Greed and the colonization of New Zealand

Having talked and written about Joel Polack, I thought that I had finished with him, but he kept coming back to me. I am now reading Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. It is an invaluable account of the founding myths of New Zealand and perhaps a key to understanding the sources of power and wealth in present day New Zealand. The men behind the New Zealand Company met for dinner in the room of the banker, John Wright in 1839. The bank was somewhat shaky, though people didn't know it at the time, it needed a rapid injection of funds. Some of the men at the meeting were younger sons, who would not inherit their father's wealth, so they needed other means of generating wealth. They were looking at a profit of 500% from the colonization of New Zealand. Some of their ideas were pie in the sky. Then they got wind that the British government planned to step in, establish British rule, and put an end to the wild speculation in land expropriated from the natives at ludicrous prizes to be on-sold to speculators. They had to act quickly to forestall this. On the advice of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a dreamer, and a persuasive con man, they despatched a hastily acquired ship, the Tory with William Wakefield, E. G's. younger brother with instructions to buy up as much land as he could in a hurry. Arriving in Wellington harbour, he found that there was nowhere near as much suitable land as he had hoped, but this didn't stop him from buying, by playing off one Maori chief against another, and by deliberately clouding what he meant by buying the land. The first settler ships left England before the arrival of the Tory was confirmed, and certainly before the settlers had an idea of where they were coming to, what would await them, and what they bought with their money form the NZ Company. What awaited them was nothing like the colony of rural England that Wakefield promised. Wakefield believed in the British class structure with a ruling landowning gentry. He didn't believe that a pauper could become a successful landowner and prospective employer. Paupers were somewhat inferior beings. He did not appreciate that people, in many cases highly skilled workers, became paupers because advances in technology replaced hand work with machinery and made many craftspeople redundant. New technology, land enclosures, made the rich richer and the poor much poorer. Politicians were concerned about poverty, but not about the growing inequality. There is a striking parallel with what is happening in New Zealand now and what was happening in England in the years after the Napoleonic wars. Those with capital get richer, those without have to give up all hope of owning their home and have to resign to being tenants for the rest of their lives at the mercy of their landlords.