The Origins of an Experimental Society

In this major work, one of our leading historians offers a new account of the origins of New Zealand: how Pakeha settlers – nurtured on Enlightenment thought and evangelical humanitarianism – encountered Maori, and how the two peoples together developed a distinctively experimental society.With James Cook' s arrival in 1769 and the subsequent colonisation, New Zealand became one of the few post-Enlightenment experiments in creating a new nation anywhere in the world. The Europeans who settled th