New Zealand Company
The New Zealand Company, chartered in the United Kingdom, was a company that existed in the first half of the 19th century on a business model that was focused on the systematic colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principles devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who envisaged the creation of a new-model English society in the Southern Hemisphere. Under Wakefield's model, the colony would attract capitalists, who would then have a ready supply of labour: migrant labourers who could not initially afford to be property owners but would have the expectation of one-day buying land with their savings.
The New Zealand Company established settlements at Wellington, Nelson, Wanganui and Dunedin and also became involved in the settling of New Plymouth and Christchurch. The original New Zealand Company started in 1825, with little success, then rose as a new company when it merged with Wakefield's New Zealand Association in 1837, received its royal charter in 1840, reached the peak of efficiency about 1841, encountered financial problems from 1843 from which it never recovered, returned its charter in 1850 and wound up all remaining business with a final report in 1858.
History
The company's board members included aristocrats, Members of Parliament and a prominent magazine publisher, who used their political connections to ceaselessly lobby the British government to achieve its aims. The company bought a lot of land from Māori using questionable contracts and in many cases resold that land, with its title in doubt. The company launched elaborate, grandiose and sometimes fraudulent advertising campaigns. It vigorously attacked those it perceived as its opponents—chiefly the British Colonial Office, successive governors of New Zealand, the Church Missionary Society and the prominent missionary Reverend Henry Williams, and it stridently opposed the Treaty of Waitangi, which was an obstacle to the company's obtaining the greatest possible amount of New Zealand land at the cheapest price. The company, in turn, was frequently criticised by the Colonial Office and New Zealand governors for its "trickery" and lies. Missionaries in New Zealand were also critical of the company for fear that its activities would lead to the "conquest and extermination" of Māori inhabitants.The company viewed itself as a prospective quasi-government of New Zealand and in 1845 and 1846 proposed splitting the colony in two, along a line from Mokau in the west to Cape Kidnappers in the east, with the north reserved for Māori and missionaries and the south becoming a self-governing province, known as "New Victoria" and managed by the company for that purpose. The British Colonial Secretary rejected the proposal.
Only 15,500 settlers arrived in New Zealand as part of the company's colonisation schemes, but three of its settlements would, along with Auckland, become and remain the country's "main centres" and provide the foundation for the system of provincial government introduced in 1853.
1825 expedition
The earliest organised attempt to colonise New Zealand came in 1825, when the New Zealand Company was formed in London, headed by the wealthy John George Lambton, Whig MP. Other directors of the company were:- East India Company merchants George Lyall, George Palmer, Stewart Marjoribanks and Russell Ellice;
- politician and merchant Edward Ellice ;
- political economist Robert Torrens snr; landowner and politician Edward Littleton ;
- Royal Navy officer and politician Courtenay Boyle;
- banker James Pattison, which Herd named Lambton Harbour. Herd explored the area and identified land at the south-west of the harbour as the best place for a European settlement, ignoring the presence of a large pā that was home to members of Te Āti Awa tribe. The ships then sailed up the east coast to explore prospects for trade, stopping at the Coromandel Peninsula and the Bay of Islands. In January 1827 Herd surveyed parts of the harbour at Hokianga, where either he or the company's agent on board negotiated the "purchase" of tracts of land from Māori in Hokianga, Manukau and Paeroa. The price for the land was "five muskets, fifty three pounds powder, four pair blankets, three hundred flints and four musket cartridge boxes". After several weeks Herd and the New Zealand Company agent decided the cost of exporting goods was too high to be of economic value and they sailed to Sydney, where Herd paid off the crew and sold the stores and equipment, then returned to London. The venture had cost the New Zealand Company £20,000.
Wakefield's influence
Wakefield's plan entailed a company buying land from the indigenous residents of Australia or New Zealand very cheaply, then selling it to speculators and "gentleman settlers" for a much higher sum. The immigrants 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.
In May 1830 Wakefield was released from prison and joined the National Colonisation Society, whose committee included Wilmot-Horton, nine MPs and three clergymen. Wakefield's influence within the society quickly grew and by the end of the year his plans for colonisation of Australasia had become the central focus of the society's pamphlets and lectures.
Despite the £20,000 loss incurred in his earlier venture, Lambton continued to pursue ways to become involved in commercial emigration schemes and was joined in his endeavours by Radical MPs Charles Buller and Sir William Molesworth. In 1831 and again in 1833 Buller and Molesworth backed Wakefield as he took to the Colonial Office elaborate plans to recreate a perfect English society in a new colony in South Australia in which land would be sold at a price high enough to generate profit to fund emigration. The Whig government in 1834 passed an Act authorising the establishment of the British Province of South Australia, but the planning and initial sales of land proceeded without Wakefield's involvement because of the illness and death of his daughter. Land in the town of Adelaide was offered at £1 per acre on maps showing town and country sites—though the area was still little more than a sandhill—but sales were poor. In March 1836 a survey party sailed for South Australia and the first emigrants followed four months later. Wakefield claimed all credit for the establishment of the colony, but was disappointed with the outcome, claiming the land had been sold too cheaply.
Instead, in late 1836, he set his sights on New Zealand, where his theories of "systematic" colonisation could be put into full effect. He gave evidence to a House of Commons committee which itself comprised many Wakefield supporters, and when the committee handed down a report endorsing his ideas, he wrote to Lord Durham explaining that New Zealand was "the fittest country in the world for colonisation". Wakefield formed the New Zealand Association, and on 22 May 1837 chaired its first meeting, which was attended by ten others including MPs Molesworth and William Hutt, and R.S. Rintoul of The Spectator. After the association's third meeting, by which time London banker John Wright, Irish aristocrat Earl Mount Cashell and Whig MP William Wolryche-Whitmore were also on board and the group was attracting favourable newspaper attention, Wakefield drafted a Bill to bring the association's plans to fruition.
The draft attracted stiff opposition 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". Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the colonies Lord Howick and Permanent Under-Secretary James Stephen both were concerned about proposals for the settlements' founders to make laws for the colony, fearing it would create a dynasty beyond British government control, while Anglican and Wesleyan missionaries were 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". Māori, Wakefield 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 Māori chiefs had sold their land to settlers for a very small sum, they would be "adopted" by English families and be instructed and corrected. At a meeting on 6 June 1837 the Church Missionary Society passed four resolutions expressing its objection to the New Zealand Association plans, including the observation that previous experience had shown that European colonisation invariably inflicted grave injuries and injustices on the indigenous inhabitants. It also said the colonisation plans would interrupt or defeat missionary efforts for the religious improvement and civilisation of the Māori. The society resolved to use "all suitable means" to defeat the association and both the Church and Wesleyan missionary societies began to wage campaigns in opposition to the company's plans, through pamphlets and lobbying to government.