The British government’s decision in 1839 to seek the consent of native chiefs to its assumption of sovereignty in the islands of New Zealand cannot be explained adequately by reference to international law, European political thought or Christian humanitarianism. It owed a great deal instead to strategic and political considerations and a complex sequence of historical events that took place in the preceding seventy years. The decision to treat with the chiefs for sovereignty was in large part a function of protection talk that generated a status for Māori as being more or less an ally of Britain and brought into being a relationship of mutual protection between the chiefs and the British Crown. At the same time, small parties negotiated with natives to purchase land from the outset of European settlement, and later groups of European adventurers and land-grabbers followed suit. At the point the Colonial Office reluctantly accepted that the British government had to intervene and assume sovereignty, the long history of encounter in New Zealand persuaded it that the means required to make a treaty were available in the form of chiefs as interlocutors and missionaries as go-betweens.

In 1842-43 native title became an important matter in its own right and the Treaty of Waitangi regained the significance it had lost since its signing, largely as a result of a highly contingent series of events, none of which has been expected by the principal British players. In what amounted to a growing chain of signification that has previously gone unremarked by historians, several British parties, in the context of a fierce dispute between the New Zealand Company on the one hand and the imperial and colonial governments on the other in regard to an agreement they had struck earlier, formulated interpretations of what was happening or should happen that made the treaty of Waitangi important again. It is similarly evident that the way in which a range of British parties treated native rights in land in New Zealand owed a great deal to the political contestation between them. It is also apparent that the precise significance the Treaty of Waitangi came to have at this time differed according to the particular circumstances of the colony’s northern and southern districts. In fact, there would be no consensus about the treaty’s significance for some time to come.

While the appointment of Howick, now Earl Grey, to the position of Colonial Secretary in 1846 promised the triumph of the New Zealand Company’s campaign to undo the consequences of the imperial and government’s recognition of native title over much of the colony’s lands, this did not come to pass. In both New Zealand and London, leading figures were troubled that the principles Earl Grey championed in regard to native title would mean that the government would break the promises they claimed the British Crown had entered into with the natives in making the Treaty of Waitangi, and they brought pressure to bear on the government. But, most importantly, for all the talk about the importance of defining the nature of native rights of property, philosophical ideas and legal principles counted for very little in the way that native title was finally treated by the British government. A new governor, George Grey, had been provided the resources denied to his predecessors, and he purchased large swathes of land from the natives. In doing so, native title was made, once and for all, in New Zealand.