The New Zealand Company tried to attract settlers from Britain by publishing romanticised images of New Zealand. A major source of this propaganda was Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s book Adventure in New Zealand, published in London in 1845. It contained many coloured lithographs. This one, from a drawing by William Mein Smith, the first New Zealand Company surveyor general, shows the company settlement of Petre (Whanganui) in September 1841. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s core insight was that colonies added to the land supply of the colonising country and so minimised the negative effects of a growing economy.
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Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference:
PUBL-0011-05
Hand-coloured lithograph after a drawing by William Mein Smith
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.
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