Why Cook was such a rarity
wonderfully described in Alfred Crosby’s brilliant book Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986). This book was the original Guns, Germs, and Steel, but better; and since Crosby spent some time in New Zealand there is even a chapter dedicated to the colonial experience of this country.
One of the real gems of the book is its explanation of the difficulties European sailors faced crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the face of prevailing winds that blew against them. I never understood the primary technological reason for pirates in the Caribbean until reading this chapter: Spanish galleons had to sail north past Cuba to find the winds that would enable them to sail home.
Nor did I understand the reasons for the rise and decline of Dunedin and Hobart. One is the changing importance of wind power. In the 1860s and 1870s, ships from Britain sailed around South Africa and then south of Australia to take advantage of the ‘‘roaring forties’’ (the winds that still plague Wellington today).
Hobart and Dunedin were the first ports of call after a long voyage, and developed vibrant merchant communities. In Dunedin you can see evidence of this if you visit Olveston House, originally owned by a prosperous merchant, the Bell Tea company building, or some of the buildings owned by the formerly sizeable Lebanese community.
But the steamship, the Suez Canal, and later the Panama Canal put an end to all of that. Auckland was now closer to the rest of the world and, given some climatic advantages, it rapidly developed into the pre-eminent merchant town.
These advantages have not ceased, and in fact Auckland’s advantages in the wholesaling sector are still increasing. If you delve into the census (no, not that one, the last accurate one) it shows that between 1996 and 2013, Auckland gained 4300 new jobs in the wholesale sector, whereas employment in this sector in the rest of the country declined by 1600.
Economic geography is a fascinating subject. It is the perfect mix of history, maths, geography and economics, with some allpurpose complexity theory thrown in. One of its findings is that the world can become more uniform on a wide scale as transport costs fall, but it also can become more locally concentrated.
Cheap international travel means technology, political power and disease become global, with all the benefits and troubles that entails, but at the same time economic activity becomes concentrated into a smaller number of increasingly large cities.
And that, in a nutshell, is a history of New Zealand in the 250 years since Cook sailed into
Tu¯ ranganui-a¯ -Kiwa.
Dr Andrew Coleman is an economist at the University of Otago’s Business School.