The other settler tea party: Blair McIntosh, Addicted to Empire? Tea, Sugar and Whiteness in Colonial New Zealand, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The other settler tea party: Blair McIntosh, Addicted to Empire? Tea, Sugar and Whiteness in Colonial New Zealand, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2024

13Sep24

Abstract: Tea and sugar have long been a mainstay of New Zealanders’ diets, but how these foodstuffs intersect with histories of racism, white protectionism and debt slavery remains underexplored in local scholarship. This thesis uses tea and sugar as mediums for interrogating Pākehā-settler identity. Crucially, it argues the discourse around these commodities in late-colonial New Zealand reflects the construction of Pākehā identity as superior, pure and progressive. While ostensibly ‘British’, these traits were actually a proxy for whiteness. Moreover, the discourse around tea and sugar—seen in advertisements, parliamentary debates, colonial exhibitions and more—worked to silence the working conditions non-white, indentured labourers endured to produce these commodities. However, this did not mean that New Zealanders were ignorant of where their tea and sugar came from. The use of indentured labour on Ceylonese, Fijian and Queensland plantations was well-known in colonial New Zealand. Pākehā were generally untroubled by the coercive nature of this labour too, unless there was a threat of intrusion into white spaces or competition against white workers. When there was such a threat, indentured labourers were scapegoated as the source of tea and sugar’s troubles. The race and class of indentured labourers was treated as the problem, rather than the inherently exploitative and imperialistic nature of indenture itself. The importance of tea and sugar for reinforcing Pākehā identity, then, was two-fold; its domestic marketing helped Pākehā identify what they were, while the imagined spectre of indentured labour sharpened the boundaries of what Pākehā were not. This thesis contributes to a wider argument within New Zealand historiography that race was equally important as class in shaping Pākehā identity. Humble, everyday commodities like tea and sugar are key mediums for understanding that identity because they reflected and shaped its formation in colonial New Zealand. Moreover, where current scholarship has focused on the vesting of meaning in such commodities, this thesis focuses on how these meanings relate to or diverge from commodities’ actual conditions of production. Indeed, the disconnect between production and consumption, coloured and white, ‘out there’ and ‘over here’, arguably endures to this day.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed