Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price: Essays on Maori History, Land and Politics

M P K Sorrenson

Jul 2014 · Auckland University Press

About this ebook

For more than half a century, Keith Sorrenson – one of New Zealand’s leading historians and himself of mixed Maori and Pakeha descent – has dived deeper than anyone into the story of two peoples in New Zealand. In this new book, Sorrenson brings together his major writing from the last 56 years into a powerful whole – covering topics from the origins of Maori (and Pakeha ideas about those origins), through land purchases and the King Movement of the nineteenth century, and on to twentieth-century politics and the new history of the Waitangi Tribunal. Throughout his career, Sorrenson has been concerned with the international context for New Zealand history while also attempting to understand and explain Maori conceptions and Pakeha ideas from the inside. And he has been determined to tell the real story of Maori losses of land and their political responses as, in the face of Pakeha colonisation, they became a minority in their own country. Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price is a powerful history of Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.

About the author

Professor emeritus M. P. K. (Maurice Peter ‘Keith’) Sorrenson was born in Upper Papamoa in 1932, a descendant, on his mother’s side, of Pukenga, Wairaka and Toroa of Mataatua. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and of Oxford University, from which he graduated DPhil in 1962. He began as a junior lecturer in the University of Auckland history department in 1958, and completed his DPhil and further research in East Africa, before returning to Auckland in 1964. He became a professor of history in 1968 and retired in 1995, after three stints as Head of Department. Professor Sorrenson was a Research Fellow, East African Institute of Social Res, Kampala, 1963–64, and the Smuts Fellow in Imperial History, Cambridge University, 1972–73. He was the president of CARE from 1972 to 1974, a Council Member of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust from 1973 to 1984 and a member of the Waitangi Tribunal from 1986 to 2002. He is the author of several books, including Maori and European Since 1870, Separate and Unequal: Cultural Interaction in South Africa 1919-1961, Maori Origins and Migrations and Na To Hoa Aroha – the edited correspondence between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck from 1925 to 1950, as well as numerous scholarly articles.