Was New Zealand’s participation in the Second World War avoidable?
A Review of Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War, by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Hugh Eldred-Grigg. A guest post by Terry Coggan. World War Two is seen […]
Category Archives: working class history
Cotton, slaves, war, and measles in colonial Fiji
Second of two articles on Land Labour and Epidemic Disease in the capitalist penetration of the Pacific First part here. Almost one hundred years after the Sydney Cove epidemic, a […]
Cruise of the Mokoia – Harry Holland and anti-colonial struggles in Fiji and Samoa
(Second of two articles on indentured labourers and the early anti-colonial struggles in the Pacific. First part here) Very soon after the publication of Holland’s pamphlet on indentured labour in […]
Indentured labourers at the forefront of early anti-colonial struggles in the Pacific
Within less than a month of joining the war against Germany in 1914, New Zealand had seized its first colonial conquest from Germany. On 29 August 1914, troops from the New Zealand warships Moeraki and Monowai stepped […]
An early New Zealand rightist movement built on religious hatreds
While Alliance of Labour leader Arthur Cook lent his support to the Communist Party, another leader of the Alliance of Labour, its President Matthew Joseph Mack, was embracing a different […]
‘Left’ critics of the Labour Party after 1919
Harry Holland’s general political course, from the time of the 1913 defeat on the waterfront, was one of ‘bending to the right’ to accommodate the Liberal politics of the […]
Catastrophe in Germany, disorientation in New Zealand
“We come into this House as representatives of the working-men in certain electorates of the Dominion, and we come to state not our views alone, but the views of the […]
Shockwaves of the October revolution reach New Zealand
In March 1917, just as the New Zealand military campaign in Europe was getting bogged down both militarily and politically, a popular uprising overthrew the czar of Russia. For three […]
The success and failure of Harry Holland’s campaign against conscription
The initial purpose of the anti-German campaign following the sinking of the Lusitania was to boost flagging recruitment to the army. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, recruitment had dwindled […]
Harry Holland’s wartime political default
In late April 1915 the first major military engagement involving New Zealand troops took place on the shores of Turkey: a bid to open the Dardanelles Strait to allied shipping […]
