Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on Marsden's career in the Tasman world from 1810, after his return from England with permission to establish the New Zealand mission. The achievements and controversies of this later period of his career were documented in a number of printed texts, a selection of which are analysed in this chapter, some written by the chaplain himself and others penned by colonial contemporaries about Marsden. This chapter examines the way that Marsden, his supporters and his critics characterized Māori and Aboriginal people. It examines a number of critical moments for the creation of race in the Tasman world and argues that racial thought that we may now see as fixed and natural was not yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, set in stone. Marsden was an active agent in the creation of racial hierarchy in the Tasman world; not only in the way he depicted Māori and Aboriginal people in his writing, but also in the choices he made in regard to his evangelical exertions.
Imagining Marsden's Religious Work in the Metropole
As Marsden was leaving England to return to Australia in 1809 an article was published in the evangelical periodical the Eclectic Review, written by the biblical scholar and doctor John Good, whose acquaintance Marsden had made during his stay in London.
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- Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 , pp. 117 - 138Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014