The Oxford History Of New Zealand

Before New Zealand became shorthand for scenery, rugby, and sensible distance from everyone else’s problems, it had the awkward business of becoming a country.

The Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by W. H. Oliver and B. R. Williams, offers a serious, wide-ranging account of New Zealand’s past, from Māori history and European contact through colonisation, settlement, politics, land, economy, society, and national identity.

This is proper Oxford history: calm, substantial, and unlikely to be distracted by romance. It looks at how New Zealand was made, argued over, governed, farmed, imagined, and revised. Not just mountains and sheep, then, but treaties, power, migration, conflict, reform, and the long effort to decide what “New Zealand” actually meant.

There is a pleasing irony in national histories. They often arrive looking solid and authoritative, while describing countries that were anything but settled. New Zealand, like everywhere else, turns out not to be a finished object, but a continuing negotiation with maps, memory, law, and land.

This good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of New Zealand history, colonial history, Pacific history, and anyone who enjoys discovering that even apparently tidy nations have complicated cupboards.

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