The welfare of the settlers: James Keating, ‘Winning the Vote in a “World Without Welfare”: Aotearoa New Zealand from Representative Government to a Universal Franchise, 1840-1933’, in Fia Cottrell-Sundevall, Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir, (eds), Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 81-105 | settler colonial studies blog

The welfare of the settlers: James Keating, ‘Winning the Vote in a “World Without Welfare”: Aotearoa New Zealand from Representative Government to a Universal Franchise, 1840-1933’, in Fia Cottrell-Sundevall, Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir, (eds), Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 81-105

05Nov24

Abstract: Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship—extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples”—this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.

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