Samuel D Carpenter

Tag: British Empire

  • Some brief notes on Christianity and te Tiriti o Waitangi

    3 February 2023 Christian (Protestant Evangelical) missions to New Zealand began with Samuel Marsden and chief Ruatara in 1814. By the late 1830s, Europeans were trying to purchase large tracts of land, and colonization companies were sending ships of settlers to the country. The British Government stepped in, with James Stephen at the Colonial Office…

  • What I’m Reading – VLOG#5

    Correspondence of Wiremu Tamehana, AJHR 1865: AtoJs Online — Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives — 1865 Session I — E-11 RETURN OF THE CORRESPONDENCE SIGNED OR PURPORTING TO BE SIGNED BY WILLIAM THOMPSON TE WAHAROA, ETC. (natlib.govt.nz) Tony Ballantyne, NZJH, 2011: New Zealand Journal of History – document (auckland.ac.nz)

  • What I’m reading – VLOG #1

    I’ve started a Video Log to talk about what I’m reading and what I’m thinking about in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and the British world and empire.

  • 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 are devoted to it, while public discourse usually responds reactively to contemporary issues and debates such as Black Lives Matter. This blog series will highlight…

  • 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 216-217: Carpenter – review of A Sharp – Samuel Marsden (Auckland, 2016)  

  • 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 next New Zealand Journal of History.

  • 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, languages and geographies. At one end of the spectrum, intellectual followers of Edward Said argue that the British imposed their own knowledge and cultural forms on…

  • Just a few light reference works…

    … as I begin some focussed writing. I stripped the NZ history shelf at my local. Good times.  

  • 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 leading scholar on the history of Western political thought, particularly of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now Emeritus Professor at John Hopkins University, being for many years…

  • Conversations about land, war, etc

    H T Kemp was a native interpreter and Crown purchase agent in the 1840s and 50s. He was a son of early missionary James Kemp. His 1870 English and Māori grammar fascinated me, including the way he starts with enumerating the various ‘tribes of the North Island’ from the 1870 census, and his ‘conversations’ including…