This proposal to the Marsden Fund  indicates the state of play in February 2008

Keywords: Political Economy & History;
 

The last attempt to write a comprehensive New Zealand economic history was Condliffe’s New Zealand in the Making (1930) and The Welfare in New Zealand (1959). There are various studies which cover particular periods, notably Hawke’s The Making of New Zealand (1985) for the century from the 1860s and my In Stormy Seas (1997), which is an economics book but provides some coverage of the 75 years after the First World War. As a consequence, general histories treat the economy as having little influence, ignoring some obvious and important impacts. (Limited exceptions are Belich (1996, 2001), McKinnon (1997) and Mein-Smith (2005).)
 

Of course there has been much work on various economic aspects in recent years, including the construction of data bases and monographs. So the time is ripe for a comprehensive study of up to 250,000 words developing the analysis in my Hocken lecture Towards a Political Economy of New Zealand (1994) with additional attention to the business cycle as well as to the long-term shifts in the political economy, drawing the research together, while integrating it with general history.
 

My initial approach was to write a pure economic history, much like the studies mentioned above. However, following an extensive reading of general histories in 2007, I realised that such an approach would rule out engaging with the growing non-economic historiography. For instance, while it would be possible to mention the Treaty of Waitangi in a handful of paragraphs (as Condliffe (1930) does), that would both be unsatisfactory in terms of public interest and miss some of the rich economic issues that surround it (of how the Maori engaged with the commercial economy). The challenge is to write an accessible history of New Zealand for scholars, students and the general public from a rigorous economic perspective.
 

It is a four-year project. Funding has been arranged for the first two years (and the first two parts of the four-part book). This application is to the Marsden Fund to finance the last two parts.
 

A 2007 Claude McCarthy fellowship funded Part I. The Economy Before the Market consists of four chapters: The New Zealand Economy Before Man; The Polynesian Economy Before Commerce; The First Settlers; The Maori Before The Market. These chapters proved to be an enormous challenge since they involved disciplines other than those with which I am familiar – archaeology; anthropology; biology; ecology; geology – as well as having to adapt standard economic analysis for non-market economies. (Last year, 2007, also involved reading New Zealand history widely, and preparing for Part II.)
 

In 2008 a J.D. Stout Fellowship at the Stout Research Centre will enable me to write Part II, which is (currently) titled The Arrival of the Market. Planned chapters are The International Background; The Maori Joins the Market; The Quarry Economy; The First European Settlements; The First Depression; The Gold Economy; The War Economy; The Vogel Boom; The Long Depression; The Marginalisation of the Maori (few of the titles I am happy with).
 

Part III The Pastoral Economy is to run from 1882 to 1966 (roughly), including a chapter on the Maori migration to the cities. There are various hazy periods in the early twentieth century (from the end of the upswing after the Long Depression (1905?) to 1920), and there appears to have been a to-be-identified change in the role of urban centres in the interwar period.
 

Part IV, The New Economy, describes the response to the 1966 structural collapse of international pastoral prices , developing the thesis of In Stormy Sea, together with chapters on the New Maori Economy and the New Pasifika Migration.
 

Each Part will follow the structure of Part II: the early chapters being on the political economy followed by a roughly chronological sequence of the (longer) business cycles.
 

Not only will the study provide a detailed account of the economy through New Zealand’s history, but other innovative features include the interaction between environment and the economy and the role of the Pacific Islands in the New Zealand economy. In a very natural way (arising from the political economic frame) the study will pay more attention to the Maori economy than any past economic history.
 

I am also currently struggling with the first chapter of Part II. The conventional accounts of New Zealand economic history are Eurocentric. I am not sure where this will lead, but I hope that the next book will be as internationalist as my Globalisation and the Wealth of Nations (2007) and yet more indigenous than many past economic histories have been.
 

Bibliography
Belich, J. (1996) Making People (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press)
Belich, J. (2001) Paradise Reforged (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press)
Condliffe, J. B. (1930) New Zealand in the Making (Allen & Unwin)
Condliffe, J. B. (1959) The Welfare State in New Zealand (Allen & Unwin)
Easton, B. H. (1994) Towards a Political Economy of New Zealand: The Tectonics of History (Hocken Library)
Easton, B. H. (1997) In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy (University of Otago Press)
Easton B. H. (2007) Globalisation and the Wealth of Nations (Auckland University Press)
Hawke. G. R. (1985) The Making of New Zealand: An Economic History (Cambridge University Press)
Mein-Smith, P. (2004) A Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge University Press)
McKinnon , M., with B. Bradley & R. Kirkpatrick (1997) New Zealand Historical Atlas: Ko Papatuanuku E Takoto Nei (Bateman)