Author(s): Catherine Comyn

History | Aotearoa New Zealand Non-Fiction | Economics | Politics | 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards long lists

This book reveals the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century.

Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.

Described as “Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent” by Max Haiven, this book reveals the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint-stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.

By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anticolonial struggle today.

“Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent” —Max Haiven

Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.

This book tells the story of the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint-stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.

By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anti-colonial struggle today.

"Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa is long overdue. In it, she covers the well-researched, familiar ground of our colonial history, but through a seldom applied lens. The result is thus entirely novel, and desperately needed." —Arama Rata