… and his views on the Waitara controversy, c. 1860.

The slides and recording below represent a conference paper given at the New Zealand Historical Association Conference last week, at the University of Auckland. (The NZHA conference is the main conference of Aotearoa-NZ historians held biennially.)

Abstract of paper: The Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary Henry Williams (known to Māori as Karuwhā or Te Wiremu) is conventionally portrayed as a stern Anglican clergyman and former naval lieutenant who ran the mission like a ‘quarter-deck’, so leading it to some success in New Zealand. He is sometimes also portrayed as intentionally fudging the words of the Treaty to convince Māori to sign (with motives allegedly benign or self-interested). This paper conducts a close reading of largely unknown Williams family archival material and political texts from early nineteenth century Britain to reframe our understanding of Williams as, instead, an Englishman of Welsh ancestry shaped by the religious and political cultures of early nineteenth century Dissent, or Nonconformity. His father belonged to a middling class of merchants and textile manufacturers involved in Nottingham Corporation politics, while Henry was raised by his parents in Independent (Congregational) chapels rather than in the Church of England. Although, as a missionary, Williams’ character and personality were marked by Royal Navy service, and his diplomacy was evident in the Treaty negotiations, we cannot understand this evangelical missionary without attending closely to his English formation, including his inheritance of Dissenting politics and its concomitant understandings of English constitutional history. Drawing on these multiple and overlapping texts and contexts we can make better sense of Henry Williams’ actual personality, his religious sensibility, and his characterisation of the Treaty-te Tiriti o Waitangi as a ‘Magna Carta’ – a Great Charter of Māori and (especially) chiefly ‘Rank, Rights and Privileges’.

Feedback or comments are welcome at scarpenter@laidlaw.ac.nz

Recording:

Slides:

The paper was part of a panel on “Revisiting missionary lives”, the two other presenters being Dr Felicity Barnes (presenting on Jane Kendall), and Dr Rowan Light (presenting on Bishop Pompallier and Pā Henare Tate). The abstracts of all three papers are here: