Spectre of jurisdiction: Supreme court of New South Wales and the British subject in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1823-41

Abstract

This paper focuses on the period prior to the Treaty of Waitangi when the Supreme Court of New South Wales had jurisdiction over British subjects living in the ‘Islands of New Zealand’. It is acknowledged that there were many factors driving the colonial endeavour in New Zealand. However it was in this period that the raw materials of the colonial state were formed: namely, a people who became an imagined community, with an emerging sense of society or culture, occupying a bounded and mapped territory. One, perhaps unlikely, catalyst for this process was the unstable, partial and largely ineffectual jurisdiction of the New South Wales Supreme Court.