Branch event: New Zealand military history and big data

Royal Society of New Zealand Manawatu Branch presents Professor Charlotte Macdonald from Victoria University of Wellington for their August public lecture

Approximately 18,000 soldiers in British Army regiments were stationed in New Zealand between 1842 and 1870. At their peak in the early 1860s the ‘redcoats’ were engaged in wars fought across the Waikato and other districts of the North Island, conflicts which shifted the balance of power in the colony.

The military presence in the ‘settler era’ also shaped commerce, road building, telegraph and postal networks, medicine, music and social life, and connected New Zealand to the global reach of the nineteenth century garrison world of India, the Cape, Sydney, Melbourne, the Caribbean, and North America, as well as Britain.

The Marsden-funded research on which this discomfiting history rests is seeking to put a face to the men who served with the regiments in New Zealand and to reach beyond the battlefields to the wider impact of the military presence in the settler empire. It draws on the dense archive of the War Office to turn nineteenth-century ‘big data’ into twenty-first understandings of the legacies of a difficult – and sometimes forgotten – history.

Charlotte Macdonald is a Professor at Victoria University of Wellington and one of New Zealand’s leading historians of migration, health, gender, and the writing of biography.