Reconciling the Treaty - 5 Paul Moon

The Doctrine of Discovery and New Zealand’s Colonisation

Paul Moon ONZM, DLitt, PhD, MPhil, MA, is Professor of History at Auckland University of Technology, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London. His books on New Zealand history have been published by many major international publishers, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Routledge, and Bloomsbury, and he has been a finalist in two international history awards. He has appeared in various international media, including the BBC, Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, and the New York Times, and has worked on several Waitangi Tribunal claims.

Since the early 2000s, claims that the Doctrine of Discovery (based on a 1493 papal bull) had some bearing on New Zealand’s colonisation have been gaining force in academic and popular literature, with a nexus emerging between historical and legal analyses of its purported role in British intervention in the country from the eighteenth century. The purported role of the Doctrine in New Zealand’s colonisation is now taught in universities and secondary schools throughout the country. This presentation explores the evidentiary bases for these claims about the Doctrine, and attempts to account for the explanatory appeal of the Doctrine as an ideological first cause of New Zealand’s colonisation. In addition to surveying the history
of the Doctrine and its possible influence in British imperial activity in New
Zealand from 1768, consideration is also given to some of the contemporary assertions about its role in the country’s colonisation.