Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value: William Colenso, natural history collecting and Indigenous labour

Considering the absent presences of Indigenous lives in the natural history archives of colonial New Zealand, this essay explores the themes of knowledge production and the use-value of labour in the expedition archives of collector and missionary William Colenso (1811-1899). It looks, first, at the citation of Indigenous intermediaries in the context of labour differentiation and tropes of natural history “discovery”; and second, at the value of scientific specimen discovery within a wider commodity chain that was both recognised and resisted by Indigenous peoples. The broader claim of the essay is that tracing these themes adds to understandings of the material practices of natural history some sense of how Indigenous people responded to coercions for assistance by European collectors.