Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body by Tony Ballantyne (review)

ENTANGLEMENTS OF EMPIRE explores the “cross-cultural” exchanges between Māori and missionaries in early nineteenth-century Aotearoa. Focusing on what he describes as intersecting “threads of association,” Tony Ballantyne examines how this “brush of bodies” gave rise to questions of morality and was central to a “remaking” of Indigenous Māori bodies as part of the missionary project in New Zealand from 1814. During this period the body, he argues, was one of the most contentious sites of cultural engagement, through which conflicts, concessions, and compromises provided the crucial building blocks for the making of empire.

Empire, for some time now, has served as the web within which Māori histories have been ensnared by Pākehā scholars. This latest contribution adds to an already sprawling array of colonizer histories in New Zealand about Māori, but not by Māori. Ballantyne is a Pākehā scholar and an excellent writer and researcher, considered by many to be at the “forefront” of New Zealand history and a “key figure” in global histories and the British empire. However, the history he spins is one that reflects Pākehā imperial interests rather than the historical narratives in which most Māori are invested. Ballantyne’s insistence on empire severely limits a native retelling. Within an imperial fixation, native historical subjects are imagined here as part of the settler-colonial mess New Zealanders should remember, in which Māori “concessions” and “compromise” are simply part of the colonial, nation, and empire-making identities that Pākehā history prefers.

This is a shame, because there is a lot to like about this book. It opens with a chapter that highlights the body as a site of analysis where questions about tā moko (tattooing), slavery, sex, death, hygiene, and the family are considered in regard to missionary conversion, but also as “mobile,” and part of “commercial connections,” work patterns, and “spatial organization.” From here, Ballantyne focuses on “exploration” and “evangelization” and the making and “reordering” of space and place. Within these empire-building schools, stations, and “spaces,” Protestant missionaries were able to “reorder” behaviors, contest practices, supervise domestic duties for Māori women and girls, and provide civilized education for boys. But transformation, Ballantyne contends, “was often driven by Māori.” Thus, he argues, missions became “sites of translation, compromise, and struggle that stood at the center of new cultural circuits” that were “neither fully British nor purely Māori.” “Mission stations” by the middle of the 1830s, Ballantyne suggests, “were pivotal to the emergence of the new mixed and messy cultural order that had emerged in the north of New Zealand.” Ballantyne tends, as have many other Pākehā historians, to overemphasize these “mixed” cultural exchanges as transformations away from precontact purity. This is perhaps reflective of long-standing colonial Pākehā desires to see their old British selves replaced by emerging settler identities, while Māori on the other hand have long resisted histories that dilute or deny an Indigenous self-determining center.

The remaining chapters traverse the threads of “Economics, Labor, and Time” and intersect with themes on the containment of “‘Transgression,’ the ‘Culture of Death,’ and ‘The Politics of the ‘Enfeebled’ Body.” These chapters scrutinize and highlight the demand for biblical texts and subsequent cosmological and spiritual revolutions in Native communities, and also investigate cases of sodomy and other “unnatural connections” between missionaries and Māori. Where “labor” and civilization had been the early focus of Church leaders like Samuel Marsden, the evolving mission under the management of Henry Williams soon turned to the priorities of “religious teaching” and translation when it became clear that Māori could not be simply “converted.” The “precariousness of the evangelical process,” as Ballantyne points out, was repeatedly exposed by members of the missionary community. This is addressed in chapter 4 through an examination of the scandalous dismissal of William Yates in 1836, who was accused of initiating several inappropriate sexual...