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The first copies of the Origin of Species arrived in Britain's southernmost colony during the early 1860s, just as the government went to war against Māori in Taranaki province. The longest and most consequential phase of the New Zealand wars saw several North Island tribes battle British and colonial troops and their Māori allies until 1872. Historians Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore argued in Darwin's Sacred Cause (2009) that the humanitarianism fuelling the anti-slavery movement of the early nineteenth century inspired Darwin's evolutionary theorizing. In Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (2017), by contrast, Evelleen Richards argued that Darwin built a strong sense of racial distinctions, hierarchy, and the extinction of 'lower' races into his thinking about human evolution from the beginning. Weaving together Darwin's use of New Zealand evidence and informants, and David Livingstone's argument about the significance of local contexts in shaping engagements with evolution, this essay argues that many settlers, politicians and some scientific leaders read Darwin during and after the wars to naturalize racial conflict, British triumph and the defeat and probable extinction of the Māori. This colonial context supports Richards' racial 'othering' interpretation more than the 'brothering' thesis of Desmond and Moore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle and second governor of New Zealand, has two contradictory reputations among modern academics. Evolutionary biologists and Darwin scholars generally view FitzRoy as a supporter of slavery, famously quarrelling with the abolitionist Darwin over that topic during a Brazilian stopover early in the voyage of HMS Beagle. He is also regarded as a political and religious reactionary, taking a biblically creationist position at the infamous 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. New Zealand historians, however, view his record as governor much more positively. They emphasize that FitzRoy was wildly unpopular with the British settlers because of his enlightened insistence that the native Māori should be treated fairly. We outline the history of these seemingly inconsistent views and examine the evidence for each. We conclude by suggesting that a more nuanced account of FitzRoy's career would surely be more thought-provoking as well as respectful of the facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of the southern suburbs of Dunedin, which during the late nineteenth century became the most industrialized and working class urban area of New Zealand. Analyzing the social composition of fifteen southern Dunedin churches, I question the idea, widely held by New Zealand historians, that the working classes had largely turned their backs on organized religion. In keeping with recent scholarship in the social history of British and Irish religion, I show that unskilled workers were better represented in many southern Dunedin congregations that previous historians have acknowledged and that skilled workers numerically dominated most churches. When women are included in the analysis, working class predominance increases further. Signing the suffrage petition in remarkable proportions, working class Christian women turned the southern suburbs into a world-leading first wave feminist community. Moreover, varieties of popular Christianity flourished beyond the ranks of active churchgoers. I conclude by suggesting that New Zealand historians need to rethink the old “lapsed masses” and “secular New Zealand” assumptions and to investigate the diverse varieties of Christianity shaping the culture, and their sometimes conflicting this-worldly meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the fluctuating fortunes of antievolutionism in New Zealand, from the indigenous protests of the nineteenth century to the American-inspired promotion of scientific creationism in the late twentieth. Impact of biological evolution in New Zealand culture; Role of the introduction of pro-evolution curricula and radio broadcasts on antievolution outbursts.

This is a case study of William Miles Maskell, an eminent entomologist, devout Roman Catholic, and the foremost scientific critic of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Modern Western intellectual history, built on the assumption that secular, scientific modes of thought inexorably swept aside traditional metaphysical and religious ones, has generally written off such persons as ignorant reactionaries battling truth, enlightenment, and progress. But this grand narrative - of scientific light banishing religious darkness - oversimplifies and dis-torts the past. Maskell failed to prevent evolution from becoming paradigmatic in New Zealand biology, to be sure. But it is far from clear that he lost what he regarded as the more important fight - against the scientism and agnosticism he saw as characteristic of modern science. We need to develop a considerably more subtle and nuanced historiography of science-and-religion that gives the religious and philosophical critics of nineteenth century science their due. They battled modernity's scepticism and scientism more successfully than historians have generally acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]