Craik’s The New Zealanders: A Formative Case of Meaning-Construction

Abstract

From the 1820s, there was a surge in the number of books about New Zealand being published in Britain.  George Craik’s The New Zealanders (1830) serves an exemplar of how many of these works – which tended to be more popular than academic – not only provided British readers with information about New Zealand and its indigenous people, but which also contributed to processes of meaning-construction that both reflected current trends in interpreting the non-European world, and to some extent anticipated new ways of understanding the indigenous other.