Ian Pool’s research while affiliated with New Zealand Institute of Economic Research and other places

The Widening of human capital—expansion and contraction are essentially driven by demographic forces, modified by factors of Deepening of human capital (a more familiar concept)—has not received the attention it deserves. Starting with the modest aim of exploring this, my paper came to the conclusion that this was insufficient. On reflection, the issue of widening of human capital opens up the peopling and development dimensions of the leading crises facing humanity: above all climate change. But, there are others—notably, social inequality, including down-stream effects such as inter-country and inter-continental migration, which is amenable to policy interventions. Another is the problem of age-structural shifts, which, by contrast, are inexorable and need management, but cannot be altered in direction. Suffice to say that they involve far more than structural ageing (%’s at older ages), the one dimension that has captured popular and media attention. In reality the causes and effects of structural ageing are misunderstood, and almost no attention paid to numerical ageing (increasing numbers at any age).

By conventional economic indicators, such as GDP per capita and unemployment, New Zealand is among the better off of the OECD countries (OECD, 2015). This, however, is not true for all areas in the country. The other empirical articles in this issue focus on the disparities between towns and rural centres across New Zealand, especially those in decline. This article takes a different approach, focusing on the contribution of Māori to national and sub-national population and development.

The Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand are a case-study of the negative impacts of colonization on the health of precursor peoples, such as indigenous peoples in Australia, the Americas, and northern Eurasia. But, colonization has such effects regardless of whether colonized peoples eventually become “independent,” or are swamped demographically and politically by a settler population. Indigenous peoples still suffer “internal colonialism” after their country becomes independent (from the United Kingdom for Aotearoa), even in social democracies, simply because majorities, through benign neglect or paternalism, often fail to meet the particular needs of indigenous citizens. Incidentally, “independent” ex-colonies do not escape post-colonialism, because they are subject to interventions by powerful international and bi-lateral agencies, such as structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank. This paper uses the epidemiological transition framework, but questions its application to colonized peoples, who often, contrary to the paradigm’s deterministic principle of progress, may suffer “regression” as their very survival is threatened by newly introduced diseases to which they have no immunity. Some, not Māori, even go through demographic collapses.” The eventual Māori transition did follow the conventional framework, but in its “delayed” form. Finally the paper shifts from theoretical dimensions into praxis: health services. It identifies stages in the evolution of these as they affect indigenous people. This is a more detailed overview than the conventional view: a shift from social determinants of health change to the impacts of public health interventions, and from the domination of communicable diseases to non-communicable.

The various factors that could have affected Maori population dynamics in the pre-colonial period have already been reviewed. The first objective of this chapter is to synthesize the information already presented by documenting possible population numbers and rates of change over the seven decades from 1769, a fairly straightforward exercise. But this simple task serves another function: to pave the way for the second objective, which looks at the important, yet until now under-reported, story of Maori development in that period. This lacuna is so severe that it is important, even in this chapter’s introduction, to elaborate a little on some key epistemological issues encountered when filling the gap. To reconstruct the everyday economy and wellbeing of Maori between 1769 and 1840, I view the economy as an integral part of Maori development across every sphere of life. My perspective would not be that of a conventional economist. Instead, I take people as the unit of analysis rather than monetized values or their proxies, the focus of orthodox economics. There is a need to formulate a different approach. It starts from the observation that any dichotomy between subsistence and market economies is false; it assumes that people – labour force and human capital – are the drivers of the economy, and finance merely oil for those engines; and that intra-family transfers, in kind or monetary, are fundamental to the understanding even of modern-day economies.

For Maori population and development in the nineteenth century, the ‘elephant in the room’ was the arrival and inflow of Pakeha. The driving force underpinning the narrative here is colonization: how contact with Pakeha was followed by missionary, trade and then political intervention by British and other Europeans; then by the cession in 1840 of New Zealand to the British Crown. From 1840, New Zealand’s trajectory followed that of some other ‘settler colonies’, especially those of the ‘Anglo-World’, Australia, Canada and the United States. There white immigrants and their descendants gained more than political suzerainty, also achieving demographic hegemony and ownership of most of the territory and other capital assets. So, everywhere, a core accompaniment of colonization in the ‘settler model’ is the loss of the resources and the erosion of the culture of the ‘precursor peoples’. This is where the New Zealand case-study has much wider resonance, certainly for the settler-colonies of Anglo-America and Australia, to a degree for the southern cone of Latin America – Uruguay, Argentina and Chile – somewhat less so for southern Africa and other parts of Latin America (Belich 2009: 180, 548ff; Pool 2009). Colonization was far more than the political act of a society becoming another territory in a wider empire, however this term might be defined: Ronald Wright’s ‘ tribute (or hegemonic)…’ as against ‘centralized (or territorial)…’ empires; or James Belich’s ‘false’, ‘loose’ and ‘tight’ ‘Empire’ (Wright 2008; Belich 1996: 249).

Before moving into substantive analyses, there is a need to look at the wider context for Maori population and development – most importantly, the major events in New Zealand’s nineteenth century social, political, cultural and economic history alongside which demographic and development trends unfolded. For example, these were affected by, or at least occurred in tandem with shifts in New Zealand’s constitutional path; with the direction taken by the settler economy; with social transformation in general; and with the forging of New Zealand’s cultural identity. One can add the country’s external relations including contact itself and the annexation of New Zealand, which sealed forever the fate of the indigenous Maori. Another seminal event in external relations came at the very end of the colonial period. This was the decision by Richard Seddon’s Liberal Government, somewhat against Whitehall’s geopolitical thinking, not to join the Australian Commonwealth in 1901. One sticking point of relevance here seems to have been differences in the citizenship status of Maori from Aborigines, even expressed at a popular level then (e.g. cartoons) (New Zealand Graphic Oct 1900; Oliver 2000). Maori were enfranchised, but Australian Aborigines were not to be ‘citizens’ of the new Commonwealth for decades to come. More widely, there was certainly concern about the erosion of New Zealand’s social reforms (Smith 2012). The present study is built around period-specific analyses of population and development, in each of which there were major events that covaried with these.

Circa 1900 has emerged as a seminal date for the two central phenomena addressed in this book: population change, particularly as demonstrated by the factor of survival, and development. But, both are really two different dimensions of development: survival is the most primal of development needs: it is reasonable to conceptualize demographic change as the human capital dimensions of population and development, underwriting all other social, economic and cultural activities. The significance of human capital, labour force and, as a product of these, savings, has been underlined by the emerging literature on ‘demographic dividends’ that I will return to later (Pool 2007). The demographic side of this story is relatively straightforward and much of the technical background analysis is already available: how Maori numbers declined and recuperated, and, beyond the time-frame of this book, sustained rapid and then robust growth. Recent knowledge-gains in the field of health enrich the demographic data-base. But the other dimension, development, consisting mainly of socio-economic, financial, physical and other material aspects of development has no such extant technical backstopping, with one major exception. Legal-historical technical research, which may be at a leading edge internationally, has greatly extended our knowledge of Maori resource-loss. This is the starting point for any analysis of why Maori were in an under-development trap.

The principal actors in this drama are the east Polynesian Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Passing mention will also be made of the smaller Moriori population of the Chatham Islands (see Map 1), who are also east Polynesians. This book deals only with a limited part of the Maori story, focusing almost entirely on the period starting with the voyages of Captain Cook in the late eighteenth century, and ending circa 1900. This part of the story saw negative changes that paralleled those elsewhere in the Pacific, and probably in many if not most territories encountering the European imperial expansionism of the last few centuries: following contact and during the colonial period, population declines, often referred to as ‘collapses’ (Kirch and Rallu 2007). By 1900, the ‘Seeds of Rangiatea’ had suffered such a ‘collapse’, although not the most extreme in the Pacific. Nevertheless, they were barely surviving as a people, and were also in what I will call an ‘under-development trap’, the key parameters of which are set out later in this chapter. How and why Maori had reached this dire situation, are the central issues documented in later empirical chapters.

Victorian Pakeha settlers spent a lot of energy describing the social pathologies they saw as ‘common’ among Maori; the recent tabloid historians seem dedicated to repainting Maori society as turbulent, venal and ‘given’ over to every possible vice and barbarism. ‘Drug-taking’ seems to have been just about the only pathology Victorians missed off the list. But perhaps opiate use was far too ‘respectable’ a behaviour to be attributed to mere ‘savages’ for opium – ‘laudanum’ – was widely used by the British middle and upper classes by ladies of ‘delicate disposition’. It is highly probable that all of suicide, abortion, infanticide, suicide and cannibalism did occur in Maori society before and/or after contact. Moreover, after contact drunkenness and sexual encounters between Maori and Pakeha seem well enough documented (O’Malley 2012: 148–149, 183), although as Maori seem traditionally not to have used any drug or alcoholic drink, drunkenness would have been very much an adopted pathology. But the real question here, for alcohol and a whole range of behaviours, is not whether Maori ‘partook’ in such activities, but whether or not the ‘partaking’ was frequent enough to have had impacts on Maori population numbers, mortality and fertility.