiped out an island’s entire species of bird.)

Who are New Zealanders?

Selection effects define settler societies. This is vastly underappreciated.

Who comes, where do they come from, and what are the circumstances of their departure and arrival? These questions define the make-up of the new societies and the folkways they seed. Are these settlers a general sample of their communities, or do they over-manifest any virtue or vice? Are they a nation’s intellectual cream, fleeing persecution? Or perhaps its criminal dregs, dumped far away to be made someone else’s problem?

The US selected for persecuted peoples forced to make their way through hostile territories and forge an independence, and then for those seeking a better future in a great land of opportunity. They mainly paid their own way. They cut their life from the earth themselves, rejecting the despotism they fled. Hence America’s love of freedom.

Australia selected initially for convicts and their gaolers, but then for around a century-and-a-half subsidised British settlers with paid passage and land. Subsidised migrants prefer subsidies — one reason for the antipodean trust in the state and its provisions. Influxes of gold prospectors made their mark too, infusing the land with risk-seeking men.

New Zealand was no dumping ground for prisoners, although it was a haven for whalers and scofflaws prior to British colonisation. Its initial settler waves were strictly selected for upright British Christian families. It too subsidised migration to its shores ever since, and attracted its share of gold prospectors. These broad selection effects, coupled with the specific missions which founded it, have shaped its national character.

Just like in Australia, after about a century of largely British immigration, and after the post-WWII collapse of the British Empire and Britain’s turn towards Europe in the 1970s, New Zealand opened its doors to a wider range of European and Asian immigration, and its face has dramatically changed over the last few decades.

The other selection effect isn't who came, but when. The Britain that settled the US in the 1600s was not the Britain that settled New South Wales in 1788, which was not the Britain that settled New Zealand after 1840.

The Britain of the 1600s was grappling with the Reformation, questions of tyranny and monarchical versus parliamentary power. The American revolution and the pertinent questions at her founding were about freedom.

By 1788, Britain was more liberal, fermenting in the Enlightenment. By 1840 it was deep into its liberal progressive arc, having abolished slavery and passed the Reform Act of 1832. So South Australia (settled in 1836) and New Zealand (1840) have more in common than South Australia and her eastern Australian counterparts. South Australia and New Zealand were settled by free men and women, with broadly equal gender ratios. They were settled by corporate missions and with educated populaces. It’s no coincidence that South Australia and New Zealand were the earliest grantors of the franchise to women and innovators in electioneering (South Australia pioneered the secret ballot).

The eastern Australian states were first populated mainly by men — convicts and their captors, then prospectors amidst the gold rush. Australian colonies’ highest GDP per capita in the world in the 1880s was flattered by the skewed gender ratio: disproportionate numbers of male prospectors and agricultural labourers meant fewer dependents in the mix and far higher labour participation.

But the question of who New Zealanders are cannot be answered without reference to its first inhabitants.

The Māori

“In some instances by the late 1820s, Maori used the smoked heads of slain enemies to trade for further muskets… [M]uch of the agricultural labour was undertaken by slaves. By the early 1830s, too, some slaves were being tattooed and killed specifically for the trade in smoked heads…”

— Fairness and Freedom by David Hackett Fischer

“[T]his here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the South Seas, where he bought up a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ‘em but one…”

“For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.”
— Moby Dick

The British were not the first people to settle New Zealand.

Auckland today is the largest Polynesian city in the world. In New Zealand there is a Māori term for non-Māori — ‘Pākehā’. New Zealand may be the only settler society in the world where whites go by the name given to them by the natives. Perhaps it is less ubiquitous in practice than it is in history books. But to even have such a word in the public discourse is unthinkable in Australia or the US.

New Zealand’s almost million Māori are descended from around 70 women who arrived 30 generations ago. They emerged from the Pacific Islands where they had a long seafaring tradition. They are believed to have even canooed to the Americas where they may have introduced the coconut and from whence they brought back the sweet potato. Such long voyages selected for larger, more muscular bodies, which had an advantage in maintaining body temperatures at sea. So contiguous are the Māori with their Pacific Island forebears that when Captain Cook first landed in New Zealand with his famous Tahitian priest-navigator Tupaia, they were able to converse. The Māori were split into tribes but shared a language and a martial culture. Europeans found much to admire in their martial spirit, even if their tendency to eat their rivals horrified them. The Māori regarded Cook as having aristocratic qualities, and in turn Cook thought them “of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition”.

The first Europeans to find New Zealand, Dutch explorers under the command of Abel Tasman in 1642, were attacked and killed by the local Māori. The Dutch called the place Murderers Bay. On the same journey Tasman discovered Tasmania (calling it Van Diemen’s Land).

In 1772 when the French navigator Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne landed in the Bay of Islands, the Māori killed and ate him and two dozen of his men. A year later around ten British sailors from the HMS Adventure — Cook’s second voyage to New Zealand — were found butchered and prepared for a meal in Queen Charlotte Sound.

On the same voyage with Cook, Tupaia was unable to converse with the natives of Australia. These natives appeared as distant to Tupaia’s people as they did to the Europeans. That is because they were. Arriving some tens of thousands of years ago across Eurasian land bridges that had since been swallowed by the sea, they dispersed over time across a vast continent, splitting into further branches of men. The reddish Tasmanians were distinct again by virtue of their own separation from the mainland as the Bass Strait swallowed the connecting land. Accordingly, the Australian natives did not share a common tongue and their customs varied significantly region to region.

This was a land not of birds but of large mammals and reptiles and marsupials, many of which were hunted by these men to extinction. In 1697, the first Englishman to set foot on Australia called them “the miserablest people in the world”. (Although Arthur Phillip, the head of the First Fleet and first governor of New South Wales, did name Sydney’s northern prominent “Manly” after the fine native gentlemen he encountered there.) Tupaia the Tahitian shared this sentiment, the shape and manners of these people neither legible nor impressive to him. One suspects that the natives in Australia were fortunate that the warrior sea peoples across the Tasman never made it over, although the Australian Aborigines did have projectile weapons in their arsenal — the boomerang and throwing spear — whereas the Māori did not (until the musket arrived with the British). One reason Britain chose to dump its convicts in New South Wales and not New Zealand was because they judged these natives to be more benign.

In time, the Māori assumed their place in New Zealand’s national fabric through sheer weight of numbers and blood, waging a series of wars in the 19th century that demanded the deployment of thousands of ‘lobsterbacks’ from Britain. Australia’s Aborigines were too disunited and spread out to appear too menacing to the British. Hence the doctrine of terra nullius, or “nobody’s land” in Latin, which whilst mightily convenient for British settlement, also reflected the British view of how the continent was populated. There was some dodgy Australian ‘treaty’-making — most infamously in the case of John Batman, who traded some scissors and some flour for around 600,000 acres of land in Victoria to circumvent Crown authority and prove he had a private contract in place for parts of today’s Victoria. But Australia had nothing like the united front shown at the Treaty of Waitangi with the Māori, where the Crown sent a representative and 500 chieftains signed (amidst much confusion). Whilst prominent in New Zealand mythology and self-conception, this treaty was questionable in its meaning and efficacy and continues to morph in New Zealand political and cultural lore. Who would the New South Wales governor even have treated with? Australian colonies themselves weren’t united until Federation over a century later. Its indigenous tribes were too different, too dispersed across a vast, tough continent to unite in the way the Māori did. Australian Aborigines succumbed more devastatingly to disease, to the sheep that conquered their lands, and to sporadic conflicts with settlers than to the resolute arm of the state, which ignored them for the most part and assumed their eventual extinction (it was also assumed wrongly that the Māori would disappear).

The Māori thought of themselves not too dissimilarly to the British: a seafaring warrior immigrant people. They did not consider the arrival of others as fundamentally illegitimate and as alien as the British appeared to the Australian Aborigines. As powerful seafaring peoples with martial records, born of island nations, it is perhaps not surprising that the Māori and British shared much mutual admiration from the start despite their many differences.

Māori began the long tradition of work travel in the 1790s as they joined the whaling crews travelling through Sydney as excellent seafarers. Moby Dick’s Queequeg was based on a Māori seaman Melville met.

The greatest immediate impact on the Māori by British settlement was the introduction of the musket. Just like the introduction of the horse in the Americas gave rise to the Comanche empire and others that annihilated neighbouring peoples, so the muskets created a brief if overwhelming advantage to certain Māori tribes, resulting in the Musket Wars (1806 - 1845). The Māori Musket Wars devastated local populations, reducing the Māori from around 100,000 at European arrival at the turn of the 19th century to around 60,000 by mid-century. Fischer writes:

“Many hundreds of men, women and children were killed, and many more enslaved. Some small tribes were all but wiped out, with only one or two families surviving the fighting and its aftermath of executions.”

“Some of these actions involved considerable cruelty. In the wake of battles, for example, the captured killers of warriors might be turned over to the widows of the men they had slain… The resulting deaths were prolonged and painful. At Waitangi Beach on Chatham Island, the Ngāti Wai hapu of Ngāti Mutunga laid Moriori women staked to the ground alongside one another and left them to die slowly.”

Second in devastation to the Musket Wars came disease. The arrival of Europeans was far less calamitous to the Māori than it was to American natives or to the Australian Aborigines. Disease was the great harbinger of death in both places. Millions of native Americans — 70 to 90% — were killed by new diseases like smallpox. Around 80% of Australian Aborigines are estimated to have died soon after white settlement. Pestilence is estimated to have killed 20,000 of around 60,000 Māori by mid-19th century — decades after European arrival. Why the delay? It was only after the Māori asked the British Crown to extend its protection over them to end the Musket Wars that they united, and disease more easily spread. Why were European diseases so much less devastating to the Māori? Several reasons. First, timing. Vaccinations were invented in 1796, and missionaries and administrators did their best to inoculate Māori. Second, the Māori were isolated from global populations for far less time than native Americans and native Australians. The former arrived over the Eurasian land bridge some 10,000 years ago, while the native Australians had tens of thousands of years in isolation. The Māori were isolated for a few hundred years, and so were probably less vulnerable to a range of the diseases brought by the Europeans.

Māori tribes are named and conceived as branches of a shared genealogy, tracing descent from common ancestors who arrived in New Zealand on a handful of founding canoes — kin-groups within a wider confederation rather than discrete peoples. Aboriginal Australians, by contrast, spoke hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages and functioned as separate nations across the continent, with no unifying origin narrative binding them. This difference had political consequences: in 1858, Māori appointed a king — a deliberate parallel authority to the British monarch, intended to consolidate Māori sovereignty against Crown encroachment. Comparable pan-tribal unity remains unlikely for Aboriginal Australians.

The story of native American people plucks elements of both. Native American tribes varied greatly across the vast continent and were often unintelligible and brutal to each other. The peaceful people suffered most, while the most fearsome like the Comanche and Lakota controlled vast territories for well over a century. Ultimately destroyed by advances in settler weaponry and the destruction of the bison on which they relied, and cheated out of countless treaties, they were ultimately reduced and subsumed into the American behemoth.

Australian Aborigines tended to be brutalised by lawmen and settlers in gangs and raiding parties. The Māori fought two wars against the British. And whilst there were brutal acts and sadists on both sides, the fighting was more or less ‘clean’ in the way of war and filled with mutual respect. In the case of one British sadist, a Captain Lloyd, who was caught and had his head baked in the tradition of the Māori, “[t]his episode was regarded by General James Alexander as a lamentable lapse of British leadership and a splendid feat of soldiering by his Maori opponents”.

Māori martial culture could be quite colourful. “Excrement eater” was a self-acclaimed title — a warrior who would gobble up the whole of his enemies, including his excrement. “It is better to fight and die like a shark than an octopus,” a Māori saying goes. Better predator than prey.

The Māori gained considerable political leverage early on. Before 1867, New Zealand ran a colour-blind franchise that in practice locked Māori out: you needed individual property title to vote, and Māori land was communal, so despite comprising a meaningful part of the population they had almost no say in parliament. The Māori Representation Act 1867 was the settler state’s workaround: it created four dedicated Māori electorates and let Māori men over 21 vote in them regardless of land title, with the first MPs elected in 1868. It was a political pressure-release valve in the context of the wars with the Māori at the time. It was sold as enlightened inclusion and officially designed as a five-year stopgap, but it also neatly capped Māori power at four seats no matter how many Māori there were, which is why it was easy to extend in 1872 and make permanent in 1876. The basic structure survives: the old four seats lasted until proportionality was introduced in 1996, and today there are seven Māori electorates whose number rises or falls with how many Māori voters choose the Māori roll. Despite these limitations, Māori men over 21 received the vote in 1867 — twelve years before non-Māori men in New Zealand, who had to wait for the abolition of the property qualification in 1879. So it remains a serious reflection of the accommodation and liberalness of the British of the time, as well as the hard-fought gains of the Māori through the wars of the period.

New Zealand fielded Māori battalions in WWI and WWII. A Māori pilot was first to shoot down a Japanese plane over Singapore. Australia had no equivalent, mostly barring Aborigines from service.

After WWII, the Māori began a process of urbanisation, creating new opportunities for their communities and increasingly mixing New Zealand’s ethnically parallel societies. Such a convergence has not happened in Australia. Partly this is due to the Māori’s far greater proportional population, but also to Australia’s misguided policy of subsidising Aboriginal confinement to desolate communal conditions where they are barred from owning private property.

Colonisation

New Zealand’s colonisation was conceived in the fecund mind of one brilliant heiress-abductor, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, while he languished in prison for his misguided jaunt. Seeking to marry labour and untapped lands, his ideas would lead to the colonisation of New Zealand and of South Australia, each undertaken via commercial enterprises with strong Christian missionary strictures. These were enterprises in social engineering born of a confident, liberal phase of the British Empire. This Anglo sense of technocratic competence and liberal temperament have permeated Australian and New Zealand sensibilities since.

In some ways the colonisation of New Zealand resembled more the colonisation of the Americas than of Australia: warrior native tribes armed with powerful new technology and split into allies and rivals in turn, forced to treaty following war; and pockets of concentrated settler ethnic heterogeneity (Otago, like Nova Scotia, was largely Scottish; Britain annexed French settlements in both lands).

In other ways, New Zealand resembled Australia. The colonisation of South Australia sprung from the same mind; they both began life as military regimes; and the waves of immigrants to New Zealand mirrored those to Australia: subsidised settlers, broken by spikes in gold rush prospectors. New Zealand, like Australia, unquestioningly stood by Britain in her global wars, and never broke from the motherland in the way of the American Revolution. At the Federation of Australia’s colonies, there was even a provision for New Zealand in the Australian constitution which remains to this day. But ultimately, New Zealand stuck its own course. Its particular native population and particular strands of settler communities set the tone for its particular national character.

It was Sir James Stephen who actually made the decision to settle New Zealand. As permanent undersecretary of the Colonial Office from 1836 to 1847, he oversaw the British Empire over this period. This was not the British Empire that had thrust itself upon the Americas. It was an Empire well into its idealistic phase. Ruling from 14 Downing Street, Stephen was a powerful man who “did not wish to add New Zealand to the empire mainly because he believed that it rightfully belonged to its Maori inhabitants, whom he regarded as an admirable people.”

But then he changed his mind, writing in 1839:

“The colonisation of New Zealand is if not an expedient, at least an inevitable measure. It is, in fact, colonised already by British subjects of the worst possible character, who are doing the greatest possible amount of evil with the least possible amount of good.”

He had a clear purpose:

“The two Cardinal points to be kept in view in establishing a regular colony in New Zealand are, first, the protection of the aborigines, and secondly the introduction among the colonists of the principle of self-government, to the utmost extent in which that principle can be reconciled with allegiance to the crown.”

The timing of this was critical. After America’s rebellion, Britain would never again tax its colonies primarily for revenue to London. And the sweep of Enlightenment led to the abolition of slavery across its empire in 1833, and the establishment of all sorts of societies for the protection of aborigines. New Zealand would be one of the few colonies in any empire established with no slavery, no penal colony, no serfdom of any kind. New Zealand “was a deliberate act of moral choice by British statesmen”, writes Fischer.

The seeds of Australia were established just prior to this wave of noblesse across the empire. It too was in part a reaction to the American revolution — Britain needed a new place far away to dump its excess convicts. Nevertheless, as Australian convicts earned their freedom, Australia too would be seeded with the moral zeitgeist of these times — of utilitarian instincts, ideas of ‘a fair go’, social justice, and equality.

Settlement: Christian utopias, pirates, and speculators

“In many ways the adventurers of Kororareka and the Pilgrims of Plymouth could not have been more different, but in one way they were the same. Both were heirs to English traditions of self-government, individual rights, mutual responsibilities, and the rule of law. These small bands of British settlers introduced that heritage to North America and the South Pacific, and the world is much the better for it.”

— Fairness and Freedom by David Hackett Fischer

“If Dunedin is a stolid, wholesome Scots lassie, Christchurch a hockey captain-type of English girl, Wellington a slightly dowdy secretary, modern Auckland is a perky gold-digger, over-talkative but full of ideas, mildly interested in the arts and much in love with life.”

— John Cowie Reid, 1964
“My efforts are aimed at establishing the Kingdom of God upon Earth.”
— New Zealand Prime Minister Michael Savage

In 1838, just prior to sanctioned settlement, there were some two thousand English-speaking peoples on the islands. They were mainly dregs — escaped convicts, sealers, whalers, and other ne’er-do-wells, including traders benefitting from the Māori Musket Wars raging since 1806. A French adventurer arrived with colonists in 1837 claiming to be the Feudal Proprietor of New Zealand.

The largest English-speaking settlement before 1830 was Kororareka, now Russell in the Bay of Islands. Fischer writes:

“Mariners throughout the South Seas knew it as “the Beach.” Missionaries called it the “hellhole of the Pacific” and the “cesspool of the islands.” Kororareka was crowded with grog shops, brothels, ship chandlers, and as many as five hundred European and Polynesian inhabitants, all chasing the main chance. In 1836, a traveller reckoned that it had “a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe.”

“Kororareka was a rough town, but not without order. Its English-speaking inhabitants drew up a covenant called the Kororareka Association of 1838, which was remarkably similar to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. They agreed to elect a president and council, to live under “equal laws” enacted by their own consent, and to be judged by their peers in courts of their own creation. They also bound themselves to a web of mutual obligations. Every member of the association was required to arm himself with a musket, a bayonet, a brace of pistols, a cutlass, and sixty rounds of ball cartridge. The bearing of arms was a right and a responsibility.”

The new settlements that would replace this were less a single colonial project than a sequence of intense, self-conscious migrations — each one a cultural experiment with its own utopian logic. Wakefield provided the blueprint. Discovering in prison the “gross injustice” of English institutions, he imagined New Zealand as a remedy: a society built on “social order and natural justice,” in which talent — not birth — would rise.

Wakefield proposed to found separate colonies in New Zealand for each of moderate Anglicans, Methodists, High Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Jewish Zionists. All but the Catholic and Jewish colonies eventuated.

Wellington was the first proving ground. 1,500 settlers arrived by mid-1840 and the place was rigidly stratified from the start, dominated by a small elite closely tied to the British gentry. They brought with them hierarchy, propriety, and a churchly seriousness. Yet the population was volatile, crime was high, and religion fractious; Wakefield’s vision of an orderly, educated colonial society repeatedly met the messier realities of a raw frontier town.

New Plymouth, by contrast, grew from the “Taranaki Mob,” a network of kin from Devon, Yorkshire, and Cheshire — mostly middling farmers, many Unitarians — who transplanted their tight rural world whole. They prized fairness and justice learned from their own exclusion at home, and they recreated in Taranaki a hard-working, cohesive agricultural colony. But land hunger quickly drove conflict with Māori, and by the 1850s the same families were deeply entangled in the transactions and antagonisms that would ignite the Taranaki Wars.

“Of absolutely idle people we have none, and the settlement has the appearance of a thriving and industrious community. It will be a beautiful villagy sort of country, wherein the population will be principally farmers and well-doing peasants, with a sprinkling of large landowners, professional men, and shopkeepers.”

— Letter to Britain from a resident of New Plymouth in 1843

Canterbury was something else again: an Anglican utopia conceived by John and Charlotte Godley. It may have been inspired by a sermon delivered on 14 July 1833, when churchman John Keble delivered at Oxford a message called National Apostasy: “He was unhappy about Catholic emancipation in Ireland, deeply distressed by liberalism, troubled by modernity, and sorely vexed by secular reform.” The Anglican utopia they sought to build would be founded on emigrants of the utmost character. The gender ratio was roughly even. Applicants in their twenties and married couples were preferred.

“Each emigrant was required to submit a letter of recommendation from his vicar, testifying that “the applicant is sober, industrious and honest, and that he and all his family are amongst the most respectable of their class in the parish.””

Godley himself despised the “derivation of power from below” and argued that a colony must be founded on duty, good conduct, and fair social order. Canterbury’s settlers thus arrived as a hand-picked God-fearing community seeking to build the Kingdom of God in their new home. Accordingly, these Canterbury Pilgrims named their capital Christchurch.

“I would rather be governed by a Nero on the spot than by a board of angels in London, because we could if worst came to worst, cut off Nero’s head, but we could not get at the board in London at all.”

— John Godley, 1851

Then came Otago, a Scottish Presbyterian project under the Burns and Cargill families. In its first decades, more than 80% of its settlers were Scots; Dunedin was, in effect, a transplanted Lowlands town, along with its clan structures. Half were women or girls, and they were more educated and religious than those they left behind. The Kirk — stern, egalitarian, and disciplined — anchored everything. Settlers who did not fit in had a miserable time. Wives were the moral arbiters. This “new Scotland” long kept its distinctly Scottish flavour, from church life to education to politics. This settlement too was to be a “godly experiment”.

“It was severe in its moral code, but serious in its intellectual purposes… They were tough, hard, difficult people, but also upright and strong-willed, with a high sense of justice and moral purpose.”

Finally, Auckland stood apart: pluralistic, improvised, and commercially driven. Its settlers were mixed — English, Irish, American whalers, Australians, traders — and its growth was haphazard but energetic. Logan Campbell, the city’s patriarch, embodied this openness. He wrote about his city:

“The whole and entire object of everyone here is making money, the big fishes eating the little ones.”

Perhaps like Sydney today.

A Scotsman turned colonial entrepreneur, Campbell bought up real estate with associates and prospered in the subsequent land boom, and profited by owning breweries through the downturn. Years later he remembered that “nearly every one of the young capital’s first merchants came to grief and were blotted out.” He invested his considerable fortune into public works, and had great admiration for the Māori. Auckland never cohered around a single founding ideal except perhaps for the pursuit of wealth.

Together, these settlements formed a mosaic of intentions and contradictions — utopias of class harmony, moral reform, Scottish piety, English hierarchy, and colonial enterprise. Each strove to build a better society, colliding with the realities of the land, with Māori, and with their own imported illusions.

Fairness is not softness: a deep military ethos

“Where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand. We are only a small and a young nation, but we are one and all a band of brothers, and we march forward with a union of hearts and wills.”

— New Zealand Prime Minister Michael Savage announcing war in 1939

If the settlers of New Zealand were chosen for character, the men who governed them were chosen for nerve. For the first quarter or so of both New Zealand and Australia’s settled histories they were ruled by military juntas. The first twelve governors of New South Wales (1788–1855) were all military men. Similar in New Zealand. These men fought in the Napoleonic Wars and the Americas; they served in India and the Caribbean. They rode the sense of victory at the peak of British Empire during the Victorian age. These men were also fired by a keenly-felt Christian zeal.

William Hobson was New Zealand’s first governor. He entered the navy at ten. He was once captured by pirates, escaped, and hunted his captors to death. He had a Christian zeal that he channelled to the creation of New Zealand. He was an iron-handed commander, claiming sovereignty over French settlers at Akaroa, American sealers on Stewart Island, and German missionaries in the Chatham Islands. He entered into the Treaty of Waitangi in a move towards peaceful co-existence with the native Māori.

After dying of a stroke, he was succeeded by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, an intellectual aristocrat who made his career in the Royal Navy. He dealt justly with the Māori. He abolished customs duty, claiming to establish the first “true and beautiful” system of free trade in the world. After he was recalled to England he largely invented the science of “weather forecasting”, a term he coined. When a report into his efforts to predict Britain’s weather found his predictions about as accurate as a coin flip, he killed himself. A nobler technocrat there scarcely ever was.

It was not just New Zealand’s military men that impressed with their fine characters. Bishop George Augustus Selwyn “walked across much of the North Island and sailed his own boat through a large part of Melanesia. One crusty old salt said that ‘to see the Bishop handle a boat was almost enough to make a man a Christian.’”

From the start, British missionaries liked the Māori. In his appreciation of the natives he ordered all his clergy to learn Māori. His vision of Christianity embraced everyone — even Americans, “a severe test of Selwyn’s ecumenical spirit”. This is Samuel Marsden, a leading Anglican priest in Australia during the early period:

“The more I see of these people, the more I am pleased with and astonished at their moral ideas, and characters. They appear like a superior race.”

Sir George Grey, perhaps the strongest of New Zealand’s early leaders, was also a soldier and an adventurer. Early in his military duties in Ireland he was repulsed by the grubby and “un-Christian” work of extracting taxes from poor Irish peasants. Twice shipwrecked, he was appointed governor of South Australia at 29. Unlike New South Wales’ first Governor Arthur Phillip, who refused to retaliate when he was struck in the shoulder by a spear from an Aborigine, Grey shot the Aborigine who transfixed him with three quick spears. He was struck with grief by the encounter. As governor of New Zealand he learned Māori, and wrote a book in Māori of their legends and traditions (it goes without saying there is no such equivalent ruler in Australia). He wanted to govern them wisely and thought the hoopla over alleged native wisdom overdone:

“I believe that the ignorance which has prevailed regarding the mythological systems of barbarous or semi-barbarous races has too generally led to their being considered far grander and more reasonable than they really were.”

Grey avoided facing the formidable Māori directly in battle. Instead he cut off their supply of muskets, isolated the tribes, and acquired more land from them than anyone in New Zealand’s history.

Despite his own infidelities, when he suspected his wife of fancying another man he refused to speak to her for 36 years.

In 1849 Grey scaled the snowy slopes of Mount Ruapehu, accompanied only by a few Māori who carried his bags. There in isolation he drafted New Zealand’s Constitution. Ratified by the British parliament with few amendments, it remained in place for 134 years until 1986. Not quite Moses on Mt Sinai, but regardless a tribute to the man’s fortitude.

And so self-government and the rule of law came to New Zealand from above, granted, as in Australia, rather than wrested, as in the US. Forged by men with deeply Christian convictions, sincere altruism, and a sense of duty and fairness, even when in practice their actions were often deeply unfair, as with the British Empire itself.

The selection of settlers and the character of their early leaders produced a country with an unusually pugnacious foreign policy for its size. We tend not to see this today, because the popular memory of New Zealand’s 20th-century military posture is filtered through one event: its decision in the 1980s to go nuclear-free.

In 1985 French intelligence agents were caught planting bombs on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, sinking the ship and killing a photographer. In 1987 the country passed legislation barring nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships from its waters. President Reagan effectively suspended ANZUS treaty obligations in response. The episode burnished a reputation for principled neutrality that has stuck.

It is a misleading image. For most of New Zealand’s settled history it was anything but neutral. It was, in fact, one of the more bellicose Anglo nations on a per-capita basis.

Like Britain, which saw itself as a natural leader across remote parts of the world, both Australia and New Zealand inherited this sense of chosenness, acting as regional powers in their own right. In the late 19th century this even took the form of a joint ‘Monroe Doctrine for the South Pacific’.

In 1887 New Zealand annexed the Kermadec Islands; the Cook Islands and Niue Island in 1901; and the Tokelau Islands in 1925. Hawaii, Fiji, and Tonga were also initially going to be part of a federation of Pacific islands including New Zealand. On the outbreak of WWI, when New Zealand occupied Germany’s West Samoa, it was the first Allied occupation of the war. (New Zealand knew nothing of German forces on Samoa, and when the New Zealand government asked London for details it was referred to Whitaker’s Almanack, which contained nothing of the kind.) In 1980, New Zealand worked with Australia and the US to bring down the Marxist government of the New Hebrides.

A greater proportion of New Zealanders fought in South Africa’s Boer War than in Britain herself. The official British history of the Boer War states that New Zealand had “the best mounted troops in South Africa.” (Māori were asked not to join the Kiwi detachments, as it was considered improper for them to battle whites.) In 1902 parliament passed a law requiring military instruction in every New Zealand school. In 1909, it enacted compulsory military service. By contrast, Australia held two referenda for conscription during WWI and lost both times. More than 40% of New Zealand’s military-aged men served in WWI. They were regarded as unruly but top-tier combatants. For their ferocity, they suffered amongst the highest casualty rate as a proportion of population of any combatant nation in WWI. Despite this momentous national injury, in 1922 when Britain came close to war again with Turkey, over 14,000 New Zealanders overran recruitment stations eager not to miss the show.

German General Rommel took note of his skirmishes with the Kiwis in North Africa:

“They were such a thorn in Rommel’s side that the German commander ordered a special effort to destroy them… Rommel wrote, “The fighting between my forces and the New Zealanders grew to an extraordinary pitch of violence, and my headquarters was soon ringed by burning vehicles.” The New Zealanders lost 1,600 men to Rommel, and many more to the Royal Air Force, which kept bombing them by mistake. That night, Freyberg found a weak point in the German lines and ordered a wild bayonet charge in the moonlight. In the fierce fighting that followed, Freyberg himself was severely wounded, but the New Zealanders broke out and escaped to fight again. Three of Rommel’s best divisions were “so worn down that they also were forced to retreat to the west.” It was a brilliant feat of combat leadership and infantry fighting.”

“After the war… Rommel and Mellenthin wrote of Freyberg with respect and even affection as an “indomitable commander,” and regarded his New Zealand Division as “among the elite of the British army.” Rommel added, “I should have been very much happier if it had been safely tucked away in our prison camps instead of still facing us.”

“Why are you New Zealanders fighting?” Rommel asked. “This is a European war, not yours. Are you here for the sport?” Clifton was astonished by the question… ‘The British Commonwealth fights together. If you attack England, you attack Australia and New Zealand too.’” Rommel was as baffled by that answer as Clifton had been by the question. He made no comment, except to wish his prisoner the best of luck.”

“Immediately after the interview, Brigadier Clifton politely excused himself, climbed out through a lavatory window (to Rommel’s amused resignation), made his way back to his unit, and went on to other adventures in the war.”

A classic Kiwi move – fiercely patriotic left hook followed by a cheeky right. Kiwi soldiers, like their Australian counterparts, riled the British in their indifference to military protocol. When one senior British officer complained to General Freyberg that New Zealand troops failed to salute him, Freyberg replied, “Ah yes, but if you wave to them, they’ll wave back.”

The Wing-Commander of a Royal Air Force detachment sent to the Soviet Union in 1941 to support the Soviets in their defence against the German invasion was a New Zealander. Wing-Commander Henry Ramsbottom-Isherwood and three of his men were the only non-Soviet servicemen during World War II to receive the Order of Lenin. On their first sortie, on 12 September 1941, they shot down three German planes for the loss of one. Wing 151 conducted 365 sorties before its mission ended in November 1941.

New Zealand’s greatest hero in World War II was Captain Charles Upham. He was the only combatant to win the Victoria Cross twice. He fought with terrible bloodlust that at times appalled his men. But after battle he would be seen moving among the Germans administering care. He represented a New Zealand ideal of manhood: a hard but gentle man, and fair.

New Zealand never left Britain. Britain abandoned New Zealand.

For most of their histories, both Australians and New Zealanders vied to be the people ‘more British than the British’. Probably, the award goes to the Kiwis. Unlike the Australians, who once had a robust Republican movement and in Federation exercised an independent posture, New Zealanders never really cared for independence, showing remarkably little appetite for separation from the Crown.

In 1909, at the Committee of Imperial Defence, the British Admiralty — in a sop to Australian agitation around its vulnerability to the Japanese in the Pacific — proposed independent units to Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Their respective reactions are instructive. Canada could hardly care less; it was protected by the American Monroe Doctrine. The Australians were delighted that after years of agitation they would have increased independent means of defence. But New Zealand was reluctant. In the words of Neville Meaney in The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14:

“Sir Joseph Ward, the Dominion’s premier, regretted the concession to national independence. He had not shifted one iota from the ‘One Empire, One Flag, One Fleet’ position. He considered that contributions to the Royal Navy was still the preferable course.”

Any deviation from being an indistinguishable part of the British Empire was anathema to the Kiwi.

In 1931, Britain’s Parliament granted full legal independence to New Zealand, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State. All were quick to ratify its terms except New Zealand. It took 16 years for New Zealand to ratify the Statute of Westminster, and even then Prime Minister Peter Fraser said the Bill “strengthened the ties between the various parts of the Commonwealth and ourselves in New Zealand and the Mother-country.” During the debate, National Party MP Frederick Doidge said, “With us, loyalty is an instinct as deep as religion.”

New Zealand’s moment of national awakening came when Britain abandoned her. 1 January 1973, a day historian James Belich calls “a black-letter day in New Zealand history.” Fischer writes:

“It was the date when Britain entered the European Economic Community and unilaterally ended long-standing economic relations with her colonies. As late as 1950, Britain had bought nearly 70 percent of New Zealand’s exports. After Britain joined the European Community in 1973, that number fell to 7 percent. New Zealand farmers found themselves competing at a disadvantage for markets in the “mother country” as Britain and other European economies aggressively subsidized their own farmers.”

Worse than the material injury was the moral one. Twice New Zealand had marched to Britain’s defence — in 1914 and 1939 — at terrible cost. And whilst neither Australia nor New Zealand hesitated in answering the call of Britain in war, New Zealand left her troops in the European theatre when Australia recalled hers ahead of the Japanese threat — a difference that caused some tension between the two allies in the years that followed. Now they were cast off without ceremony. The sense of betrayal was sharpest among those who had been most loyal: the more-British-than-the-British. As one New Zealand leader put it to Fischer, “We envy your Declaration of Independence from the mother country. As for us, our mother left home.”

Only in 1986 did the Constitution Act formally end any remaining UK parliamentary power.

Immigration

“The Te Āti Awa chief Te Wharepouri told William Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon, that he had participated in the sale of land to the New Zealand Company expecting about ten Pākehā to settle around Port Nicholson, one for each pa. When he saw the more than 1,000 settlers who stepped off the company’s first fleet of immigrant ships, he had panicked. The spectacle would have seemed like an invasion of extraterrestrials. It was beyond anything that Wharepouri had imagined.”

— Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand

In 2023 over 250,000 migrants arrived in New Zealand.

What was once an alien invasion is today a Tuesday morning.

Like its settler-colony peers Australia and the US, New Zealand has taken its migrants in waves. Prior to WWII, it was a deeply British culture. The Penguin History of New Zealand illustrates this with a couple of fun anecdotes: one about a local knocking out a man on a bus in 1936 for the offence of speaking Norwegian, and another about how a few Indian workers spawned the creation of the White New Zealand League in the 1920s.

The vast majority of migrants to New Zealand until the 1970s were from Great Britain. After 1974, annual immigration from Great Britain fell from more than 90% of new arrivals to less than 10%. As of 2023, the country’s 1.4 million immigrants accounted for 29% of New Zealand’s 5 million population, a share sitting alongside Australia’s as highest in the developed world. 14% of these were from England, followed by China (10%), India (10%), the Philippines (9%), South Africa (7%), and Australia (6%).

Nevertheless, New Zealand was one of the more tolerant places in the world quite early on. Whilst in New Zealand the Catholic Church flipped from being French to Irish, unlike in the US, Britain, and Australia, Protestant and Catholic tensions were surprisingly low.

An English member of the Religious Tract Society who visited New Zealand in 1880 was alarmed by the extent of Catholic–Protestant interaction he found. “One can’t help feeling that the spirit of tolerance is somewhat carried to excess when one finds Protestants patronizing the Roman Catholic bazaar. One admires their love more than their wisdom, their heart more than their head.”

A Catholic became first Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament in 1854. Another Catholic became Premier in 1864. The influential Premier Julius Vogel, first elected in 1873, was a Jew.

What kind of immigrants did New Zealand select for, either directly or indirectly?

American immigrants paid their own way, or were supported by friends and family. Australian and New Zealand immigrants were subsidised, their fares largely paid for for a century. By the 1940s, would-be migrants paid a token ten pounds — waived for veterans — earning them the affectionate moniker ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Even this nominal sum proved onerous, especially for young women, and was abolished in 1950. The vetting itself was anything but token. Applicants submitted birth certificates, character references, employer statements, military records, and medical reports, and faced a mandatory personal interview where they were sized up for ‘character’ and ‘bearing’. Many were rejected. Immigration officers complained that ‘the wrong type’ kept applying — semi-professional men, junior executives, small traders. Exactly the kind of people America was actively trying to attract. One observer reckoned it was harder to migrate to New Zealand than to join a gentleman’s club in London.

New Zealand’s subsidised and screened immigration policy selected for safety-ists while America’s self-driven immigration process selected for more risk tolerant types:

“Immigration as a process of social filtration had other important consequences for both New Zealand and the United States. In some ways its effects were diametrically opposed. In New Zealand, Megan Hutching did a survey of assisted immigrants and found that “in the end, people often chose New Zealand because it seemed non-threatening.” One woman explained that she selected New Zealand because it was “small and comfortable.””

“All of this was very different from American immigration. In the United States, a voluntary and largely self-driven process selected immigrants who were restless, autonomous, ambitious, aggressive, entrepreneurial, and highly individuated. They tended to be more tolerant of risk, in the hope of greater profit. America’s open and voluntary system of immigration selected a population that lived for liberty and freedom.”

New Zealand officials advertised their country to new immigrants as a fair society. America put the emphasis on economic opportunity via land grants. Australia was somewhere in between, subsidising migrants for a century but also with the judicious use of land grants and a steady stream of gold and other mineral rushes that attracted risk-takers.

Many of the founders and first supporters of New Zealand’s Labour Party originated from Fabian socialist William Ranstead, who in 1900 led four shiploads of followers to New Zealand to build a “socialist Canaan”.

A stranger nation than it knows

So who are New Zealanders?

Fischer answers: a people of fairness, in contrast to a people of freedom. Fairness is not a folk attribute that drifted in on the Pacific air. It is an output — of who came, when they came, and what kind of mother country sent them.

National values are not chosen in the abstract. They are coping mechanisms selected by founding conditions. America’s freedom is the morality of exit: dissenters, frontiersmen, self-funded migrants, and people who could leave. New Zealand’s fairness is the morality of managed settlement: screened migrants, planned communities, a strong indigenous counterparty, and a mother country still trying to prove that empire could be moral.

The British settlers who built New Zealand were not the Puritans of 1620, nor the convicts of 1788. They were the children of Wilberforce and the Reform Act, dispatched by an empire deep in its idealistic phase, by a Colonial Office that believed in the protection of aborigines and the principle of self-government. They came in subsidised, screened, religious cohorts — Anglican utopians at Canterbury, Scottish Presbyterians at Otago, the Taranaki Mob in New Plymouth — chosen for their character. They met not the dispersed peoples of New South Wales nor the terrifying mounted Comanche of the American South West – but the Māori: a fellow seafaring warrior nation that demanded to be treated as such.

The result is a country whose self-image as a small, friendly, sheep-strewn hobbit nation belies a richer past. New Zealand is the nation that sent 40% of its military-aged men to fight for the mother country in the First World War, and got more than half of them back killed or wounded. That fought Rommel to a standstill in the desert. That named its capital Christchurch because it intended to build the Kingdom of God in the South Pacific. That gave its women the vote first in the world. That clung to Britain so tightly it took 16 years to ratify its own legal independence — and that, when Britain finally let go, had to invent a new self in the wreckage.

That new self is still being negotiated. The anti-nuclear stance, the still-evolving Treaty politics, the Māori urbanisation and its discontents, the recent Asian waves layering onto an old British base — all of it is a country slowly figuring out what it stands for now ‘British’ is no longer a sufficient answer.

New Zealand is a place that was made by deliberately sailing beyond the sunset – by men and women who believed that they could build a better society at the literal end of the world. They mostly did.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.