Emigrant Dreams, Colonial Realities: The History and Significance of the New Zealand Company

The records of the New Zealand Company in this collection provide an excellent insight into the Company’s contribution to bringing migrants, largely from the United Kingdom, to New Zealand in the 1840s. With one notable exception, Colonel William Wakefield’s journal of 1839, the records begin in early 1841 when the Company formally received a signed charter from Her Majesty’s Government. But to understand the Company’s aims and methods we must go back over a decade.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Vision

The vision which lay behind the New Zealand Company was born in the head of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Born the son of a farmer and land agent in 1796, Wakefield grew up influenced by his family’s philanthropic and charitable interests and by his own drive for social and political influence. To this end he eloped with a 16 year old heiress, and then after her death, abducted a 15 year old schoolgirl, Ellen Turner, whom he forced into marriage in the hope that her rich father, a Macclesfield manufacturer, would support his entry into political life.  Instead Edward Gibbon and his brother William, who had assisted him, were sentenced in 1827 to three years in Newgate Prison. There Wakefield read classical economics and became interested in colonisation as a cure for the overpopulation and pauperism affecting British and Irish society.

In Wakefield’s view previous emigration had been handicapped by an imbalance of capital, labour and land. Colonies had abundant land, but this simply attracted poor squatters who had no capital to develop the land or to employ a waged labour force. Society became scattered, creating lawlessness and dissolute behaviour. Wakefield’s solution was a ‘sufficient price’ for land. This would provide an income from the sale of lands which could be used to pay for the free emigration of labourers and for investment in infrastructure like ports and roads; and it would ensure that labourers must work for wages for a time before they could purchase their acres. Capitalists would be attracted because they could gain a profit from making their land productive. They would eventually take on the role of a leisured aristocracy. Since population was concentrated rather than dispersed, civilised life would flower. Polished manners would replace the usual crudity of the frontier. A vision of a stable landed society, like rural England before the coming of industrial cities, was Wakefield’s dream. Such colonies would become prosperous and happy; while providing the homeland with opportunities for the ‘troubled’ middle class, work for unemployed rural workers (thus reducing the burdens of poor relief), a market for home manufactures, and a source of cheap agricultural produce.

Wakefield spelled out this alluring vision in A Letter from Sydney in 1829. The next year after his release from Newgate, Wakefield set out to push his ideas. He wrote pamphlets and books, but also promoted his views through his own magnetic personality and through cultivating powerful allies. In 1830 he won over Robert Rintoul, editor of The Spectator, who attracted a number of liberal intellectuals including several MPs such as Charles Buller and William Molesworth. They formed the National Colonization Society to push Wakefield’s ideas.  Their first major opportunity came with the founding of a colony in South Australia, and Wakefield published The New British Province of South Australia to provide advice to intending colonists. But he was side-lined while away in Europe and became appalled at the low price of land offered. Instead Wakefield and his band of reformers turned their sights on New Zealand.