Both colonial and postcolonial historical approaches often sideline New Zealand as a peripheral player. This book redresses the balance, and evaluates its role as an imperial power – as both a powerful imperial envoy and a significant presence in the Pacific region.

Introduction: New Zealand’s Empire – Katie Pickles and Catharine ColebornePart I: ‘Empire at home’1. Te Karere Maori and the defence of Empire, 1855–60 – Kenton Storey2. An imperial icon Indigenised: the Queen Victoria Memorial at Ohinemutu – Mark Stocker3. ‘Two branches of the brown Polynesians’: ethnographic fieldwork, colonial governmentality and the ‘dance of agency’ – Conal McCarthyPart II: Imperial mobility4. Travelling the Tasman world: travel writing and narratives of transit – Anna Johnston5. Law’s mobility: vagrancy and imperial legality in the trans-Tasman colonial world, 1860s–1914 – Catharine Coleborne6. ‘The World’s Fernery’: New Zealand, fern albums, and nineteenth-century fern fever – Molly DugginsPart III: New Zealand’s Pacific Empire7. From Sudan to Samoa: imperial legacies and cultures in New Zealand’s rule over the Mandated Territory of Western Samoa – Patricia O’Brien 8. ‘Fiji is really the Honolulu of the Dominion’: tourism, empire and New Zealand’s Pacific, c.1900–35 – Frances Steel9. Empire in the eyes of the beholder: New Zealand in the Pacific through French eyes – Adrian Muckle 1900–55 10. War surplus? New Zealand and American children of Indigenous women in Samoa, the Cook Islands, and Tokelau – Judith A. BennettPart IV Inside and outside Empire11. Official occasions and vernacular voices: New Zealand’s British Empire and Commonwealth Games, 1950–90 – Michael Dawson12. Australia as New Zealand’s western frontier, 1965–95 – Rosemary Baird and Philippa Mein Smith13. Southern outreach: New Zealand claims Antarctica from the ‘heroic era’ to the twenty-first century – Katie Pickles14. A radical reinterpretation of New Zealand history: apology, remorse and reconciliation – Giselle ByrnesGlossaryIndex

This edited collection is about New Zealand’s history as an imperial power, and about its evolving place within the British Empire. It revises and expands the history of empire within, to and from New Zealand by looking at New Zealand’s spheres of internal imperialism, its relationship with Australia, its Pacific Empire, and its outreach to Antarctica. In the study of the imperial past, both colonial and postcolonial approaches have often asserted the dualism of core and periphery, with New Zealand seen as periphery, or on the edge. This book critically revises our understanding of the range of ways that New Zealand has played a role as an imperial power, including the cultural histories of New Zealand inside the British Empire, engagements with imperial practices and politics of imperialism, and the circulation of the ideas of empire both through and inside New Zealand over time. It departs from earlier studies of both imperial and national histories by taking a new approach: it sees New Zealand as both a powerful imperial envoy, and as having its own sovereign role in Pacific nations, but it also examines the manifold ways in which New Zealanders look back at and comment on their relationships with ‘the empire’ over time. The book includes contributions from both established and emerging researchers, and will be useful for students of imperial history, histories of New Zealand, national history and histories of the Pacific.