Of Unfolding Dialectics, Shifting Paradigms and Fickle Fashion
New Zealand Journal of History, 51, 2 (2017) Of Unfolding Dialectics, Shifting Paradigms and Fickle Fashion SEDDON AND THE HISTORIANS NIGEL BENSON’S 2010 Otago Daily Times piece on ‘Kiwi Rogues, Rascals and Renegades’ is representative of the caricature of our longest-serving Prime Minister, Richard Seddon, that has become widely accepted by many New Zealanders. Benson wrote that the ‘old rogue’s record tenure’ seemed even longer to ‘women, Maori and Chinese’. He went on to inform readers that Seddon ‘compared Chinese to monkeys and believed Maori should be crushed with Gatling guns and locomotives’. Benson concluded by expressing surprise that ‘many historians regards [sic] him as one of New Zealand’s greatest political leaders’.1 This article argues that after more than 30 years of stiff, revisionist critique, many historians have made similar judgments, even if they are written in less sensational style. Over the course of the twentieth century debunkers developed a consensus that this heavily bearded, obese and vulgar man was a ruthless pragmatist lacking any kind of guiding philosophy or idealism, an imperialistic jingoist, a rabid racist and a particularly cunning misogynist. I claim that such a view is unbalanced and extremely unfair to the man himself, as well as to the New Zealand people who elected him to the premiership five times. It is also wildly ahistorical and presentist. Political history, and the related field of the history of ideas, has fallen badly out of fashion. The fact that over 50 years elapsed between the publication of R.M. Burdon’s King Dick in 1955 and my book, King of God’s Own Country (2014), suggests that New Zealand historians in the interim had turned their attention towards more fashionable fields of social, cultural, gender, environmental and race relations history, yet political biographies that attempt to link to those subfields can reveal much about how each of these important historical dynamics intersected with the complicated world of politics.
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