UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE SYSTEMATIC COLONIZATION: THE COPRODUCTION OF ELECTRIFICATION AND COLONIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By NATHAN NARAIN KAPOOR Norman, Oklahoma 2019 SYSTEMATIC COLONIZATION: THE COPRODUCTION OF ELECTRIFICATION AND COLONIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE BY Dr. Suzanne Moon, Chair Dr. Peter Barker Dr. Piers Hale Dr. Hunter Heyck Dr. Robert Lifset Dr. Peter Soppelsa Dr. William Storey © Copyright by NATHAN NARAIN KAPOOR 2019 All Rights Reserved. To my wife, Amber, without you none of this would have been possible iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my dissertation committee Suzanne Moon, Piers Hale, William Storey, Peter Barker, Robert Lifset, Peter Soppelsa, and Hunter Heyck for their support, critical reading, and suggestions for my work. I am especially indebted to Suzanne Moon for her supervision of the dissertation. Throughout my time at the University of Oklahoma and from afar, she encouraged me to exceed my own expectations, offered invaluable and constructive criticism, and always provided the support I needed. I expect my appreciation for her guidance will only increase. I would also like to thank the faculty of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Department for their encouragement and financial support during my time of study. For the research I completed in New Zealand, I would like to thank the staff of the Archive New Zealand and National Library for the hours they spent teaching me to navigate the collections and guidance they provided in utilizing the sources. My thanks to Jim McAloon from Victoria University, Wellington, who wrote letters on my behalf and introduced me to relevant historiographies in New Zealand. I am also grateful for the conversations with Stephen Bastrone and David Reeve, editors of the “Powering New Zealand” documentary. They guided me to new sources and helped me refine my interpretation of many of the developments in New Zealand’s electrical infrastructure. I am also grateful for the travel assistance I received from the University of Oklahoma and the History of Science Department without which I would have been unable to complete necessary research. Numerous others have contributed professionally to the completion of this work and degree requirements. Many thanks to Piers Hale for appointing me to serve on the Tyndall Correspondence Project and Stephen Weldon appointing me to the Isis Cumulative Bibliography v team. Each of these projects granted me access to an international network of scholars and publications, which expanded my learning in and outside my research. My thanks to the graduate students at the University of Oklahoma, both in and outside of my department, for providing an intellectually stimulating and welcoming environment. And thanks, to Aparna Nair, Elyssa Faison, Roberta Magnusson, and Judith Lewis for leading seminars and directed readings that supplemented my research and broadened scope of my graduate studies. Finally, I am fortunate to have had a strong support system of friends and family without whom I could not have completed my work. Thanks to Anna Reser and Leila McNeill for those seminar discussions, the ones that happened long after class ended in the Library. Brent and Becky Purkaple gave me a home when I periodically returned to OU. My longtime friends from Tennessee Tech encouraged me to get through all of my degrees and planned much needed getaways during breaks and holidays. Nathan Brown, Maya Kuchit, and Jason Desjarlais made me feel at home in Wellington. Alex LeBoeuf, Jeremy Soule, AngryGirl1234 (Kevin Reimnitz), and VikingNoob (Andrew Vincent) gave me an outlet for all of the stresses that come with research. My sister, Sarah Kapoor, always served as a source of inspiration to always keep me going. And finally, thanks to my parents for all the opportunities they gave me to succeed and follow my dreams. vi Abstract The central of argument of Systematic Colonization is that in New Zealand’s transition to electric power is inseparable from its colonization. This dissertation integrates energy history, the history of technology, and New Zealand history to provide new perspectives on how colonial authorities, British settlers, and Māori used electric power infrastructures to colonize and decolonize New Zealand. I investigate four electrification projects in New Zealand between the 1880s and 2000s, showing how each shaped and was shaped by colonialism. In the first two chapters, I argue that the rhetoric around and development of electric lighting and power systems in Reefton and the Phoenix Mine played a critical role in how colonial authorities and British settlers came to envision New Zealand as the ideal colonial. In each of these case studies, boosters argued that electric power systems made New Zealand more technologically modern, self-sufficient, and less of a financial burden on Great Britain. Next, I examine the role of electrification in New Zealand’s transition to Dominion and argue that the new government continued to employ colonial rhetoric in its plans to create a national grid. As New Zealand expanded it electrical infrastructure in the twentieth century, regulating bodies continued to insist that electric power production should be centrally governed and directed toward making the country self-sufficient. In the final chapter, I look at the ways in which Māori decolonized the grid by building geothermal power stations to service their communities and reclaim their physical and cultural resources. vii Table of Contents 1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………….1-27 2. “Endless Supply”: Reefton’s Electrification and New Zealand’s Colonial Imaginary …...……………………………………………………………………………………….28–66 3. Mining for Power: Electrifying the Phoenix Mine and the Creation of a Model Colony …………………………………………………………………………….…………….67–98 4. The Dam at World’s End: Reimagining Imperialism in through the Lake Coleridge Dam ….………………………………………………………………………..……………...99–133 5. “Another World is Possible”: Geothermal Power and Decolonization …………………………………………………………………………….…………...134–173 6. Conclusion ……………….………………………………………………………………………...174–179 7. Appendix ………………………………………………………………………………………………180 8. Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………181–212 viii Introduction Driven by Malthusian fears of over-population and pauperism, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) proposed a process of government intervention in the distribution of land in the colonies known as, “systematic colonization.”1 Nowhere in his plans for the settler- colonies does Wakefield argue for the implementation of electrical technologies. However, he stressed the significance of implementing modern technologies, extracting natural resources in the most efficient means, and increasing centralized bureaucratic authority.2 From the beginning, New Zealand’s electrification embodied Wakefield’s vision for a systematic and controlled colonial state. Why study electrification in New Zealand? To answer this fully requires an understanding of the advocacy for non-fossil fueled production of electric power in late- nineteenth century Great Britain. These early debates over electricity generation demonstrate that fossil fuels were not considered by all the sole option for electrification, and that the British electrical community viewed certain methods and structures of generation (i.e. wind, tidal, decentralized) as fitting for sociocultural British values of efficiency and self-sufficiency. The definition of New Zealand’s self-sufficiency hinges upon the “self.” For settlers, self-sufficiency signified their own hardiness and fitness to colonize, settle, and profit from land. Whereas, for the colonial government and later Dominion government, self-sufficiency denoted the colony’s ability to grow independent of the Empire’s protection, administration, and financing. These conversations took place across the British Empire; Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, British 1 The Collected Works of Edmond Gibbon Wakefield, ed. Muriel F. Lloyd- Pritchard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), 178–87. 2 Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire: In Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist (London: John W Parker, 1849), 44, 273, 497. 1 Honduras, India, China, and Japan all provided lengthy records of electrification projects within the formal and informal Empire. However, New Zealand’s place within the British empire, as a site of special promise, “The England of the Pacific” makes it a particularly valuable site for illuminating a key characteristic the transition to electric power; it was not an inevitable next step for industrialization but a concerted effort by colonizers and the colonized to achieve political goals. Not only does New Zealand’s electrification resemble Britain’s but also advocates for electrification wielded the country’s identity as a British settler-colony, or its Britishness, as a justification for adopting electric power technologies at all. For many, electric power and its requisite technological systems represented the progress of Britain’s long imperial project. Not every New Zealander identified electricity with the Empire, but the industries they worked in adopted electric power; the cities they settled utilized public electric lighting; and, in the case of the Māori, electric power infrastructures displaced