Book review: Not in Narrow Seas

It's been a while since my last book review, back in August. And that's because I read a couple of novels, and after that I've been working my way through Brian Easton's Not in Narrow Seas. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for economic history, and Easton sets out to provide an in-depth account of the economic history of New Zealand. He justifies his approach as follows:

Many historians have told the Aotearoa New Zealand story before; but an economist uses a particular lens and, I would argue, helps us to see our nation's history in a new way.

Easton won't get any disagreement from me on that point. However, despite the prominence that Easton accords the economic lens, I found that the book fell short on that point in two ways. First, the book is heavily focused on political history, rather than economic history. Now, I will grant that it can be difficult to disentangle the political from the economic. However, a great number of words in this book are devoted to cataloguing national electoral results and the shifting political climate, which makes the economics seem somewhat of secondary importance. I would have preferred more emphasis on explaining the economic mechanisms underlying New Zealand's history and development, rather than recounting the political decisions and events that accompanied it. The core economic history context is actually available in a concise form in the Appendix, which I thought was actually one of the highlights of the book!

Second, when economic theory or technical detail does make an appearance, as opposed to the purely descriptive economic statistics that tend to suffuse books on economic history, that theory or technical detail is sometimes insufficiently explained to the reader. Consider this, on measuring the political position of government after the introduction of MMP:

The first coalition was about 0.8 standard deviations to the right of the New Zealand centre on a left-right scale and the second about the same distance to the left. That means that only 15 percent of the population were on the right of the first coalition or on the left of the second. On the social conservative-progressive scale the first coalition was also about 0.85SDs on the conservative side, while the second was a slightly closer 0.65SDs on the progressive side, with about 25 percent more progressive. The sharp change in the politics of the government did not reflect a sharp change in the politics of the voters.

None of that passage is really explained to the reader, and we are left trying to figure it out for ourselves. The book is not footnoted, but there are references at the end of each chapter. Except for the chapter that quoted passage comes from, where there are no sources provided. Easton is usually much more careful than this, so I was surprised. And it wasn't the only example of sometimes quite technical aspects of economic or political theory that were not really explained. Perhaps in a book that is already over 600 pages, there isn't room for detailed explanations? I was disappointed.

Having said that, there is a lot to learn from the book. I have to admit being under-informed about the political history of New Zealand prior to Muldoon, so despite my gripe above about the political content, it actually turned out that I appreciated that aspect of the book. There is also good coverage of early New Zealand, including pre-European times and the early encounters between Pākehā and Māori. I also learned some surprising facts, such as that New Zealand's first liquor 'laws' date to an 1833 agreement between grog sellers, brokered by British Resident James Busby. Or that New Zealand's first Labour Day celebrations, in 1890, marked the first anniversary of the formation of the Maritime Council, a union that would go on to suffer a crushing defeat in the Great Maritime Strike later that year. And this:

Wellington, which in 1843 was so much of the doldrums that one visitor described it as 'rotten to the core', was saved by sheep.

I won't forget that sentence in a hurry. So. Many. Jokes.

It takes a lot of commitment to write a 600-plus page book on economic history, and to do so in such a way that you keep the reader's attention to the end. Easton is to be commended on that, and I found Easton's writing considerably more engaging than Gary Hawke's The Making of New Zealand (which I have never reviewed, as I read it before I started blogging). I'm not sure that this book is "The" economic history of New Zealand, as the subtitle claims. But it is certainly "A" history of New Zealand, with an economic flavour, and worth reading if you have an interest in that area.