Unrealised plans : the New Zealand Company in the Manawatu, 1841-1844 : a research exercise presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Diploma in Social Sciences in History at Massey University

Abstract

The New Zealand Company was formed in August 1839 following the amalgamation of two earlier colonising bodies. The Company was the instrument with which Edward Gibbon Wakefield hoped to give practical expression to his theories of colonisation, and it was representative of a Victorian trend toward colonisation by which the British ' ••• commercial classes and many of the British Ministers (worked) toward the expansion of British trade and shipping in the Far East.•1 Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theories of systematic colonisation and the activities of the New Zealand Company in New Zealand have been well documented and described in the literature.2 This essay is in the form of a regional case study, as it examines the Company's plans to open up the Manawatu and Horowhenua districts for European settlement by purchasing a vast tract of land from one Maori tribe with rights of landownership. [From Introduction]