James Morton in 1865/6 (Tennent 2013). The company acquired dozens of properties in the Southland and Otago Regions, turned them into “British farms” by introducing European flora and fauna and established the first frozen meat exports to the colonial motherland in 1882. In later years it also leased out and sold land to settlers. The company “established a managerial structure which linked specific places on both sides of the world and allowed directly for the transfer of financial capital, technology, skills and raw materials” (ibid.: 91). This structure, when juxtaposed against contemporary financial investments in Aotearoa New Zealand agriculture, looks all too familiar (see Figure 3.1). In the case of the Land Company, as well as other estates backed by metropolitan finance, a shareholder value gaze “penetrated the production sphere of pastoralism” (McMichael 1987: 431) at a surprisingly early juncture, “institutionalising the managerial goals of closely supervising production, enhancing productivity and rationalising the enterprise with various technical developments involving fixed capital investment” (ibid.).
Sources: A: own research*; B: redrawn from data provided in Tennent (2013: 86).
The estatization of Aotearoa New Zealand agriculture was also supported by several legislative acts passed from 1863 onwards. Passed amidst a series of wars with Māori related to the control of the highly productive regions of Waikato, Taranaki, and Eastern Bay of Plenty in the North Island (where Māori tribes were better placed to resist European colonization and runholding, and estates could not spread accordingly), these provided the basis for the confiscation of millions of acres of additional Māori land (Wynyard 2016: 75). With these acts at hand, all the colonial government had to do was to claim that an iwi (the traditional family unit of the Māori), or a significant number of members of an iwi, had risen against the Crown. In addition to war and “punishment”, state-led land purchasing and the establishment of a Native Land Court in 1865, intended to “modernise” the Māori communal land tenure system by individualizing it, further redistributed land or access to it in favour of Pākehā (the Māori name for white colonialists) settlers. At the same time, the land inequalities between settlers would grow tremendously. As a consequence, many of the South Island’s large land holdings were broken up through a series of Land Acts between the late 1870s and early 1890s. Crucial here was the small-farmer-oriented politics of John McKenzie, the agriculture minister of the Liberal Party government from 1891 to 1900 (Wynyard 2016). Although this laid the foundation for different farm structures and land ownership relations, it was the rise of the government-mediated credit and mortgage industry that was the tipping point in the country’s agricultural history. Via the Advances to Settlers Act of 1894, the Liberal government of the time obtained funds in London and made loans to farmers below current market rates of interest, thereby providing “the credit necessary to establish small intensive farms … and stimulate the dairy industry …, remov[ing] the barrier which had been preventing New Zealand from recovering from the long depression …, [and] organis[ing] and systematis[ing] the market for rural long term credit” (Quigley 1989: 51).2 This system was to prevail almost unchanged until the 1980s, with the public Rural Banking and Finance Corporation (RBFC) serving as the most important lender, but also other institutions such as stock and station companies, insurance companies, commercial and trading banks, investment and finance companies, and solicitors, families and trusts generously extending credit to Kiwi farmers (Le Heron 1991). The RBFC-backed system of credit provision was abandoned only during the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s, which led to a further globalization of the finance–farming nexus in Aotearoa New Zealand (Argent 2000). Against the backdrop of rising interest rates, the burdening nature of farm debt and the restructuring of the farming sector according to free market principles (Wallace 2016), experts argued that farmers should open up to new forms of capital, such as equity, so that non-farm investors would have “greater opportunities to purchase shares in large farms” (Pryde 1987: 6-13).
It was at this time that business-savvy farmers rolled out new organizational structures such as syndication and equity partnerships as part of a more corporate-oriented farming model (Wallace 2016). Although some individuals had already experimented with syndication in the 1970s (Hawke 1985), a model in which the ownership and management of farms is split and thereby allows the entry of other (non-farming) investors, it became more widespread in the 1980s. For instance, a group of entrepreneurial farmers helped set up the New Zealand Rural Property Trust, opening up Aotearoa New Zealand farmland to passive investment by superannuation funds from Australia. By the late 1980s the trust held 34 farming properties across Aotearoa New Zealand (Le Heron 1991: 164). Interestingly, its key architect would also become one of the crucial players in the new finance-driven land rush in the late 2000s (see Chapters 7 and 8).
The case of Aotearoa New Zealand tells us that finance capital was crucially involved in the transformation of imperial “frontiers into assets” (Weaver 1999), but how this advanced varied significantly from frontier to frontier. The work of Rudolf Hilferding (1981 [1910]), writing at the height of the colonial frenzy, allows us to connect these various imperial frontiers. He argued that “[t]he export of capital and the struggle for economic territory” were tightly interlinked during the age of empire. Yet neither the export of capital nor the conquest of new territory was as straightforward as in this case (or Australia, Argentina or Canada, to name a few other dominion states). This is exemplified by the example of modern-day Tanzania. Like Aotearoa New Zealand, it is an example of capitalism’s expansionary drive to tap into new markets, export its internal social or environmental contradictions (e.g. “surplus people” or “environmental destruction”) and appropriate new human and non-human resources. But it is also an example of how local factors may change that project, and how each postcolonial government has tried to correct its respective colonial heritage, albeit with often limited or short-lived success.
The coast and some hinterland parts of mainland Tanzania (the island of Zanzibar is another part of it) had been profoundly influenced by the slave, ivory and spice trade, backed by Arab, Chinese, Persian and Indian merchant capital for centuries, when it became the focus of organized merchant capital from the West in the 1830s (Coulson 2013 [1982]). When the region was proclaimed as German East Africa in the 1880s, this was spearheaded by the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation: GfdK), rather than by the state itself, which was reluctant to spent taxpayers’ money on the colonial project. Like similar outfits to follow, the society had various shareholders, with all of them betting on the colonial ventures of its notorious director Carl Peters (Peter 1990: 199). After having negotiated access to land with a number of local authorities in the north-east of the country, the GfdK managed to get state backing and was renamed the German East Africa Company (Deutsche-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft: DOAG) in 1887
