The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (30 page)

Of course, these distinctive features of Australian nationalism, catalysed by strategic and demographic anxiety,
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created inevitable differences between the outlook of the new Commonwealth and official opinion in Britain. The Australian colonies contributed over 16,000 volunteers to the imperial cause in the South African War. But there was a strong dissenting tradition which suspected the part played by British finance and was deeply uneasy at an imperial war against free white men in Southern Africa.
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After 1902, Milner's recourse to ‘Chinese slavery’ in the Transvaal was fiercely criticised by all shades of Australian opinion.
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There was bound to be friction between the ideal of a ‘White Australia’ and the needs of an empire in which white settlers formed only one element in a complex political and strategic equation. Thus Australian governments were keen to contribute to naval defence. But a sense of remoteness, and of London's European priorities, sharpened the case for a local army and a local (not imperial) navy to guard home waters in case of need.
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Australian governments hoped to shape imperial policy in the South Pacific but got scant encouragement from the Colonial Office, still their channel of communication with the imperial government.
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Australian prosperity revived after 1904, seeking capital and immigrants from Britain. But protection and ‘socialistic’ legislation went down poorly in the City.
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And Australian politicians were deeply suspicious of the imperial ‘embrace’: the sweet life of London ‘society’. To wear court dress at the coronation, said the Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in 1910, was more than his job was worth.
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Yet the significance of all this should not be exaggerated. Before 1914, and long after, to Australian opinion of almost any hue, independence outside the imperial framework would have meant not the fulfilment of Australian nationality but its certain negation. Their nationalism was the fuel, just as federation was the vehicle, for finding Australia's true place in the system of empire.

‘New Britain’ in the South Pacific: New Zealand

Among the British settlement colonies, New Zealand was the extreme case, and remains the most fascinating. It was the most remote from Britain, perched far out on the Pacific frontier of Australasia. Much of its terrain was harsh or poor. The value of its grasslands – its principal wealth – depended overwhelmingly on the demand for food and wool on the other side of the world. But, despite this, it had grown with astonishing rapidity into a settled society: from a few thousand immigrants in the 1840s to over a million whites seventy years later.
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(Over the same period, the indigenous Maori population had fallen by two-thirds to less than forty thousand.) This demographic invasion had been accompanied by a drastic transformation of the pre-colonial environment into a land of European grasses, trees, flowers and animals.
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No less remarkable was the apparent strength of white New Zealand's attachment to imperial Britain. Remoteness was no bar. Of all the settlement colonies, New Zealand became the most committed to closer imperial relations, and regarded itself as the most ‘British’ of the white dominions. But it would be a great mistake to see this as an unthinking loyalism, or as the calculating ‘super-patriotism’ of a far-flung outpost. Nor was it a retrograde diversion from the high road to a Pacific ‘destiny apart’.
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Quite the reverse. As we will see, the emergence of a distinct New Zealand nationality at the end of the nineteenth century was at the heart of New Zealand's ‘imperialism’. Indeed, ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’ were the two faces of a single identity.

Cook had been the first European to gain an accurate knowledge of New Zealand's coastline in 1769, circumnavigating these ‘high, slender, irregular islands’.
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But, from then until British annexation in 1840, ‘Old New Zealand’
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had been a disorderly maritime frontier where some hundreds of European and American whalers, sealers, traders and timbermen sojourned, settled, trafficked and intermarried among the Maori. Old New Zealand was part of a ‘Tasman world’ linking the New Zealand islands with the convicts, commerce and sheep farms of Eastern Australia. Where trade had ventured, missionaries soon followed (the first was Samuel Marsden in 1814), and in 1833 the British government sent James Busby (dragging with him a prefabricated cottage) to keep order among the escaped convicts, boisterous seamen and grog sellers who congregated at the Bay of Islands, the great natural harbour in the north of New Zealand. Busby's regime was ineffectual, and a stream of missionary complaints flowed back to London. Meanwhile, New Zealand had attracted a group of promoters who hoped to plant British emigrants on land bought (cheaply) from Maori and resold (less cheaply) to incoming settlers. The New Zealand Company (with its aristocratic directorate) countered missionary objections by insisting that ‘systematic colonization’ would bring order to the chaotic relations between Maori and European in the islands, aiding not hindering the civilising and converting of the tribes.
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Unwilling, or unable, to block the Company, the imperial government trailed reluctantly after it. In 1840, it annexed the islands and, by the Treaty of Waitangi, asserted its authority over the resident Europeans and (more ambiguously) the Maori chiefs.
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Annexation was the beginning of a thirty-year struggle to widen the original settler beachhead (at Wellington) and construct a viable colonial state. Distance and expense, the shortage of capital, the difficulty of acquiring more land, the antagonism between the early governors (anxious to restrain settler expansion) and the Company (eager to satisfy it) and friction with the Maori chiefs dimmed its early promise. But, by the 1850s, the location of grasslands free of the dense New Zealand ‘bush’ (patois for forest) in the Wairarapa, Hawke's Bay and parts of Taranaki
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and the planting of new settlements on the Canterbury plains and in Otago on the South Island gradually turned New Zealand into a second New South Wales built on wool. In the early 1860s, the discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully in Otago brought a rush of immigrants, and the white population climbed to 267,000 by 1871. Meanwhile, London had conceded self-government in 1852, but withheld from the settler politicians control over relations with the Maori, whose land could only be bought through the agency of imperial officials – a rule laid down in the treaty.

Until the 1860s, it seemed as if New Zealand might develop not as a full-blown settler state but as ‘one country, two systems’. In the South Island where there were few Maori and around the fringes of the North Island, were a series of settler enclaves, largely confined to the grasslands and the flat coastal plains and linked together not by roads but by sea. Across much of the North Island stretched a Maori ‘protectorate’, where Maori
hapu
and the ‘pakeha-Maori’ who lived among them farmed and traded largely free from outside control.
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But it was an uneasy equilibrium. Maori chiefs sold land. More settlers moved in. The pressure to keep up a brisk market in land sales – the settlers’ fastest route to a speculative fortune – was intense. By the late 1850s, Maori unease was turning towards resistance. On the edge of the settler enclave in Taranaki, the ‘King’ movement sprang up to unite Maori behind a common leader and the refusal to part with more land.
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Far away in London, the Colonial Office was baffled and irritated by the growing racial friction and accepted its governor's advice that more settler responsibility for dealing with the Maori would curb their aggression.
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The result was confusion as settler leaders in the North Island pressed forward, demanding imperial protection against a Maori ‘conspiracy’. A forceful new governor, George Grey, with previous experience in the colony, tried to reassert his authority over the Maori chiefs and conciliate the settler politicians by conquering the Waikato region, south of Auckland. The New Zealand wars ground on through the 1860s as some 10,000 imperial troops and a large body of settler volunteers fought the ‘fire in the fern’ – with very mixed success and a heavy reliance on Maori allies (the so-called
kupapa
) hostile to the Kingites.
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By 1870, when the imperial contingent was eventually withdrawn, Maori still controlled much of the North Island's hilly interior. Their tenacity had bought a breathing space and perhaps a measure of grudging toleration.
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But they had failed to check the steady expansion of the settler world around them.

The main consequence of the wars was to marginalise the Maori and snuff out what was left of the fragile vision of ‘racial amalgamation’ as the basis of New Zealand society. Henceforth, New Zealand was to be unambiguously a settler state. But it was, as yet, a small and backward one. The 1870s, however, were a turning point. In a period of rising trade and easy money, colonial New Zealand became a prosperous and successful settler community, able to attract a steady flow of capital and migrants from the distant metropole. The agents of this transformation were local men, immigrants who had enough capital and connections to build up small fortunes in land or trade.
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They were the runholders whose sheep ranches spread out over the Canterbury plains; and the merchants who made Dunedin (for a time) the colony's main port and manufacturer, and the headquarters of the Union Steamship Line (founded in 1875) that supplied much of New Zealand's coastal and maritime connections.
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In the North Island, the leaders were provincial notables like Isaac Featherston, who opened up Wellington's hinterland in the Wairarapa; Donald McLean and J. D. Ormond, who dominated Hawke's Bay;
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or the Richmond-Atkinson clan in Taranaki.
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These men were pocket versions of Cecil Rhodes, building empires but on a smaller scale. They mobilised capital and commercial enterprise to push forward from the coastal plains into the bush:
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building railways, recruiting settlers, laying out townships.
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The exception was Auckland, which grew fitfully into a small Pacific entrepot, exploiting its magnificent harbour, the timber trade in kauri pine and the short-lived gold rush in the Coromandel. From the start, Auckland was a merchant not a settler enclave.
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But the main architect of the new settler state was Julius Vogel (1835–99), a colonial politician in the same mould as Sir John A. Macdonald. Whether as finance minister, premier or agent-general in London, Vogel was the most influential figure in New Zealand's affairs for much of the 1870s and 1880s.
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The son of a Jewish small businessman in London, Vogel had gone to the Australian gold fields as a youth, but found his métier as a newspaperman not a digger. In 1861, he came to Otago to try his luck in its golden prosperity. By 1870, he was a leading South Island politician who pressed on his colleagues a bold plan for rapid economic development. Vogel's scheme was simple but audacious. He proposed that the settler government should raise a large loan in London to finance a programme of railway-building and subsidised immigration. ‘Let the country but make the railroads and the railroads will make the country’, he declared.
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As the railways were built, and newcomers poured in, the government's land reserves would be sold off at a profit, output and exports would swell, the loans would be paid off, and the colony would rise to a new plateau of prosperity, with more of the amenities of an ‘old’ country. A virtuous circle of growth and improvement would be set in motion. Vogel's prospectus was seductive. But his real genius lay (like that of Cecil Rhodes) in convincing investors in Europe (including the Rothschilds) that New Zealand was a colonial eldorado. Vogel was a visionary who sailed close to the wind and a speculator on his own account who died in near-poverty. But his economic programme was transformative
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and, by driving through the abolition of the provincial system (where control of public lands still inconveniently lay), he created a unitary colonial state in 1876.

In fact, ‘Vogelism’ contained many of the ingredients used by later governments to fashion a distinctive role for New Zealand in the British system of empire. Vogel had insisted on the urgency of attracting British immigrants and capital to ward off stagnation and regression. As agent-general in London, he used his pen freely to advertise the colony's charms. He saw that New Zealand must compete with many other calls on British investment and grasped (though not the first to do so) that its special claim must be based on assertions about its likeness to Britain. ‘The ambition of the New Zealand settlers’, he announced in his journalistic days, ‘has been to make in the Southern Hemisphere an exact counterpart of Great Britain in the Northern.’
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With Vogelism, the myth of New Zealand as the replica of Britain – but without the ‘warts’ of industrialism – entered the political mainstream, and lodged there firmly for a century. Vogelism proclaimed that the main business of government was development: borrowing, buying, building, recruiting and settling. Everything was secondary to the prime task of expansion and colonisation. But Vogel was not content with a purely domestic vision of New Zealand's future. More vigorously than any contemporary, he pressed the colony's claim to be ‘Queen of the Pacific’. New Zealand's manifest destiny was to be the centre of a great Polynesian dominion
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– a maritime version of Canada – incorporating Fiji and Samoa as well as many smaller islands. Vogel wanted to promote this scheme through a government-backed company based in Auckland, a pale (and abortive) shadow of Macdonald's alliance with the Canadian Pacific Railway. London's hostility to his plans strengthened Vogel's belief in the need for imperial federation to amplify Wellington's voice at the imperial centre, and assert New Zealand's right to act as the local manager of the imperial enterprise in the Pacific. Indeed, it was Vogel's intense vision of New Zealand's special role, its unique tie with Britain, and its claim to a Polynesian sub-empire that turned him against entry into an Australian federation, mooted in the 1880s and favoured by some New Zealand politicians.