WorldCat Linked Data Explorer

Turtle N-Triple JSON-LD RDF/XML HTML Contact Us Home

http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2281096395

At the Margin of Empire : John Webster and Hokianga, 1841 - 1900

Born in Scotland in 1818, John Webster came to New Zealand via Australia in 1841 (after a violent encounter in the outback which he just escaped unscathed) and spent most of the rest of his life in Hokianga. At the Margin of Empire charts his colourful experiences carving out a fortune as the region's leading timber trader and cultivating connections with the leading figures of the day, Maori and Pakeha. Webster fought alongside Tamati Waka Nene in the Northern War, married one of Nene's relatives and built up his kauri timber business through trade with local chiefs (though at one point awoke to find a plundering party had arrived on his front lawn). He was also friends with Frederick Maning, and visited by George Grey, Richard Seddon and other luminaries of the day.

Open All Close All

type

about

http://schema.org/about

creator

description

http://schema.org/description

  • "In recent years, settlers have largely disappeared from histories of the colonisation of New Zealand, at least in frontier settings. This has been the result of an unwillingness on the part of Pakeha academics to study people who were recast as colonisers following the rise of postcolonial discourses from the 1970s, as well as the Treaty of Waitangi claims settlement process which has re-constituted the Maori-Pakeha relationship as a relationship between Maori and the Crown in which settlers play little part. This thesis reintroduces settlers as central players in colonialism. But it does not seek to replace the binary of Crown-Maori with settler-Maori. Instead, it offers a reading of nineteenth-century New Zealand history that foregrounds daily interaction and personal entanglement between Maori and Pakeha as important sites of change. Its central figure is John Webster, a settler who came to New Zealand in 1841 and whose ideas of race, formed during his adolescence in Britain, coalesced in an imperial identity that dictated he should dominate the indigenous people with whom he came into contact. Webster spent most of the next 60 years in Hokianga, where he found his ambition to assert political dominance over his Maori neighbours continually thwarted. Hokianga escaped the full impact of the political forces usually associated with colonisation, such as war and confiscation, but its reliance on the international timber trade meant it did not escape economic change. It was in this arena that Webster made an impact. Looking at Webster's experience at the centre Hokianga's timber trade, and contrasting it with his political ambition to be seen as someone who could control Maori, provides a way of understanding how change came to Hokianga not through Pakeha political domination, or through watershed moments of violence and confrontation, but through a gradual shift in the economic balance of power based around personal connections and networks. It also offers a way of seeing the role empire played in this shift. Webster's local impact was also based on global networks of trade. They connected Hokianga to the wider world and Maori and Pakeha to each other. His story contributes to New Zealand's colonial historiography and to the wider historiography of empire by presenting a vision of colonial interaction that emphasises the role of connection rather than political domination and social separation, and which focuses on the power of the personal and quotidian in the global reach of empire."
  • ""Born in Scotland in 1818, John Webster came in New Zealand via Australia in 1841 after narrowly escaping death in the outback following a violent encounter with a group of Aboriginal men. He spent most of the rest of his life in the Hokianga region, carving out a fortune as the region's leading timber trader and cultivating connections with the leading political figures of the day. As he settled into this new home his life became intimately entwined with Māori. He fought alongside Tāmati Wāka Nene in the Northern War against Hōne Heke, married one of Nene's relatives and built up his kauri timber business through trade with local chiefs, but also awoke one day to find a plundering party had arrived on his front lawn. Webster was also engaged with Pākehā and the Crown - friends with Frederick Maning, visited by George Grey, Richard Seddon and others. Ashton takes us into Hokianga to reveal how the evolving intimate relationships and economic transactions of everyday life reflected larger shifts in colonial power. She argues that through his daily interactions, Webster helped slowly shift the balance of power in the North: the credit that he extended to his customers and kin saw them selling land to pay debts, helping push Māori into economic dependence"--Publisher information."
  • "Born in Scotland in 1818, John Webster came to New Zealand via Australia in 1841 (after a violent encounter in the outback which he just escaped unscathed) and spent most of the rest of his life in Hokianga. At the Margin of Empire charts his colourful experiences carving out a fortune as the region's leading timber trader and cultivating connections with the leading figures of the day, Maori and Pakeha. Webster fought alongside Tamati Waka Nene in the Northern War, married one of Nene's relatives and built up his kauri timber business through trade with local chiefs (though at one point awoke to find a plundering party had arrived on his front lawn). He was also friends with Frederick Maning, and visited by George Grey, Richard Seddon and other luminaries of the day."@en

genre

http://schema.org/genre

  • "Biography"
  • "Electronic books"@en
  • "History"
  • "History"@en

name

http://schema.org/name

  • "At the margin of Empire : John Webster and Hokianga, 1841-1900"
  • "At the Margin of Empire : John Webster and Hokianga, 1841 - 1900"@en
  • "At the Margin of Empire John Webster and Hokianga, 1841-1900"@en

workExample