« The poetics of settler self-fashioning: Sarah Sharp, ‘The Settler Colonial Cotter: Situating “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” in Post-Revolutionary America’, Burns Chronicle, 134, 1, 2025, pp. 3-24
Settler colonizing Kashmir? Hafsa Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation, Stanford University Press, 2023 »

The cartography of settler self-fashioning: Jamie Ashworth, ‘Cartographic Traces of Cultural Change: Land Surveying and Environmental Imperialism in the Wairarapa, 1842-1853’, New Zealand Journal of History, 59, 1, 2025, pp. 50-78

22Apr25

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of three cartographic depictions of land in Wairarapa and its immediate surroundings, portraying how these maps effected cultural change in the region from initial surveys until the first official purchases of land. Grounded in the historiography of British colonial cartography, the article observes the textual representations of resources that would have proved significant to colonist groups, and how European settlers interpreted and shaped New Zealand’s environments within these texts to suit their intentions of exploiting land resources. Significantly, this article presents a new perspective on activities executed by settler groups that invariably furthered imperialism and subjected Māori to significant social, political, and environmental changes within a shifting colonial milieu, using names and terms to ‘indigenize’ colonists in this ‘new land’. The surveying work of these groups displays the use of maps as dedicated instruments in asserting land ownership and environmental control in early colonial Wairarapa.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed