Tony Ballantyne is dissatisfied with terms such as “encounter” for interpreting the complex engagements between Europeans and indigenous people in the course of colonization or, as a postcolonial historian would say, colonialism. His chosen word is “entanglement,” in an effort to convey the profoundness and messiness of cross-cultural contact. In this book, he explores the cultural entanglements that ensnared New Zealand Maori and the Anglican and Wesleyan missionaries who established missions in New Zealand from 1814, with a focus on their different understandings of the human body.

The book is organized into six chapters. The first three consider the place of the body in European views of the Maori capacity to embrace “civilisation,” the mission station as a site of cross-cultural engagement, and the clash over understandings of work and time between missionaries and Maori. The second three chapters address more intimate bodily questions of sexual scandal (the sexual transgression of missionary William Yate), contrasting cultures of death, and the question of the “enfeebled” body. Here Ballantyne reinterprets the accounts by the missionaries, usually portrayed as a story of “fatal impact,” that relayed their anxieties to the Colonial Office about the devastating effect of European encroachment, interference, and violence on Maori.

Much of the material traversed in Entanglements of Empire, drawing on the journals and letters of British colonial missionaries, is familiar to New Zealand historians, though it may not be familiar to historians of the British Empire and British world. One example is the story of Tuki and Huru, who initiated relationships between northern Maori and Governor King in New South Wales in the 1790s when they were kidnapped to teach convicts how to work flax. Another is how the Church Missionary Society mission resulted from connections between the Rev. Samuel Marsden at Parramatta and chiefs in northern New Zealand, one of whom, Ruatara, invited Marsden to the Bay of Islands in 1814. Another is the story of the brig Elizabeth’s fateful interference in warfare between the Ngati Toa and Ngai Tahu tribes, which still resonates today. And another concerns Judith Binney's studies of the sexual misdeeds of missionaries William Kendall and William Yate (Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall, 2nd ed. [Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2005]; Binney, “Whatever Happened to Poor Mr. Yate?: An Exercise in Voyeurism,” New Zealand Journal of History 9, no. 2 [1975]: 111–125).

Ballantyne nevertheless adds to the historiography through his interpretation, which is a development of his earlier thinking about webs of empire and bodies in contact (Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past [Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012]; Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005]). In what is a fresh approach, he explores key problems and points of cross-cultural tension and conflict between missionaries and Maori, including housing, work, trade, sexual transgression, illness, and death, locating bodily practices at the center of his analysis. While Marsden thought Maori capable of “improvement,” Ballantyne explains how the mission in New Zealand depended on Maori patronage, beginning with Ruatara. One contribution to the field is the comparison of colonial mission houses and Maori whare, and their different use of space, where mission houses modelled a new social order. It was difficult for missionary families to meet British standards when they initially lived in a whare. Missions were in fact culturally mixed sites, not fenced off little Englands. Likewise Ballantyne deploys an analysis of Yate's sexual misconduct with men and boys to emphasize the importance of marriage to the Christian missionaries rather than to explore Yate's sexual identity. Just as missionaries worked to transform Maori social practices, he shows how they sought to transform indigenous cosmologies, by understanding Maori views of death. For the local population, atua (spirits) were sources of chiefly power that they were reluctant to give up. The Maori practice of slavery, which expanded in the 1820s as a result of warfare that produced many captives, appalled the missionaries, and they were more appalled when slaves were sacrificed on a chief's death. Ballantyne argues that missionaries transported their own cosmological understanding of death to New Zealand, but had less success with modifying burial practices, and indeed were obliged to alter their own.

Overall, Ballantyne's achievement rests not in the originality of his sources, but in the overarching argument that he imposes on his script. The core argument is convincing, that social and cultural change for Maori in northern New Zealand resulted not from direct missionary action, but from “entanglement” with the newcomers. Correspondingly, Maori chiefs constrained what the mission could do, while Maori shaped the mission and its work. Maori could control missionaries on the ground in New Zealand; Maori culture was not destroyed. But they could not control missionary writings, which travelled internationally, resulting in further entanglement. Despite the missionaries' professed opposition to colonization, it is ironic that their humanitarian missives famously influenced the Colonial Office's decision to intervene formally in New Zealand and arrange a Treaty with Maori chiefs. The northern chiefs whose tribes were the earliest to become entangled in the webs of empire were, in fact, the first chiefs to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and the missionaries themselves were agents of the colonization process from which they believed their presence would protect Maori. As Ballantyne concludes, the missionary remains an ambiguous figure in national histories and in British imperial history. While bodies and body politics do not feature as much as I expected given the professed emphasis on bodies called into question, this is a welcome contribution to histories of religion and empire and to our understanding of cross-cultural “entanglement”.