British policy - background to the Treaty

British policy

Protecting Maori, regulating land transactions, controlling the activities of settlers and dealing with the influx of New Zealand Company migrants all came together in British policy in 1839. Other nations watched the events with interest. French and American whalers used New Zealand waters and ports. The Americans had appointed James Clendon as consul to New Zealand in 1839, and a shipload of French colonists was heading New Zealand's way. How Britain annexed the country was crucial  to the kind of nation that New Zealand would become and the relationship between its British and Maori citizens.

Maori and settlers

The British government finally realised that it was futile and undesirable to keep Maori and settlers apart. Maori and settlers mingled and traded in the main ports and harbours. British policy was to develop trading further, encourage Maori to 'amalgamate' with settler society, encourage Maori to continue their education under the missionaries, and have them prosper with the settlers. The New Zealand Company planned that Maori would be given 1 in 10 sections in its new settlements. These would not be reserves in an American or Australian sense but investments that would grow in capital value and be the real payment for land the settlers occupied.

Britain also needed legal authority to deal with British subjects. It had only a limited ability to control settler activity, including land transactions. The British government intended to guarantee Maori land rights and was strongly influenced by new thinking about systematic colonisation.

Protecting Maori interests was seen as vital. British officials thought it pointless to protect Maori by isolating them on reserves when their culture was already damaged, it was assumed, by guns and alcohol. Such reserves would be swept away by the settlers, as they had been in the Americas and Australia. Colonisation in New Zealand would be done differently, hence the Treaty promises.

Final formalities

As far as British law and practice was concerned, it was not the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi that transferred sovereignty to Great Britain but the formal proclamations of sovereignty later in 1840. The Treaty provided the prerequisite for these proclamations of sovereignty.

The New Zealand Company, without any sanction from the British government, had carried on with its settlement plans. Before the Treaty was signed, it entered into land purchase deeds signed at Port Nicholson, Kapiti and Queen Charlotte Sound. Its aim was to purchase from Maori a huge area of the North and South islands. It had then, also without government approval, sent a fleet of emigrant ships to Port Nicholson, establishing the new settlement of Wellington.

William Hobson decided that it was urgent to proclaim sovereignty over the whole country. This would leave the Port Nicholson settlers in no doubt that they were bound by British government policy and were not entitled to regard themselves as forming an independent colony. Hobson took this step while copies of the Treaty were being taken around the country for signing. On 21 May 1840 he proclaimed British sovereignty over the North Island by cession and over the South Island by discovery. In June 1840 Thomas Bunbury, unaware of Hobson's actions, separately proclaimed British sovereignty over the South Island by cession.

The last formal steps were taken later in 1840 when the boundaries of the colony of New South Wales were formally altered to include New Zealand. In 1841 New Zealand was established as a separate Crown colony in its own right. The Chatham Islands were inadvertently left out of the official boundaries of New Zealand until 1842.