Abstract
This chapter examines a series of cultural connections and intellectual exchanges between India and the Pacific that have been elided by historians of empire as well as being neglected within the historiography of individual colonies. From the early nineteenth century, Orientalist learning played a central role in the development of Pacific studies, providing comparative evidence, analytical frameworks and methodological insights that were embraced by scholar-administrators and ethnographers in the Pacific. While at a general level, this engagement with Orientalism reflected the cultural authority that the work of Jones, Prichard or Max Müller enjoyed, more specifically, however, it was a powerful ‘imagined geography’ borne out of European imperialism.
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Notes
Helen Wallis, ‘Terra Australis, Australia and New Zealand. Voyages, discoveries and concepts’, Australian and New Zealand Studies, Patricia McLaren-Turner ed. (London, 1985), 184–93.
Robert Clancy, The Mapping of Terra Australis (Macquarie Park, NSW, 1995) Maps 6.13 and 6.38–6.40, 83, 100–1.
Oxford English Dictionary, I, 569; John Callander, Terra Australis Cognita, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1766–8), I, 49.
Douglas Sutton suggests that a ‘consensus view’ accepts that: ‘first, the geographical settlement of New Zealand was the same as for Easter Island and Hawaii; second, this central Eastern Polynesian homeland includes the Marquesas, Societies, Southern Cooks, with Mangareva, the Australs and Pitcairn.’ Douglas G. Sutton, ‘Conclusion: Origins’, The Origins of the First New Zealanders, Douglas G. Sutton ed. (Auckland, 1994), 251. The Maori, as Polynesians, are part of the Austronesian family, a broad linguistic and ethnic grouping who can be traced back to the speakers of Proto-Austronesian in southern China and Taiwan approximately 3500 BCE.
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John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere …, 3 vols (London, 1783), III, 474. Hawkesworth did add one phrase from Cook’s vocabulary: ‘What do you call this or that?’ Presumably he preferred Banks’s vocabulary because it distinguished between ‘northern’ and ’southern’ Maori. Ibid., 474–5.
Alun David, ‘Sir William Jones, Biblical Orientalism and Indian Scholarship’, Modern Asian Studies, 30,1 (1996), 173–84.
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Richard Taylor, A Leaf from the Natural History of New Zealand (Wellington, 1848), xviii–xix. My emphasis.
Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and its inhabitants (London, 1855), 184, 189–90.
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Richard Taylor, Te ika a Maui: or, New Zealand and its inhabitants, 2nd edn (London, 1870), 33.
The standard work on Maori demographic history is Ian Pool, Te Iwi Maori: a New Zealand Population, Past, Present &and Projected (Auckland, 1991).
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About 75 per cent of these were Irish Catholic, composing 13.9 per cent of the total population. Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto, 1996), 67–9.
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On ‘Munshi Abdullah’ and the cosmopolitan world of the Straits see Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1995), 10–30;
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John Turnbull Thomson, ‘On Barata Numerals’, TPNZI, 5 (1872), 131.
Thomson, ‘Barat or Barata fossil words’, TPNZI, 11 (1878), 158.
On the language and politics of race in colonial science see John Stenhouse, ‘“A disappearing race before we came here”: Doctor Alfred Kingcombe Newman, the dying Maori and Victorian scientific racism’, NZJH (1996), 124–140. For Thomson’s concerns with the conduct of colonial science see J. T. Thomson, An Outline of the Principles and Details connected with the Colonial Survey of the Province of Otago (Dunedin, 1861) and An Exposition of Processes and Results of the Survey System of Otago (Dunedin, 1875).
J. T. Thomson, ‘Original Exploration in the Scottish Settlement of Otago, and Recent Travel in Other Parts of N. Z.’, Royal Scottish Society of Arts, 10 (1878), 96.
For a recent reassessment of the Scottish Enlightenment’s impact in New Zealand see Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an experiment in post-Enlightenment experimental practice’, New Zealand Journal of History, 31 (1997), 197–218.
He also suggested that the English too would exhibit the Malay’s ‘self-indulgent patriarchal tendencies’ if placed in a tropical environment. John Turnbull Thomson, Some Glimpses into Life in the Far East (London, 1864), 60, 253–4.
John Turnbull Thomson, Rambles with a Philosopher or, Views at the Antipodes by an Otagoian (Dunedin, 1867), 86–7.
He pursued this project by overlaying Maori place names with a new layer of names drawn from the borderlands. See W. H. Roberts, Place Names and the Early History of Otago and Southland (Invercargill, 1913).
R. C. Barstow, ‘Stray thoughts on Mahori or Maori migrations’, TPNZI, 9 (1876), 242;
J. D. Lang, A View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation; demonstrating their ancient discovery and progressive settlement of the Continent of America (London, 1834).
W. H. Blyth, ‘On “the Whence of the Maori”’, TPNZI, 9 (1886), 544.
Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington, 1885), 1–2, 5–6.
A. S. Atkinson, ‘The Aryo-Semitic Maori’, TPNZI, 9 (1886), 552–76.
Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations, and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I, 3 vols (London, 1878–85).
See K. R. Howe, ‘Some origins and migrations of ideas leading to the Aryan Polynesian theories of Abraham Fornander and Edward Tregear’, Pacific Studies, 11 (1988), 67–81.
James Belich, ‘Myth, race and identity in New Zealand’, NZJH, 31 (1997), 18. Sinclair argued that ‘it was widely believed that Maori were a “branch of the Caucasian race”’.
Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity (Wellington, 1986), 198. Sorrenson seems confused in his use of terminology: he identifies the dominant ‘idea of an Indian or Caucasian origin’: Sorrenson, Maori Origins, 33. Not only does this conflate two distinct geographic/cultural regions (and Sorrenson does not discuss any theorist who argued that Maori were Caucasian), but it also neglects the debates over whether Maori descended from Indian Aryans, Dravidians or tribal peoples.
Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europes Rediscovety of India and the East, 1680–1880, Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking trans (New York, 1984).
Cf. Tony Ballantyne, ‘The “Oriental Renaissance” in the Pacific: Orientalism, language and ethnogenesis in the British Pacific’, Migracijske Terne: A Journal for Migration and Ethnic Studies, 15 (1999), 423–50.
Tregear was a regular contributor to the leading free-thought journal The Monthly Review and its earlier and more openly theosophical incarnation Hestia. These journals are discussed in Robert S. Ellwood, Islands of the Dawn. The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand (Honolulu, 1993), 99–101;.
F. D. Fenton, Suggestions for a History of the Origin and Migration of the Maori People (Auckland, 1885). 60, 87–8.
Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis, 2 vols (London, 1883), I, 9.
Gerald Massey, A Book of the Beginnings, 2 vols (London, 1881), I, 26. Anne McLintock has recently analysed some of the relationships between gender, sexuality and colonial geography articulated in passages such as this: Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995), 1–3, 21–30.
S. E. Peal, ‘The Ancestors of the Maori’, JPS, 6: 24 (December 1897), 174–6.
Percy S. Smith, Hawaiki, the Original Home of the Maori (Wellington, 1898), with subsequent editions in 1904, 1910 and 1921; ‘Aryan and Polynesian points of contact: the story of Te Niniko’, JPS, 19 (1910); ‘The fatherland of the Polynesians: Aryan and Polynesian points of contact’, JPS, 28 (1919).
Peter Buck [Te Rangi Hiroa], Vikings of the Sunrise (New York, 1938), 35.
Raymond Firth, Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori (Wellington, 1929). Also see his ‘Economic psychology of the Maori’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 55, (1925), 340–62.
Radhika Viyas Mongia, ‘Race, nationality, mobility: a history of the passport’, Public Culture, 11 (1999), 527–55.
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© 2002 Tony Ballantyne
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Ballantyne, T. (2002). Indocentrism on the New Zealand Frontier: Geographies of Race, Empire and Nation. In: Orientalism and Race. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508071_3
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