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Start date: 2024Subject: search.filters.subject.430313 History of empires, imperialism and colonialism

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    On the bones of Batala : exploring the colonization of the Tagalog Region through tabletop role-playing game design : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025) Bañas, Ar-Em
    The collaborative narrative space of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) can create opportunities for the TTRPG designer, the Game Master (GM), and the players to engage in conversation about real-life issues such as the impact of colonialism in the Philippines. It can also be a vehicle for counter-hegemonic narratives (Scherff iii–iv) by allowing marginalized players to engage with their culture and folklore through anticolonial play within a fictional environment. Growing up in Metro Manila, Philippines, which historian William Manchester described as the second most destroyed Allied city after Warsaw and “one of the greatest tragedies of World War II” (413), I found little space for Filipinos to discuss colonial violence and trauma specific to the Tagalog region. This project provides an avenue to address that need thereby offering the potential for creative expression and collective healing. Reimagining the colonization of Metro Manila and the Tagalog Region through a folk-horror TTRPG allowed me to navigate and process its violent and traumatic history while offering an outlet for other Filipino players to explore their own feelings about colonialism. On the Bones of BATALA positions players as Katauhan, the human survivors in an alternate-history folk-horror setting. They survive on the Rotting Isles, an archipelago built on the corpse of the Tagalog supreme god, Batalang Maykapal, who was slain by the god-like colonizers. The game’s development was guided by the question, “How do I recontextualize my experiences with colonial violence, trauma, and hegemonic narratives through tabletop role-playing game design to enable Filipino players to regain agency over their own experiences through play?”
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    British humanitarians and the founding of New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand. EMBARGOED to 14 November 2026.
    (Massey University, 2024) Wyatt, Philippa
    This thesis reconsiders the intentions of the British humanitarians who sought to implement a ‘new system’ of ‘humane colonisation’ inaugurated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It addresses two principal questions. First, it attempts to understand how scholarly interpretations regarding humanitarians have changed over time and come increasingly to deny any protective intentions. It begins with Keith Sinclair who, although initially critical of humanitarians, came to greatly appreciate the importance and influence of humanitarian thinking and its Christian basis. It then follows the historiographical marginalization of humanitarianism during a period of intense historical revision in the 1970s and 1980s when humanitarianism was dismissed along with long–held ‘myths’ of racial harmony. ‘New Imperial History’, while reintegrating New Zealand with the empire, has likewise continued to present all humanitarians, particularly missionaries, as little more than active agents of imperialism. Secondly, this thesis seeks to provide a revision of that existing interpretation through a re–examination of the intentions of leading humanitarians in 1840. What that assessment reveals is that their goal was to create a more just and equal society, both at home and within the empire. This was understood to be necessary given the ‘crisis of civilization’ these men were then facing as evident in the growing poverty of the working poor within Britain and the increasing mistreatment and exploitation of indigenous peoples in the empire. It was the urgency created by that crisis that not only fueled a revival of faith but united these men as Christians, and led them to then seek to change their society and the empire as a whole through what was to be a radical programme of social and political reform based on ‘moral politics’. What they sought was to empower the poor and marginalized to better help themselves by assisting with their development to a position of ‘social equality’ and independence through educational and social reforms. With regard to Māori, what that meant was implementing a programme of targeted assimilation that could equip them with the education and skills they needed to compete more equally with Pākehā, while maintaining that which was important to their culture and identity, particularly their language. Securing the independence and greater protection of the vulnerable both at home and abroad was also understood to be dependent on securing their greater legal equality and civil rights, and what was a movement inspired by Christian faith and ‘love’ in turn became a civil rights movement that eventually sought to achieve in New Zealand what these men called ‘amalgamation’: the peaceful union of the two races on the basis of a shared faith and equal rights and laws. This was the great hope of the ‘new system’ of ‘humane colonization’ that came to be first attempted in New Zealand. It was also the hope of many Māori leaders, who likewise understood the Treaty to have created a union based on ‘one faith, one love, one law’.
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    Colonial discourses of deviance and desire and the bodies of wāhine Māori : a thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Arts at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024) Allen, Elizabeth Anne
    This research traces how colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality contributed to nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of wāhine Māori and questions how these repetitive inscriptions might continue to have a negative impact on perceptions of wāhine Māori and kōtiro Māori in contemporary culture. As a Mana Wahine study, I demonstrate that fundamental codes of the developing colonial state were affirmed by how Pākehā guarded sexuality, ordered gender, and surveilled race. As a wahine Māori centred project, it examines the colonial dimensions of “domesticity,” the “civilising mission,” and the ‘paternalism of liberalism’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand, specifically, on the assumption that differentiations of race and colonial power were essentially ordered in terms of Western notions of gender. Of particular concern is the management of wāhine Māori sexuality, procreation, child-rearing, and marriage as a mechanism of colonial control of their bodies. Focusing on spaces of perceived proximity and desire as a source from which we can search for newly recognisable forms of social perceptions in relating, it offers an engagement with myriad forms of art across multidisciplinary fields to provide a unique window into a colonial exercise of the imperial project that had a direct impact on the bodies of wāhine Māori. A critical examination of the colonial metaphors around desire and degeneration, of the intimate and affect, attempts to decolonise its representative paradigms by addressing the consequential structural and material histories that, for wāhine Māori, resulted in meting out differential futures based on ‘fabulated’ divisions of worth, prompting the central questions of the dissertation, how are bodies similar or not? How are bodies available or not? How are bodies knowable or not? And to whom?