New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2 by Stephen Levine

Author:Stephen Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

Provincial fragmentation

If one were placed in the New British Isles of the early 1860s, it would have been difficult to believe that it would splinter so thoroughly and in such disparate directions. It is even more surprising that these isles would eventually unite politically not with one another, but with a different country, some 1,200 miles across the ocean, which a diehard New British Isles anti-federation politician would later describe as ‘twelve hundred impediments to unity’. But history often takes surprising twists and turns, and what now appears inevitable at one time seemed all but impossible.

Eminent historians, examining the turning point of 1862, long ago concluded that the underlying separatist forces were simply too strong, and that once parts of the Isles took the road of separation it was inevitable that the Isles as a whole would eventually federate with the Australian states. Scholars have looked back to the formation of the constitution for the entity called ‘New Zealand’ in 1852 – its complex political institutions and divided financial arrangements – and have argued that these were the essential origins of the process, and that it required but a single moment of disturbance to deflect matters onto a different path. The Great Storm in 1862, unavoidable and unforeseeable, was just such an event.

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