In 1842-43 native title became an important matter in its own right and the Treaty of Waitangi regained the significance it had lost since its signing, largely as a result of a highly contingent series of events, none of which has been expected by the principal British players. In what amounted to a growing chain of signification that has previously gone unremarked by historians, several British parties, in the context of a fierce dispute between the New Zealand Company on the one hand and the imperial and colonial governments on the other in regard to an agreement they had struck earlier, formulated interpretations of what was happening or should happen that made the treaty of Waitangi important again. It is similarly evident that the way in which a range of British parties treated native rights in land in New Zealand owed a great deal to the political contestation between them. It is also apparent that the precise significance the Treaty of Waitangi came to have at this time differed according to the particular circumstances of the colony’s northern and southern districts. In fact, there would be no consensus about the treaty’s significance for some time to come.

The significance of the treaty made at Waitangi in 1840 has consistently been exaggerated by historians. All the British players involved in making it were preoccupied with the momentary diplomatic task of persuading the chiefs to cede sovereignty to the British Crown. The inclusion in the agreement of a clause confirming the natives in the possession of their lands did not spring from the British government’s instructions but from the influence of local rather than metropolitan actors and forces. Moreover, with one exception, there is no contemporary evidence that any parties attached the significance to the first clause of its second article that was attributed to it later. What is more, the British government eventually claimed possession of the larger part of New Zealand on the very same basis as it had assumed possession of New South Wales in 1788, namely the doctrine of discovery. The way in which critical matters relating to land title were treated at the imperial centre was fundamentally a function of political power and could readily change according to circumstances. The government bowed to the pressure that a group of adventurers, the New Zealand Company, was able to exert in parliament and the press.

Hobson’s successor as Governor, Robert FitzRoy found New Zealand in crisis but had few resources to address it and adopted rash measures that appeared to abandon the means by which the British government hoped to acquire ownership of vast swathes of land. A major political struggle erupted in London between the New Zealand Company and the Colonial Office with the former spinning a powerful tale that its troubles were primarily the result of the natives’ rights of property in land being defined wrongly. More specifically, the Company’s directors and Lord Howick blamed the Treaty of Waitangi for the way that the natives’ rights in land had been defined. It mattered not a jot that the stories told about its significance involved more fiction than fact. For its part, the Colonial Office insisted that the Treaty had to be upheld in light of what had happened in the past, the facts on the ground in New Zealand and the undertakings the Crown had given the natives. In the colony, abstract legal principles and philosophical ideas similarly played little role in the way the key British players approached native title, especially in comparison to a mixture of moral, political and strategic considerations.