A Limited Express or Stopping All Stations? Railways and Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (original) (raw)
Dreaming on a Railway Track: Public Works and the Demise of New Zealand’s Provinces
2015
The demise of New Zealand’s provinces in 1876 demands explanation. I argue that public works policy undermined the provinces and that railway development provided the impetus for abolition. The failure of the six original provinces to meet hinterland settler demands for public works led to the creation of new provinces in 1858, destabilising the system. Reckless investment in railways in the 1860s robbed the provinces of popular support and led to a prohibition on borrowing. This created a developmental vacuum until the central government acquired public works policy in 1870. The provinces thus lost their primary reason for existence. New Zealand’s provinces are a valuable case study in how railways and other forms of transportation can shape political systems.
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26: 2 (1993), 319-343
An examination of how railway powers orchestrated the demise of wagoning in the eastern part of South Africa when that older, less-capitalised road transport industry threatened to undermine the profitability of the railways. Owning the ports as well, the railway operator applied surcharges to traffic arriving at or leaving harbours by road. The penalties ended the slower but cheaper (and more user-friendly) transport services of mostly African carting entrepreneurs, and damaged the incomes of ancillary providers of wagoning equipment and animal feed. The paper spotlights the premature engineering of modal succession in transport by new and exclusive vested interests.
Introduction – New Insights and Perceptions on Railway History
Journal of History of Science and Technology, 2018
special issue: new insights and perceptions on railway history Throughout the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, railways played a vital role in the construction of nations, economic growth, technological development and the dominance of Western nations over sundry African, Asian, and Latin American territories. In more or less recent years, different authors have emphasised this agency in several of their classical works, reflecting in some way the representations and the feeling of technological sublime 1 that contemporaries of the first decades of the locomotive had. Hobsbawm called them the most spectacular symbol of the nineteenth century, 2 while Adas deemed them pioneers of civilisation, conquerors of time and space, unrivalled promoters of migrations, settlement and 1 That is, the pleasure of observing a moving machine, as a symbol of the triumph of technology and Man's ingenuity. Kasson considered the railway "the most common vehicle of the technological sublime."
The Soliloquy of Whiteness: Colonial Discourse and New Zealand's Settler Press 1839-1873
2010
The Research Questions What white British colonial ideologies and discourses can be identified in the colonial press in relation to the native? Colonial Discourses as a Discursive Racial Framework How did New Zealand's colonial press constitute the authority, privileges and entitlements? Patterns of meaning in Colonial Discourse What do these discourses look like over time? vi Other ways of Authoring the Encounter The Question of Whiteness Research Implications Further Implications and Links to Local Research BIBLIOGRAPHY APPENDIX Chapter Seven Articles Endnotes vii list of figures and tables I te taha o tōku tipuna wahine, ko Te Here Taiapa Ko Hikurangi te maunga Ko Waiapu te awa Ko Te Whānau a Ruataupare te hapū Ko Te Hono ki Rarotonga te marae Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi I te taha o tōku tipuna tāne, ko Hau Ruwhiu Ko Puhanga Tohora te maunga Ko Maungatawa te awa Ko Punakitere te marae Ko Ngaituteauru te hapu Ko Ngā Puhi te iwi E tū ana mātou, te iwi Māori, ki runga i te kaha me te mana o ō tātou tūpuna mātua. Mō rātou tēnei mahi rangahau. However, it is not that difficult to determine from the archive how colonizers understood Māori. What is more nebulous is determining what white British settlers thought of themselves in relation to Māori. When I was called 'dumb', did that mean those Pākeha understood themselves as 'clever'? When I was considered 'difficult', did that mean they understood themselves as 'unproblematic'? And if this is the case, why has it been so necessary to repeat these appellatives from one generation to the next if they were so uncompromisingly accurate? I have found, in these colonial discourses, a palpable sense of Pākeha vulnerability, weakness, and limitation, expressly in relation to Māori. For here was a people, and here continues to be a people, who struggle to be firmly, utterly, connectedly, uncompromisingly grounded in this land as rightful and entitled. Hence the need to talk so vociferously, repeatedly, and determinedly about their superiority, rights and entitlement to occupy, govern and control that which is not their own. Until relatively recently, New Zealand's 1 historical archive was characterized by the deafening silence around events of the 19th-century. Looking back, there is little indication that there was a complicated, defining, challenging, and sometimes affectionate interaction between these two stunningly and obviously dissimilar groups of human beings, Māori and white British colonists. There is little indication that, for much of the 19thcentury, New Zealand was dominated by tension, war, conflict, oppression, suffering, rebels, villains, heroes, theft, murders, sickness, poverty, broken promises, protest, and survival. The price of Britain's colonization of New Zealand has been, and continues to be, staggering for Māori. Between 1860 and 1910 over 15 million acres of land were lost through military and legislative violations that were unrelenting, rendering a people intergenerationally impoverished. Efforts to civilize, Christianize, eradicate, assimilate and integrate Māori, informed social policy, while systemic skin colour prejudices regularly denied Māori access to rudimentary services. Social, political, cultural and economic processes were denied and undermined, rendering Māori alienated from their past, unsure in their present and unable to control the future. Yet Māori did not yield entirely to the colonial machine, making the white British colonial contest for ascendancy an ongoing struggle and process. This struggle to order a new society, in which colonists and indigenes were required to co-exist, is captured in the discourses of the day through urge onward (as Lord John Russell once expressed it) "the glorious destiny to which New Zealand is called.". (The New Zealander, 4 August 1852, p. 2) At the heart of the colonial settlement of New Zealand, therefore, is the colonial gaze which fell, not only upon the land, but also upon the native who was similarly scrutinized.. Māori were visually probed, prodded, and sectioned for their hue, cranial proportions, breadth of torso, height of body, and texture of hair, the character of facial expressions, eye colour and muscularity. Indeed, in his seminal expose on the 'Māori Race', Tregear (1904) observes: The Maoris were a handsome and well-developed race; muscular, fleshy, with fine figures, good arms and well-shaped legs, but with the feet flat and broad. The men were as tall as the average Englishman, but many of the chiefs, owing to better nourishment than the common people, were far above the middle height. Among a hundred Maoris, at least ten would be six feet high or over, and these by no means weedy, but of corresponding bulk and weight. The women were shorter than the men, but in youth were elegant and graceful; many of them had small and beautifully shaped hands, especially those whose birth removed them from the necessity of heavy and constant work. (p. 8) The settler gaze-roving, searching, examining, recording and appropriating as it wentdesired, penetrated and laid claim to both the landscape and the people, from coast to hinterland. The land and her residents began to orientate around the rightful place of the colonist, as governors of the people and proprietors of the territory, so that the entitlement of settler institutions to determine the destiny of the soil and its inhabitants was assured. This proprietary right was taken up by colonial writers as they affirmed the land and the people's subjection to British governance, authority and control. Shohat and Stam (1994, pp.1-2) argue that eurocentrism or ways of centring European 'ways of knowing' characterize the public archive and provide: … a single perspective in which Europe is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the world's centre of gravity, as ontological 'reality' to the rest of the world's shadow. Eurocentric thinking attributes to the 'West' an almost providential sense of historical destiny. Eurocentrism, like the Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. It maps the world in a cartography that centralises and augments Europe while literally 'belittling' Africa. The 'East' is divided into 'Near', 'Middle', and 'Far', making Europe the arbiter of spatial evaluation, just as the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time produces England as the regulating centre of temporal measurement.
Acknowledge No Frontier: The Creation and Demise of New Zealand’s Provinces, 1853–76
The Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2016
Starting at the beginning, one does not always pay much attention to Acknowledgements but it came as a surprise to find two paragraphs in the Acknowledgements of this book concerning the author’s debt to music. He writes history with headphones on. Fair enough; the reviewer listened to Ravi Shankar when studying Indian history.
The journal of transport history, 2019
Reviewed by: Friedrich (Rudi) Newman , Independent Scholar, UK Railways have played a major role in global development, but from their earliest days, there have been those disquieted by their expansion. While now an accepted technology, criticisms and the eponymous "Nimby-ism" attitude continue with new proposals just as they have for centuries. This publication offers a new take on the subject of opposition to railways. References to opposition are common in many studies but near-invariably as only a small part of research concentrating elsewhere. Here it occupies the main focus, looking at its form across Britain over two centuries. The authors make no pretence of this being a comprehensive history, rather aiming to create a detailed introduction with the aim of encouraging further study. Subdivided into 14 chapters, it opens with overviews of British industrialisation, pre-railway transport and early rail network development before introducing the challenges of nineteenth century landowners and how early railway ventures were promoted. Aimed for a non-academic public audience, these chapters largely provide background for readers unfamiliar with Britain's railway development. It then commences with the reactions of landowners to the coming of the railways, followed by other types of landowner opposition. As with subsequent chapters, there is extensive use of examples and many close with an amusing, if atypical, example demonstrating the great variety of situations that occurred. Returning to Victorian rail development, it next turns to parliamentary regulation and the "Railway Interest" before considering other forms of opposition such as Sabbatarianism. With the network complete, the focus shifts to operation: varied sources of criticism (safety, stations and suchlike) and depictions in the Arts. To provide balance, examples were given of support for railways, before concluding with a substantial chapter detailing changes and issues from the 1920s onwards to the present.