Commentary on Class in Colonial New Zealand: Towards a Historiographical Rehabilitation

By Jim McAloon

Response by Oliver Hill

Jim McAloon effectively grounds his study of class in nineteenth-century New Zealand within the material realities of capitalist and petty-capitalist production. This approach aligns with Marx and Engels’s assertion in The German Ideology that historical analysis should begin with real individuals and their "actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions." Class, according to Marx, must be understood from the ground up, rooted firmly in productive relations and economic structures, rather than solely through expressions of explicit class consciousness or open conflict.

Historiography has frequently limited itself by defining class narrowly through visible consciousness and overt struggles, as seen in Olssen’s emphasis on the rarity of overt class agency and Thompson’s framing of class as a historical happening rooted in cultural expression and behavioural disposition. While Thompson’s approach valorises lived experience, it risks overlooking how class structures shape consciousness before any explicit political expression. Olssen’s framework, meanwhile, suggests that class formation is absent without revolutionary outcomes, missing how structural class relations persist beneath the surface. Such approaches obscure the fundamental economic exploitation underpinning all class relations, which imply a lack of agency by their nature. Marx emphasises that it is not consciousness that determines life, but rather life and material production that determine consciousness. Therefore, the relative lack of overt class struggle or consciousness in colonial New Zealand before 1890 does not imply a classless society, but one where structural exploitation existed without always sparking immediate conflict.

I expand on this historiographical critique by emphasising the deeper historical foundations of class relations, tracing them back to the earliest forms of social organisation. Primitive communal structures, initially matrilineal and matrilocal, relied on "bride service," a labour-based exchange that reinforced kinship solidarity and protected women's autonomy by ensuring that men remained economically and socially tied to their partner's kin group. The later shift to "bride price," where a man provided a lump sum of wealth in exchange for a permanent claim over a woman, marked a significant change: it allowed wealthy men to bypass the reciprocal labour obligations of bride service, transferred women to their husband's kin group, and transformed reproductive labour into property. This shift fundamentally altered gendered power relations and introduced patriarchal marriage as the first stable form of class relation, where women’s reproductive autonomy was alienated, her labour appropriated by the husband and her subservience expressed ideologically through patrilineal descent systems.

The introduction of property in herds and grain not only entrenched patriarchal relations but also intensified intergroup competition, eventually leading to warfare and the transformation of captives into slaves. Thus, patriarchal marriage and slavery became foundational to later class structures such as feudalism and, ultimately, capitalism. Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation further explains how European feudal societies transitioned to capitalism through processes of dispossession and proletarianisation, laying the groundwork for industrialisation. As Marx notes, industry presupposes a working class rather than spontaneously creating one. Indeed the working class actually built modern industry, thus Olssen’s suggestion that ‘industrial society did not automatically generate a working class’ further demonstrates how the historical process has been flipped on its head.

Capitalist production, by socialising labour through centralised factory systems and mass production methods; as exemplified by the shift from individual artisanal workshops to large-scale textile mills during Britain's Industrial Revolution, paradoxically simplifies class divisions into distinct categories of capitalists and wage workers. This concentration and standardisation of labour processes simultaneously increase productive capacity, thereby creating the material conditions for capitalism's eventual abolition. Yet, capitalism simultaneously masks its exploitative nature through commodity fetishism, a phenomenon Marx describes as social relationships among people appearing deceptively as relationships between things. This ideological distortion makes capitalist relations appear natural and unalterable despite their historical specificity.

Here, the dominant social‑scientific image of society as a machine comes under scrutiny. British labour historian EP Thompson captures this point succinctly, writing: “[Class is] not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion — not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests — the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise…” The metaphor invites us to view economic life as an impersonal engine in which human beings function as interchangeable cogs and the relations between people appear only as the engineered fit between component parts. But a machine is nothing more than a constellation of dead objects arranged for an external purpose. I contend that it is far more illuminating to treat society as a living organism - a web of subjects whose internal processes, conflicts, and co‑operation constitute an evolving metabolism. For Marx, the economy is precisely this Stoffwechsel between humanity and nature, not an external engine grinding on regardless of its passengers. Thinking in organic rather than mechanical terms allows us to recognise capital as a historically specific disturbance in that metabolism: a pathological growth that can be removed, rather than as the eternal ‘motor’ of progress. It restores (potential) agency to the very limbs that keep the social body alive and exposes the fetish that disguises living relations as lifeless gears.

Work itself, shaped by changing productive relations, influences workers' consciousness significantly. Medieval craftsmen, skilled across multiple tasks within a unified production process, experienced profound attachment to their craft and the tangible outcomes of their labour. In contrast, the rise of industrial capitalism broke the labour process into minute, repetitive, and specialised components within mechanised factory systems. This change stripped workers of their connection to the broader labour process and final product, reducing their work to monotonous repetition and severing the emotional and intellectual investment once tied to craftsmanship. The alienation resulting from this fragmentation is not merely psychological but material: it reflects the worker’s separation from the conditions and outcomes of their own productive activity. Importantly, academics are not outside of this dynamic. Their tendency to locate class first in the realm of ideology reflects their own position in the division of labour as brain workers. Just as manual labourers become estranged from the material object of their labour, intellectual workers risk becoming estranged from the material conditions of the society they analyse. Contemporary academic discourses can thus replicate the very alienation they attempt to study, abstracting class analysis from the concrete realities of exploitation and struggle.

These historical insights critically inform the understanding of class dynamics in colonial New Zealand. Settler capitalism in New Zealand did not emerge in isolation but inherited layers of older property and class forms, including patriarchal marriage and coerced labour. For example, colonial land acquisition frequently relied on pre-existing patriarchal understandings of property ownership and inheritance, facilitating the dispossession of Māori communities and the establishment of settler dominance. Recognising these historical continuities enriches analyses of colonial wage labour, land alienation, and petty commodity production, offering a comprehensive account from household origins to global capitalist structures.

A rigorous historiographical approach, therefore, necessitates starting from material conditions and productive relations rather than abstract debates around "class autonomy" or overt class consciousness. As Marx argues in The German Ideology, history must focus on real production processes and concrete human relations, revealing how class formation occurs through evolving economic activities rather than merely through ideological shifts or moments of visible conflict. Previous labour historians such as Thompson used a vulgar definition of class as a heuristic device which was good enough for the object of his study; the boisterous early-life of the English working class, in a context of economic and political turmoil, which included many opportunities to make its class existence known. For the parochial economy of 19th century New Zealand, built on Wakefield’s petit-bourgeois dream of egalitarian farm ownership, class relations must be analysed at the root. Not in culture, or rebellion, or in conscious agency. but in production, distribution, ownership and exchange: Stoffwechsel.

### Suggestions for future improvement

1. Commodity fetishism - Analyse how wool, gold and frozen meat concealed Māori land theft and women’s unpaid labour behind price signals.
2. Patriarchal household - Track colonial marriage, custody and inheritance law as moments of primitive accumulation.
3. Metabolic vision - Recast land clearance, sheep-raising and refrigeration as ruptures in the species-nature exchange that feed back into class struggle.
4. Intellectual labour reflexivity - Acknowledge how academic distance encourages definitions of class that begin in the head and underrate manual and reproductive work.