New Zealand Company - Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Edward Gibbon Wakefield revived plans for the settlement of New Zealand during the 1830s. Wakefield, who had grown up in a family with roots in philanthropy and social reform. In 1829, while in prison for abducting a 15-year-old heiress, he had published a pamphlet and a series of newspaper articles – the latter eventually republished as a book – promoting the colonising of Australasia. Wakefield's plan entailed the company buying land from the indigenous residents very cheaply, then selling it to speculators and "gentleman settlers" for a much higher sum. The emigrants would provide the labour to break in the gentlemen's lands and cater to their employers' everyday needs. They would eventually be able to buy their own land, but high land prices and low rates of pay would ensure they first laboured for many years.

Many of those who had had involvement in the 'New Zealand Company' of 1825 embraced Wakefield's ideas and used them in 1834 as a basis for the colonisation of South Australia, where his supporters proposed recreating "a perfect English society". Wakefield regarded the South Australian experience as a failure, however, and in 1836 set his sights on New Zealand, where his theories of "systematic" colonisation could be put into effect. A year later he chaired the first meeting of the New Zealand Association. Its members soon included MPs William Hutt and Sir William Molesworth, R.S. Rintoul of The Spectator and London banker John Wright. Wakefield drafted a Bill to bring the association's plans to fruition.

The Bill attracted stiff opposition, however, from Colonial Office officials and from the Church Missionary Society, who took issue both with the "unlimited power" the colony's founders would wield and what they regarded as the inevitable "conquest and extermination of the present inhabitants". Anglican and Wesleyan missionaries were particularly alarmed by claims made in pamphlets written by Wakefield in which he declared that one of the aims of colonisation was to "civilise a barbarous people" who could "scarcely cultivate the earth". Maori, he wrote, "craved" colonisation and looked up to the Englishman "as being so eminently superior to himself, that the idea of asserting his own independence of equality never enters his mind". Wakefield suggested that once Maori chiefs had sold their land to settlers for a very small sum, they would be "adopted" by English families and be instructed and corrected.