Petitioning beyond the settlers: Darren Reid, ‘”A Scheming Unprincipled Native and Notorious Mischief Maker”: The 1882 Ngāpuhi Petition to Queen Victoria and Settler Disinformation in the Late Nineteenth-century British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Petitioning beyond the settlers: Darren Reid, ‘”A Scheming Unprincipled Native and Notorious Mischief Maker”: The 1882 Ngāpuhi Petition to Queen Victoria and Settler Disinformation in the Late Nineteenth-century British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

30Mar25

Abstract: In light of the inability of most late-nineteenth-century Indigenous petitions to the British Crown to achieve their stated objectives, many historians conclude that the rise of settler self-government precluded imperial intervention in settler affairs. Consequently, Indigenous petitions to the British government in the late nineteenth century are often portrayed as futile anachronisms from an earlier phase of imperial administration. However, using Māori and settler correspondence relating to the Ngāpuhi petition and delegation to London in 1882, this article demonstrates that neither Māori petitioners, the New Zealand government, nor the British government were overly concerned with the rights of responsible government when contemplating responses to the petition. Instead, this article contends that the primary consideration for all three parties was whether the grievances proclaimed within the petition were accurate, and that the failure of the petition had more to do with the petitioners’ credibility than Britain’s right to interfere in New Zealand. It is argued that Indigenous petitioners moved between government, newspapers, and imperial humanitarian networks in pursuance of the credibility that could prove the legitimacy of their grievances in the face of disinformation campaigns launched against them by settler governments. I suggest that the importance of credibility over the rights of responsible government illuminates the liminality of the late nineteenth century, when the division of sovereignty between the empire and its settler colonies was unstable and Indigenous issues were more likely to be decided by the power of persuasion and the manipulation of facts than by formal and stable jurisdictional boundaries.

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