Beyond the Imperial Frontier

Marianne Williams recorded that soon after her arrival in New Zealand she was greeted by three young Māori girls who had welcomed her with ‘How do you do Ma’m’ in English, in answer to her own greeting of ‘Tena ra koe’.

Frontiers in colonial New Zealand were not simply lines on maps, but zones of contact and encounter.Beyond the Imperial Frontier explores these zones to discover the different ways Māori and Pākehā ‘fronted’ one another across the nineteenth century. Beginning with a pre-1840 era marked by significant cooperation, Vincent O’Malley details the emergence of a more competitive and conflicted post-Treaty world. As a collected work, these essays also chart the development of a leading New Zealand historian.