No Idle Rich: The Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago, 1840-1914

To substantiate his case, McAloon has mined probate files, mortgage records, biographies, death-duty registers, and personal papers, not only to identify the numbers who fall within his chosen definition of wealthy (which is far removed from the asset or financial ranges one would adopt in, say, a European context, but which makes sense here) but also to determine how those numbers grew, overall and within particular families. By doing so, it should excite other researchers to investigate more case studies of New Zealand enterprise, of success and failure, and, above all, of the emergence of spirited entrepreneurial, financial, and commercial groupings which shaped the country in ways that are not always captured by the inevitable emphasis on its role as a supplier of food and raw materials.