Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the
sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler
nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.

Join us in Time Out’s cosy upstairs space for a talk by Catherine Comyn on her
Ockham-longlisted book, The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (ESRA, 2023).
This book tells the story of the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the
British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint stock
company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands
of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to
dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.

By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, Comyn not
only reframes the understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anti-
colonial struggle today.

Catherine Comyn (Ngāti Ranginui, Pākehā) is a PhD candidate in International
Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research focuses on finance capital
and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming.

Praise for The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa:

“The most stimulating book I have read on the colonisation of Aotearoa from the
exciting new generation of scholars”
- Jane Kelsey

“entirely novel, and desperately needed”
- Arama Rata

“Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent”
- Max Haiven