Post Archive
Author: nzhistorian
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Legacies of Empire #1: academic debates
Recent conversations about the good, bad, ugly and indifferent legacies of the British Empire… The debate about the legacies of the British empire does not go away. Various academic projects…
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Interview with Bradford Haami about my PhD thesis
Recorded in September 2021 In September 2021, I was interviewed on Zoom by Brad Haami, historian and published author and Pou Amorangi/Māori Director and lecturer at Laidlaw College, Henderson. The…
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Te Rauparaha & Son.
I’m doing some work on the correspondence and recorded speeches of Tamihana Te Rauparaha, son of Ngāti Toa rangatira, Te Rauparaha. The father has the more historical fame (or infamy)…
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Thesis writing … and ‘the romance of the archive’
Well it’s been some considerable time since I’ve posted. A principal reason for this is that I’ve been focussed on writing this past year, and will be for the forseeable…
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Review of Andrew Sharp – Samuel Marsden bio
I recently had published a review of Andrew Sharp’s significantly-proportioned appraisal of Samuel Marsden’s life and ‘opinions’: in the New Zealand Journal of History, vol 51, no 1 (2017), pp…
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Alfred Brown’s library – Te Papa, Tauranga
I recently spent a couple of days in the library of this important Church Missionary Society missionary in New Zealand. What I was struck by: the striking aesthetic of this nineteenth century…
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Thomas Carlyle on … Democracy
The enigmatic Victorian writer, Thomas Carlyle, who was inspired by German Romanticism, wrote some pretty fascinating lines on ‘democracy’ and ‘government’ in his Past and Present (1843): Democracy, which means despair…
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Review of new Samuel Marsden biography
My short review of Andrew Sharp’s intellectual biography of Marsden was published this week on the NZ Listener’s webpage, see here. A longer (academic) review will be published soon in the…
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Only E P Thompson could say it like this
From ‘In Defence of the Jury’, in E P Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994): … Two basic propositions of democracy are so…
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Notes on Colonial-Imperial knowledge formation
A number of scholars of British India have sought to understand the ways in which British power was exercised through constructing knowledge about Indian societies, including their histories and literatures,…
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Clifford Geertz – historical anthropologist
Every now and again one reads some truly arresting prose. I’ve been reading some the last couple of days in F Inglis, ed., Clifford Geertz: Life Among the Anthros and…
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Just a few light reference works…
… as I begin some focussed writing. I stripped the NZ history shelf at my local. Good times.
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New faith, new law
I was in Ōtaki recently. One of the aims of my thesis is to explore the origins of the Kīngitanga on the Kāpiti coast. At Ōtaki is one of New…
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… and more books
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted. I’m still busy collecting and reading relevant historiography. Just took a photo now of the latest arrivals. I’m also starting to frame…
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The politics of history… J G A Pocock
I’ve been reading J G A Pocock, a New Zealander with an international reputation in the world of humanities. Initially a professor of political science at Canterbury University in the 1960s, he has become a…
