Tag: New Zealand

New Special Issue of Parliamentary History: Settler Colonialism and Parliamentary Democracy – Histories and Legacies

Published on by CIGH Exeter

David Thackeray
University of Exeter

Our new special issue of Parliamentary History, ‘Settler Colonialism and Parliamentary Democracy- Histories and Legacies’, co-edited by me and Amanda Behm, emerges at a time of acute public interest in the practices of settler democracy. In 2023 efforts to establish an ‘indigenous voice to parliament’ in Australia were defeated in a referendum but drew attention to a long history of contestation of the national constitution by indigenous peoples and their allies. In New Zealand ongoing efforts by the coalition’s minority partner to reform the legal status of the Treaty of Waitangi have been met by protests and claims of historical amnesia by opponents of the bill. The papers in this special issue seek to offer a better understanding of the practices which connected supporters and opponents of settler democracy across and beyond the British empire.

Continue reading “New Special Issue of Parliamentary History: Settler Colonialism and Parliamentary Democracy – Histories and Legacies” →

Buying British Across the World

Published on by CIGH Exeter

David Thackeray

An Empire Marketing Board poster from the late 1920s
An Empire Marketing Board poster from the late 1920s

This autumn I spoke at several universities in Australia and New Zealand on the subject of the various shopping weeks that were launched to promote Empire trade during the 1920s and 1930s. The story of the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts to develop the idea of ‘Buying Empire’ in inter-war Britain is well known, and its posters still appear regularly on the covers of books written about imperial culture (and also currently featured as the background to this blog!). What is less well known is that the same cause was taken up with enthusiasm by a variety of organisations in the Dominions, and arguably achieved greater and more lasting prominence there than it did in Britain.

At the same time, it quickly became clear to me that the archives in England and Australasia were telling different stories. Politicians and businessmen in Wellington and Melbourne may have conceived themselves to be members of a ‘British’ trade community, but their understanding of what the future of the Empire as an economic unit should be often differed from their counterparts in London. Continue reading “Buying British Across the World” →