About

My name is Samuel Carpenter. I am a lecturer in history and research fellow at Laidlaw College, Auckland, New Zealand.

I was awarded a PhD in history by Massey University, New Zealand in 2021. My PhD research was supported by a Marsden trust scholarship.

My PhD reconstructed mentalities and political argument concerning New Zealand’s constitutional evolutions, late 1830s-1860s, in both European and indigenous (Maori) worlds. Methodologically the work reflected ‘Cambridge School’ and ‘New Imperial History’ priorities. It formed part of a wider Marsden-funded project at Massey University, led by Prof Michael Belgrave, which explored the extent to which a civil society was created or imagined that  transcended the scattered European settlement and different Maori polities, allowing the wars of the 1860s to be seen as ‘civil wars’.

This website is now a blog page for my ongoing research and thinking, which generally looks to situate New Zealand history in a broad milieu of global history influenced particularly by the Pacific and the British world and empire.