Jennifer Ashton.At the Margin of Empire: John Webster and Hokianga, 1841–1900.

Abstract

This well-crafted book exemplifies the work of a growing number of scholars seeking to complicate a fundamental binary of colonial New Zealand—that of the struggle between colonizers and colonized. This “race”-based contest dominated a powerful challenge to traditional historiography from the 1970s and 1980s onward, when revisionist scholars confronted a national myth that depicted a history of racial harmony and enlightened indigenous policy. Their perspectives became generally accepted in the scholarly world, if not necessarily in that of popular discourse. The recent efforts to complicate the binary outlines of the revisionist version of New Zealand history constitute a welcome development, adding value and balance to histories dominated by racial tension and conflict. The new studies have focused, in particular, on interdependence between early settlers and indigenous people and on the resulting degrees of autonomy Māori were able to retain in the face of relentless colonization. Jennifer Ashton’s case study investigates the intricate family, business, and other ramifications of mutual dependence at the margins of the farthest frontier of the British Empire. Her examination of the life and times of a powerful timber trader places capital in a central position on the colonial frontier and explicates the temporal and spatial unevenness of the colonial political economy. During John Webster’s long career, the Hokianga region, once a thriving beachhead of capitalist production, became a marginalized backwater. Ashton’s “life and times” account of this period is both compelling and accessible as it canvasses such weighty matters as the porousness and temporality of notions of indigenous cooperation and resistance.