- Title
- Law's mobility: vagrancy and imperial legality in the trans-Tasman colonial world, 1860s-1914
- Creator
- Coleborne, Catharine
- Relation
- New Zealand's Empire p. 89-101
- Relation
- Studies in Imperialism
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- This chapter adds to our understanding of ‘New Zealand’s empire’ in two ways: first, by suggesting that by the 1860s, New Zealand was forging a legal culture of its own inside an existing imperial world of law and legality; and second, by offering a new focus on the legal regulation of colonial mobility. Mobility has been explored by demographers, migration scholars, and geographers, and in the context of historical studies of social class movement. This chapter deploys the concept of mobility to examine the history of vagrancy in colonial New Zealand, and the laws that were introduced to contain it. By privileging the themes of population movement, colonial transience, and the occupation of new social and physical space, the chapter examines the way that undesirable forms of movement were made visible by laws and the criminalisation of the transient poor, also examining the role of law and order in the formation of New Zealand’s identity as a colonial power. Bringing legal-historical sources into view to draw attention to law as part of the broader history of New Zealand’s ‘empire’, the chapter draws from a slice of data: a sample of just over 200 cases of vagrants sentenced in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century whose details were reported in the New Zealand Police Gazette (NZPG). It also refers to the New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (NZPD), newspapers, and other contemporary sources, to show the range of ways in which the history of past unwanted mobility might be uncovered. Geographer Tim Cresswell suggests that it is mobility which ‘lies at the centre of the vagrant’s career’. It was the vagrant’s ‘mobility that necessitated new laws, regulations and forms of surveillance’. Viewed from this angle, mobility itself, embodied in the vagrant, was the problem. Since the late eighteenth century in Britain, vagrants as ‘vagabonds’ had been categorised as a separate ‘class’ of the very poor, given the threat posed by unmoored, mobile people in a society deeply concerned with imperial mobility structured inequality, and practices of the provision of local, parish welfare to the deserving poor.
- Subject
- New Zealand; vagrancy; colonial transience; imperial mobility
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1345672
- Identifier
- uon:29696
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780719091537
- Language
- eng
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