NZHistorian.com
Samuel Carpenter is an historian of New Zealand/Aotearoa and the British empire who is particularly concerned with the role of ideas in history (‘intellectual history’) and the evolution of political institutions. This is his personal blog page which highlights ongoing research and provides links to publications.
Latest posts…
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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)… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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,… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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. Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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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… Read more ⇢
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Coffee and Colonialism
… of course there is an important imperial or post-colonial discourse that can be written about the relationship of coffee to colonialism. Right now I’m reading Partha Chatterjee and drinking… Read more ⇢
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My anthropological and post-colonial turn?
I seem to be collecting a lot of anthropological and post-colonial literature at the moment. My shelf (below) is the evidence: Bernard S Cohn, Nicholas Thomas, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee,… Read more ⇢
Samuel D Carpenter 