As cancelations go, it didn’t make waves. It was covered by the Free Speech Union, some nonmainstream websites and Britain’s Daily Mail. An eminent professor of history withdraws from his proposed talk at the National Library because the Library requested a change to the description of the talk on the event’s publicity. The offending phrase? A quote from a nineteenth century historian that the British Empire appeared to have been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind.’ It’s a well-used quote that captures the haphazard processes of imperial expansion from ancient Rome to the United States. 

The initial explanation given by the National Library staffer who requested the quote be removed was that ‘our [the Library’s] director wasn’t keen on the quote.’ After being queried as to why, she replied the quote was ‘of concern’, that it ‘could be seen as us agreeing with Britain conquering the world’, that the matter was ‘political’, and that it was ‘the director’s wish to have it taken out.’

I am able to quote these emails because the historian involved, Professor Paul Moon, has made them available to me. The two emails are sent from a named official using a @dia.govt.nz email address (the National Library sits within the Department of Internal Affairs) and dated 12 December 2024. 

From censorship to misrepresentation

What happened next moves from censorious to something worse. Someone unknown to Professor Moon wrote to the National Library requesting, under the terms of the Official Information Act, ‘What is the reasoning behind the National Library director’s request for Paul Moon to drop a quote from his work?’ In its formal response dated 30 January 2025, the Office of the National Librarian asserts ‘the quote referred to was to be used in an event listing and was too long to fit within the six lines available for the proposed event listing to be used on the National Library website and social media.’

This response is plainly, factually, wrong. The National Library’s email exchanges with Professor Moon did not mention word count, and did very explicitly refer to political sensitivities. Professor Moon’s initial text was well below the limit stated in the Library’s own ‘Information request for speakers & audio/video consent form.’ And the first email from the Library requesting the change asks for the quote to be replaced with ‘a sentence or two’ of something else. Clearly, the Office of the National Librarian is misrepresenting basic facts. 

So we have a National Library that is censorious and untruthful. Disturbing, given the National Library is custodian of many official records of the nation’s history. It exists to preserve and disseminate information. An agency prone to distorting the record in favour of a sanctimonious vision of what is politically acceptable belongs in the propaganda toolkit of authoritarian regimes. 

Truth and spin

Sadly, this kind of distortion is unusual only for being so clearly documented. Many professionals regularly engage in processes of tweaking, toning down, rewording and selective editing in order to serve their bosses or their own advantage. For some, it is an explicit part of the job. Corporate comms speak, or PR, refers to the art of massaging the record in ways that work for the client. We can expect the record to be strategically edited when it comes to corporate press releases and political messaging coming from politicians. 

It’s a betrayal of public trust and purpose when those staffing ‘truth-seeking institutions’ – libraries, universities, the press – engage in this kind of agenda-driven censorship. 

Why do they do it? Why would a professional whose entire professional ethos and purpose is to discover and disseminate accurate information sacrifice this commitment to political expedience or piety? 

One can only speculate, but it seems to me that two things are likely to be going on when well-intentioned professionals appear to lose their minds in this way.

The moral imperative

First, I’d guess they have a pretty elevated sense of moral righteousness, a conviction that being morally right is what matters. Most of us, including officials staffing state bureaucracies, like to maintain beliefs about ourselves as essentially good people. It’s one source of cognitive bias that has repeatedly been shown to lead to all sorts of distortions and selective interpretation of evidence. This may be inherent to human nature, but surely becomes more salient the more overt moralism is adopted as part of an organization or professional sphere’s set of operating norms. And it’s not hard to find examples of such moralism becoming increasingly espoused in statements of organizational purpose. 

It’s no longer enough to run a competent library service that informs the public accurately, or a university that pursues knowledge. Instead, our libraries and universities give prominence to statements of moral purpose and commitment. The University of Auckland, for example, says its purpose is to have ‘globally transformative impacts’, its vision is to be recognized for our ‘our unique contribution to fair, ethical and sustainable societies’ and its ‘fundamental principles reflect our foundational relationship with tangata whenua and our commitment to Te Tiriti.’ The National Library itself headlines its strategic directions to 2030 as ‘Turning knowledge into value.’ 

Fear

Second, it’s likely that a dose of fear helps professionals make sure ‘knowledge’ gets turned into the right sort of ‘value.’ Fear of upsetting the narrative. Fear of asking questions that might yield the wrong answers. Fear that kills curiosity.

Surely there is some very effective killing of curiosity behind the National Library’s request to delete the offending quote that the British empire was acquired in ‘a fit of absence of mind.’ The mere suggestion that colonial empire advanced in a haphazard manner, rather than according to some grand plan of imperial domination, is too uncomfortable to headline. Coming from a professional in a supposedly truth-seeking institution, this looks like losing one’s mind. 

To be uncomfortable with historical interpretation means being uncomfortable with historical enquiry. Historical judgements such as how empires were acquired are very obviously not simple statements of descriptive fact. If one were the slightest bit interested in how and why colonial rule advanced, the motives and perceptions of colonial agents would seem pretty relevant. This should be a central question for anyone interested in either the past or present-day legacies and parallels. Far from condoning ‘conquering the world’, some of the sharpest criticisms of colonial intervention have been based on archival sources of colonial bureaucracies and neo-imperial ventures. Such research has shown that pathways to disastrous interventions were frequently buffeted by events and forces that officials did not control, along with an array of contending beliefs, assumptions and aspirations. Agents of imperial intervention often believed themselves to be doing the right thing, even as some also expressed doubt and dismay at how their ventures were working out. 

Far from condoning imperial rule, these historical interpretations provide a useful reminder of both institutional capacities for self-delusion and the futility of populating history with nothing but a cast of cartoon heroes and villains. 

I would be surprised if a professional such as the director of the National Library actually espouses a heroes and villains view of history. Indeed, the willingness to invite Professor Moon in the first place suggests that the Library does wish to foster discussion of different ways of interpreting history. 

If so, the forces driving censorship and misrepresentation can co-exist with sincere efforts to do the right thing. 

Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash

The post Fear and Loathing in the National Library appeared first on Open Inquiry.

And the Commission is not alone in this view. Margaret Mutu has alleged that ‘[t]he Doctrine of Discovery underpins our legal system and relies on the myth that White Christians are superior to all other peoples. It gives them permission to dispossess, enslave and exterminate other races, cultures and religions’. Mere Berryman asserts that ‘[w]ith the ‘discovery’ of New Zealand by Captain Cook, the Doctrines of Discovery became part of New Zealand’s legal framework’, while legal scholars Jacinta Ruru and Robert Miller have claimed that ‘[w]hen England set out to explore and exploit new lands, it justified its sovereign and property claims over newly found territories and the Indigenous inhabitants with the Discovery Doctrine’.

As a consequence of such vociferous advocacy, the idea that the Doctrine of Discovery is the First Cause of New Zealand’s colonisation has entered into the country’s historical bloodstream and begun to circulate. Even some schools now teach it as part of the new compulsory History curriculum.

Yet, for historians working in the field of New Zealand’s colonisation, arguments about the Doctrine come across as little more than a latter-day conspiracy-theory, coated in some areas with a thin patina of legal argument which for devout believers is all that is needed to certify its credibility.

What is the Doctrine of Discovery? Did it influence British Colonisation?

What, then, is the Doctrine of Discovery, and did it play any role at all in Britain’s colonisation of New Zealand? The ‘doctrine’ itself derives from a sentence contained in a Papal Bull issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. The Bull’s purpose was to support Spain’s wish to assert exclusive rights over certain territories discovered by Christopher Columbus the previous year. The Bull set out the specific locations (one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands) that would be assigned solely to Spain, and imposed a prohibition on other Catholic states approaching those territories without Spanish approval. The Vatican’s view was that any territories outside of Europe that were not inhabited by Christians were open to claims of ‘discovery’ (and implicitly, some form of sovereignty) by whichever Catholic power reached these territories first. This is the essence and extent of what later became known as the Doctrine of Discovery.

However, the 1493 Papal Bull did not influence intervention in the New World by Catholic nations so much as respond to incursions that were already well underway. It was descriptive of what was already taking place, rather prescriptive in terms of colonial policy and ideology. Recent scholarship on the Bull confirms that the Vatican exercised very little authority over the foreign policy of Catholic states at this time. Indeed, so ineffective was this Bull that its provisions were superseded the following year by the Treaty of Tordesillas – an agreement that similarly aimed to determine exclusive areas of colonial activity, but that was signed directly by the colonial powers concerned, without any regard to the Vatican’s pronouncements. And if any suspicion remained that the Bull still retained some influence, this was eliminated in 1537, when Pope Paul III issued his Sublimis Deus ­– a Papal Bull which explicitly forbade Catholic nations engaging in wars of conquest in potential colonies, and which effectively superseded the 1493 Bull. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, along with this 1537 Papal Bull, ended any faint influence that the 1493 Bull may have exercised over European colonisation in this era.

How the Doctrine got Resuscitated

The matter should have ended there, but over the last few decades, a clutch of lawyers has resuscitated  the idea that the Doctrine of Discovery somehow guided practically all European colonisation for the subsequent four centuries – a claim that is preposterous to anyone familiar with the way in which various European states – especially Britain – developed their colonial policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Certainly, Britain’s intervention in New Zealand was never predicated on the two essential tenets of the Doctrine of Discovery: the arbitrary assertion of territorial sovereignty over a colony; and the subjugation of that territory’s indigenous population. However, proponents of the Doctrine cite two imperialist examples to support their allegations: James Cook in 1769; and William Hobson in 1840.

Cook has been demonised by advocates of the Doctrine as the embodiment of Britain’s alleged intention to claim New Zealand as its own possession, and to rule over Māori. In fact, the opposite is true. Britain knew about New Zealand’s location from the late 1640s, but only sent an expedition to the country in 1768. It was not until 1840 that Britain (only reluctantly) asserted sovereignty over its people living in the territory. This lethargy is hardly the behaviour of an avaricious colonial power, intent on devouring territory to rule over.

It is not just the timeline that confounds the notion that the Doctrine of Discovery propelled British intervention in New Zealand. In July 1768, shortly before Cook’s departure on his voyage to the South Pacific, he was given a set of secret instructions by the Admiralty. These encouraged him to claim any portions of lands he may come across. However, crucially, (and this is something the advocates of the Doctrine conveniently omit) he was only permitted to make such assertions ‘with the consent of the natives’, and that he could only claim territory by right of discovery ‘if you find the country uninhabited’ [my italics]. Moreover, Cook conceded in his confidential journal on 31 March 1770, as he was departing New Zealand, that it had never been British policy to establish New Zealand as a British settlement. Such evidence directly contradicts the suggestion that Britain was looking to seize land in New Zealand and subjugate its occupants.

The other alleged conspirator behind the Doctrine in New Zealand is Hobson. His May 1840 proclamation is held up by advocates of the Doctrine as documentary proof of their belief. The relevant segment from Hobson’s Proclamation reads ‘I…assert…on the grounds of Discovery, the Sovereign Rights of Her Majesty over the Southern Islands of New-Zealand’. On the face of it, this looks like the Doctrine of Discovery in action in New Zealand, and the Human Rights Commission has indeed cited this Proclamation as incontrovertible proof. However, such an assertion is only possible by ignoring the historical context in which the Proclamation was made.

By May 1840, Hobson was still unaware how many chiefs had signed the Treaty, and was becoming increasingly apprehensive about the threat that the New Zealand Company posed to his rule and the colony’s stability. This Proclamation was issued as a pre-emptive measure against the Company, and not part of any attempt to ‘claim’ the South Island by relying on the Doctrine of Discovery. Contemporaneous correspondence makes this indisputable, but as further evidence, Hobson explicitly continued to seek consent from South Island chiefs to the Treaty (which would have been redundant if he was applying the Doctrine of Discovery), and by June 1840, a total of 56 chiefs from the South Island had signed the Treaty. Moreover, the Treaty did not give (and Hobson’s administration never claimed) control either over any Māori land in the South Island or over its indigenous inhabitants. So by every measure, the Doctrine of Discovery did not apply to Britain’s colonisation of New Zealand through this Proclamation.

Further Evidence of Fabrication

And there are other reasons which expose the claims about the Doctrine of Discovery affecting New Zealand’s colonisation as being entirely fabricated. For the sake of brevity, these are summarised as follows:

• By the time that Britain commenced colonising New Zealand, it had severed any ties with the Catholic Church for centuries, and any Catholic influence was actively repudiated.
• Britain’s imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lacked adherence to any doctrine. The Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’, as John Seeley famously observed in 1883. Moreover, the motives behind the Doctrine of Discovery were religious and territorial. British colonisation, on the other hand, was largely secular, and focussed primarily on trade instead of territory.
• The Doctrine was devised for a specific region, of which New Zealand was not a part, for a colonising power which never had any territorial claim to New Zealand, and at a time when New Zealand’s existence was unknown to Europe.
• Even for Catholic nations in Europe, the 1493 Bull had carried little authority at the time, and by the eighteenth century was no longer adhered to at all.
• There is no mention of the Doctrine of Discovery in any British Government document relating to New Zealand’s colonisation – neither directly nor implicitly – and neither did its precepts form part of British policy in this period.
• In the approximately two years leading up to New Zealand’s cession of sovereignty in 1840 via the Treaty, British policy on the territory was developed on principles that contravene the central tenets of the Doctrine of Discovery. This is especially important because it negates the argument that somehow, the general sentiment of the Doctrine embedded itself in British colonial policy in the nineteenth century as a precursor to New Zealand’s colonisation.

The persistent assertion that the Doctrine of Discovery applied to New Zealand’s colonisation is falsifiable on numerous evidentiary bases, and betrays among its advocates an extraordinarily uncritical and impoverished understanding of history. (It is understandable why so many historians of this period find their patience being tested by such claims).  But when branches of the state and academia seem unwilling to relinquish their fixation on this myth, the evasions of evidence in favour of ideology (however vapid) ought to be of concern.

Cover image: Portrait of Pope Alexander VI Borgia (Vatican Museums – Musei Vaticani, Vatican). Attributed to Pedro Berruguete – gallerix.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100409618

A version of this post first appeared at Plain Sight on 11 April 2023.

The post The Doctrine of Discovery in New Zealand: A Case of Historical Disinformation appeared first on Open Inquiry.