SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

This report attempts to trace the economic and social impoverishment of the Hauraki people resulting from the colonisation of their lands. The term 'colonisation', as used here, embraces the following:

•   the subordination of the indigenous people by unilateral lawmaking or regulation by Crown agencies: the governor, the provincial or central ('colonial') legislatures or other executives, or officials acting under their instructions;

•   the military subjugation of the 1860s as an adjunct to the Waikato and Bay of Plenty campaigns, a process continued under the subsequent policy of 'pacification' which is here regarded as war carried on by other means;

•   the progressive imposition from 1865 onwards of European laws of (land) conveyance, facilitated by the substitution of individualised titles for customary communal titles.

Hauraki people were extraordinarily vulnerable to this process of colonisation because of their closeness to Auckland. They had a propinquity to that major pioneer settlement that mere miles on a map do not disclose. In nineteenth-century provincial Auckland, the main mode of transport was water transport: the province's 'mosquito fleet' became a proverb. The great bulk of the Hauraki hapu, their habitations adjacent to the inland sea, the Firth and the island-barrier protected gulf, were a brief steam-journey away from the capital (until 1865), and the colony's commercial centre for many of the years following. Consequently the full weight of Auckland influence fell on Hauraki iwi with an intensity and to an extent that should not be forgotten. Because of this propinquity the Hauraki people were peculiarly vulnerable, and the Crown had a considerable fiduciary obligation to protect them. This responsibility was not shouldered.

How far were the Hauraki people impoverished, economically and socially by this Crown neglect? To understand this one must first look at the pre-European economy of Hauraki so that later changes can be measured.

The traditional economy

The pre-European economy was stable but not in a condition of stasis. In response mainly to population pressures on limited resources it was evolving to technically higher levels of food gathering and cultivation. There was a constant factor, however: regardless of technological changes in production, the economy interlocked with the social order and was in equilibrium with it. Maori production was communitarian and co-operative; demands for labour were met by kinship obligations; and the activities were subject to chiefly co-ordination. This mode of production carried through to the next phase, the time of Hauraki's early interaction with the European economy, here called 'the phase of co-existence'.

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