The Treaty Of Waitangi and how to misunderstand history

Did Maori agree to cede sovereignty over New Zealand when they signed the treaty? This was the question debated by 'experts' and their report has just been published. But is this a meaningful question? The Treaty was cobbled together in a hurry. It was drafted by James Busby, better remembered as a wine grower than a constitutional expert and the British Resident, an inefficient representative of the British Government, It was translated into Maori by Henry Williams and his son, Edward. over one evening. In 1939 the British Government decided to take action over the unruly settlements of its subjects in New Zealand. But by then The New Zealand Company of Edward Gibbon Wakefield had despatched a ship on a land buying expedition. Treaty or no Treaty the land was in effect getting colonized. There was a groundswell of opinion in Britain that the country was overpopulated and the surplus population had to be dumped somewhere for the benefit of the people surplus to requirements as well as the mother country, who would benefit from the trade in produce from the newly colonized lands whose inhabitants then would be able to purchase the excess of manufactured goods. The disastrous experiment in settling South Australia in this fashion did not deter the New Zealand Company from trying again in New Zealand. So the Treaty of Waitangi had to be forced through in haste to forestall other attempts at colonization. How could the Maori signatories to the Treaty possibly understand the concept underlying the Treaty? The concept of nationhood, the idea of sovereignty over a whole nation, let alone an empire was totally outside the experience of the Maori. Maori was a tribal society, in which differences, conflicts, were resolved though Utu, marriages, alliances, but none of the tribes would have even considered accepting the chief of another tribe to rule over them. The concept of Rangitara was understood, but the concept of Tino Rangitaranga, highest chieftainship was an alien concept drafted on Maori tradition. There was no question about it, the Treaty of Waitangi was designed to rob Maori of their land. But by and large, both sides benefited from it. The Maori could not stop the process of colonization, whatever some of their leaders thought. The British government created a pseudo-legal form of accommodation. Tribal wars with murderous, genocidal outcomes were largely, but not completely eliminated. The excesses of European land speculators were curbed. Maori were, by and large integrated into a dominant European civilization and did not suffer the disastrous fate of the Australian Aborigines or the people of South America and even Africa. But couching the story of Maori land appropriation in a cloud of legalistic mumbo jumbo distorts history and only benefits the historians working on researching claims under the Treaty, lawyers negotiating Treaty settlements, politicians, and some of the more powerful Maori interests. Let's be honest about it, the discussion about the Treaty of Waitangi is a distortion of history.