The Origins of an Experimental Society

Erik Olssen’s book is remarkably lucid and insightful on a broad front of historical scholarship; it is informed profoundly on philosophical, political and scientific thinking of the period, and overall a quite astonishing intellectual achievement.’

This new history argues that New Zealand was a series of “experiments” in settling a country. The author tracks the ideas, philosophies and values which were carried in settlers’ baggage, the early inter-connectedness between Māori and the newcomers that reshaped those experiments, and the profound significance of these decades for the future of the country and its peoples.

I found this book stunning, breathtaking even, in its scope and detail. It revisits and explores the origins, themes and complex patchwork of ideas that came together to underpin the founding years of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our early engagement with the intellectual and physical manifestations of global colonisation, as related by Olssen, is especially interesting. This is not an easy book but steady application to its contents leads to immeasurable rewards

This is an extremely important book written by a scholar of immense learning. Olssen’s omnivorous reading is the foundation for the remarkable range and sophistication of this volume. He can sketch historical contexts, see and reconstruct connections across time and space, and display a sensitivity to divergent regional patterns in manner that few who have written on nineteenth-century New Zealand have demonstrated. It is an incredibly rich text and a compelling read.

Erik Olssen is emeritus professor at the Department of History, University of Otago. His research interests focus on the relationships between politics, society, ideas, culture and economics. He was elected an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. His many books include:

• A History of Otago (1984)
• The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–14 (1988)
• Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s (1995)
• An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 1880–1940 (2011) (co-author)