The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa

"This is the most stimulating book I have read on the colonisation of Aotearoa from the exciting new generation of scholars."
- Jane Kelsey

"The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa is long overdue. In it, she covers the well-researched, familiar ground of our colonial history, but through a seldom applied lens. The result is thus entirely novel, and desperately needed"
- Arama Rata

"Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent"
- Max Haiven

Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.

This book tells the story of the financial instrumrnts and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.

By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes the understanding of this country's history, but also the stakes of anti-colonial struggle today.

Catherine Comyn (Ngāti Ranginui, Pākehā) is an ESRA researcher based in London, where she is completing a PhD in International Political Economy at King's College.

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