Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body

Conflicts over time management and work discipline showed that Maori had a "task-specific" sense of time, one that corresponded to agricultural cycles of intense labor followed by a period of rest and feasting; these ideas conflicted with the industrious subject central to notions of evangelical improvement (124). In spite of his desire to avoid a teleology of colonization, the book ends with the arguments for a treaty between the Maori and the British government, one that cast the Maori as enfeebled, and needing British protection; it was a debate that recognized the unequal status of a people faced with a growing empire (and a strong navy), a status that many indigenous populations faced as they were confronted by a quickly moving imperial frontier across Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century.