Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa examines the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the first colonial emigration scheme to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial grievances. Moving from the formation of the New Zealand Company in the 1830s to the Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising at the close of the nineteenth century, this book reveals the inextricability of finance and colonialism.

Described as “Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent” by Max Haiven, this book reveals the financial instruments 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 romanticized 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 colonization of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anticolonial struggle today.

Available from Unity Books