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Stereotypes of Scottishness: money making in nineteenth-century New Zealand
| For session organised by Dr David Green on "Wealth, inequality and investment in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: a comparative study of Britainand the British empire"
This paper explores the relationship between ethnicity and money making in the context of late nineteenth-century New Zealand. In particular it examines the popular conception that Scottishness equated with economic success. As Arthur Trollope put it ‘… in the colonies those who make money are generally Scotchmen’ and there are a set of well-rehearsed stereotypes in New Zealand as elsewhere about the particular sectors in which Scots were said to be influential ‑ financial services, the metal trades, medicine, shipping, and sheepfarming among others. The idea of clannishness is also a pervasive stereotype, of course, and is held to account for much of this success.
The research presented here attempts to test these stereotypes for nineteenth-century New Zealand through a large database of colonial worthies. The database arises from a c.1900 six volume Cyclopedia of New Zealand. The Cyclopedia proceeds, village by village, through the various provinces with descriptions of each district, and short biographies of many of the local middleclass settlers. There are two major flaws: the biographies are largely self-nominated (it was a subscription volume) and overwhelmingly male. Nevertheless, by adopting a prosopographical approach it is possible to explore the nature and sources of the wealth belonging to those who appear in the records. For the entire country, there are something like 2500 Scottish-born men, of whom about 400 also had Scottish wives for which we have some information. By comparing the wealth of this group with a much larger number of English settlers, it will be possible to explore not only differences between these two groups but also to question the assumption about the relationship between Scottish descent and economic success.
The broader questions that arise from this research are twofold: to what extent does ethnicity influence particular strategies relating to the accumulation of wealth and can the findings discussed here be compared to the situation in other settler colonies.
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