The recognition and allocation of indigenous property rights have long posed complex questions for the imperial powers of the mid-nineteenth century and their modern successors. Recognizing rights of property raises questions about pre-existing indigenous authority and power over land that continue to trouble the people and governments of settler states. Through focusing on the settlement of New Zealand during the critical period of the 1830s through to the early 1860s, this book offers a fresh assessment of the histories of indigenous property rights and the jurisprudence of empire. It shows how native title became not only a key construct for relations between Empire and tribes, but how it acted more broadly as a constitutional frame within which discourses of political authority formed and were contested at the heart of Empire and the colonial peripheries. Native title thus becomes another episode in imperial political history in which increasingly fierce and highly polemical contestation burst into violence. Native title explodes as a form of civil war that lays the foundation (by Maori ever after challenged) for revised constitutional orders. Lords of the Land considers histories of indigenous property rights not only as the stuff of entwined streams of a law of nations and constitutional theory but also as exemplars of the politics of negotiability - engaging relations of struggle and ambition for power, together with the openness and limits of incoming settler polities towards indigenous polities and laws. This study is an examination of rights as instruments of analysis and political discourse, constructed and contested in and through time. Anchored in the striking experiences of New Zealand and the politics of trans-oceanic empire, it tells a tale of indigenous political autonomy and how the vocabularies of property rights mediated relations between empire and the indigenous political communities found in newly settled lands.

About the Author
Mark Hickford is currently in the Prime Minister's Advisory Group at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in New Zealand, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He is 2008 New Zealand Law Foundation International Research Fellow and a Crown Counsel. Dr Hickford holds a doctorate from Oxford and is a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. From 2002-2010 he was a Crown Counsel specializing in public law, the Treaty of Waitangi, Crown-Maori relations, and Natural Resources Law and he also served as a senior consultant to the New Zealand Law Commission from 2007 to 2008. Specializing in the history of law and empire, he has authored chapters and articles on the questions of indigenous property rights and the history of law and political thought, including contributions to the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the History of Political Thought.

Reviews
Lords of the Land is the most outstanding book of New Zealand history of current times. Not since the 1980s has a text of this calibre appeared. It is transformative of the methodologies with which historical studies are undertaken in New Zealand. It is an absolutely exemplary text, both for new techniques and as well as for the revival of deep research into imperial and colonial archival sources and for how they should be melded together. * Bernard F. Cadogan, The Journal of Pacific History *
It encapsulates an immense effort of legal archaeology ... excavating the messy contingences of actual colonial policy and practice on indigenous land rights from the archival records of the time ... I earnestly urge all legal historians to pay particular regard to Hickford's section on Symonds contextualized. * David V Williams, ANZLH E-Journal *
Constitutionalism represents a flexible way of framing the distribution of political and legal authority within a polity (polis) as well as a culture and ways of resolving disgreements about what is to be done. These disagreements may be addressed through political or juridical contests or both. 6 The most enduring and salient feature of political constitutionalism in colonial NZ, according to Hickford, was Maori insistence on treating any agreement with the Crown as never final, but only as punctuated moments in conversations without end ... From the perspective of political constitutionalism the Treaty of Waitangi generates a kind of positive uncertainty. * Mamari Stephens, Maori Law Review *
Hickford's work is notable too for its portrayal of the agency that Maori have insisted on exercising in the development of native title and political constitutionalism in New Zealand. Maori are not, and never have been a fatal impact people, and this is reflected in these kinds of recent scholarship. * Mamari Stephens, Maori Law Review *
There is much yet to be done to do justice to the rich constitutional history of New Zealands peoples. Lords of the Land is an important book that takes us some considerable distance down that path. * Mamari Stephens, Maori Law Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199568659
Author Mark Hickford
Format Hardback
Page Count 552
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 163mm * 45mm