Prof. Tony Ballantyne, "Mission and the Languages of Colonisation, New Zealand, 1814-c.1850"

Keynote Address, Wānanga-Symposium, Waitangi, 17 November 2023
ABSTRACT
What was the relationship between the missionary enterprise in New Zealand and the projects of empire and colonisation? Reading a number of key moments and sources in Protestant missionary work in New Zealand from 1814, this talk navigates a course between the long-standing concern in imperial history with the question of the ‘Bible and the flag’ and the critical New Zealand scholarship on ‘cultural colonisation’. It particularly highlights the shifting importance of the place of land in the socio-economic formation of the CMS mission; as a key nexus in the patronage and protection of key rangatira; as a source of sustenance and support for mission work and missionary families; and, increasingly, as a locus for identification and belonging. I demonstrate the tensions within the mission around colonisation. I highlight the co-existence of the determined critiques of the New Zealand Company forwarded by the CMS, which was part of the discourse on what Elizabeth Elbourne has termed the ‘sin of the settler’, and the centrality of the languages of settlement and improvement in the self-imaginings of missionaries and their families. This was a tension that critics of the mission were alive to and in turn mobilised in sharp critiques through to the 1850s and beyond. I suggest that these tense exchanges were important in attempts to negotiate the cultural legitimacy of colonisation in these islands. Building on these exchanges, I will conclude with some concluding reflections on these missionary arguments and aspirations in the emergence and evolution of Pākehā identities in the nineteenth century.
BIO
Tony Ballantyne is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement) at the University of Otago. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and has held faculty positions at universities in Ireland and the USA. Prior to his current role, Tony served as Head of the Department of History and Art History (2011-2015), Pro-Vice Chancellor, Humanities (2015-2021), and was also the Director of Otago’s Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. Tony is recognised as a world-leading historian of the modern British empire, who has also published extensively on colonialism and its legacies in New Zealand. In recent years much of his research has come to focus on the changing place of New Zealand within the British Empire. He has published on missionaries and cross-cultural entanglements, the transformation of knowledge traditions in the nineteenth century, and the abiding consequences of empire and colonisation in shaping contemporary New Zealand. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Societyof New Zealand in 2012. He has won both the Mary Boyd and W. H. Oliver prizes from the New Zealand Historical Association as well as the Aronui Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

[@Dave183]

Kia ora...

[@jamescrydeman540]

I think it a bit rich when an earlier coloniser/occupant complains about a latter day coloniser/occupant doing the same on the same basis.