What is it about?
Designing colonial constitutions was a mid-nineteenth century commonplace for Britain’s settlement empire. This essay examines the process of crafting and lobbying on constitutional design across the second half of the 1840s and through to 1852. In doing so, it illuminates the localised inflections in play in colonial New Zealand, while analysing how the materalities of indigenous power were recognised and paradoxically obscured.
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Why is it important?
The article looks at how indigenous legalities - law-making and concepts of law - were recognised under the Imperial Parliament's early constitutional enactments for the colony of New Zealand in 1846 and 1852. It examines how the notion of indigenous law related to separate indigenous territorial government in colonial New Zealand and how it is crucial to consider the lobbying that underpinned the shaping of these constitutional provisions. In doing so, the article shows how the intellectual histories of constitutional design benefit from engaging with the archival record in sequencing and understanding influences.
Perspectives
I was eager to demonstrate the contingent elements that went into constitutional design, specifically when thinking about how to acknowledge the material presence of indigenous communities and legal regimes in circumstances where such accommodation might not occur in constitutional enactments elsewhere in the 1840s and 1850s. Colonial New Zealand affords an interesting insight into the factors and influences that could shape the drafting of such constitutional recognition and I wished to show the influences at work. In doing so, I wished to get away from the techniques of some who engage with high-level philosophical or other texts and to show the power of research in the archive.
Dr Mark Hickford
Victoria University of Wellington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories, The Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, December 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2017.1408228.
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