Architectural designer, Jade Kake, claims that ‘debt is a colonial construct – the implications of which continue to be felt in the colonies’.

Kake is quite correct that debt, as we know the notion today, did not occur in traditional Maori society, but she does not tease out why. It is true that Maori had ‘utu’ which meant a reciprocal obligation – not just ‘revenge’, as it was once frequently misunderstood. Utu was part of a gift exchange economy (details in my Not in Narrow Seas). The key distinction between that and today’s economy, based on commercial exchange, is that the focus of the former is the transactors, while the focus in the commercial exchange economy is the transacted. You may be familiar with it in your family and friendship networks, where you make a gift which you expect to be reciprocated when it can be. You may not expect an exact value for value reciprocation.

Traditional Maori could not do exact value because they had no system of prices. (We are all deeply indebted to Raymond Firth’s The Economics of the New Zealand Maori which was an internationally pioneering introduction to the gift exchange economy illustrated by Maori practice. His book struggled to introduce prices into the gift exchange economies and lamentably fails; a nice reminder to economics that prices are not everything.)

Nor did traditional Maori have any notion of money in its role of a unit of account (related to prices), medium of exchange, store of value and means of deferred payment (no money, no debt). They did not need it because they had a perfectly satisfactory economy without it – affluent by the standards of the day.

Money was unnecessary, not just because of the gift economy but because each hapu (community) was largely self-sufficient. Yes, there was exchange between hapu, but it was minor compared to what they produced for their own consumption. (Most hapu could function without any trade – although fish from the distant sea or birds from upcountry added to their variety.)

Debt, the logical consequence of money, enabling consumption to be shifted through time, is enforced by the courts, which pre-European Maori did not have, rather than custom, which they had in loads.

Money, prices and debt are a consequence of specialisation which enables economies to substantially increase their productivity. Consequently, we have a much higher level of material production today than in pre-market times, but now we no longer know personally who supplies the product. For instance, I do not know a single person involved in the supply of my petrol between oil well (probably in Saudi Arabia) and self-service bowser. The gift exchange economy with its priority of the transactors over the transaction no longer applies.

Money, prices and debt are so useful that they are not confined to societies which might be called (ex-)colonies. Imperial economies carry far more debt than the periphery; the Global Financial Crisis, which was a failure of the debt system, would have been trivial if it there was not huge debts in America and Europe. (Below is an acerbic poem by Rex Fairburn, in his social credit phase, which describes the imperial colonial situation.)

One of the miracles in New Zealand economic history is how well Maori transitioned from the gift exchange economy via barter to the commercial economy. Not all first peoples adapted as well or as quickly as Maori.

That is at the heart of the weakness of Kake’s argument. It is easy to be nostalgic about the pre-European economy, but Maori have seized the opportunities that new circumstances and technologies presented despite having had to face some brutal experiences. They include:

            - learning to use the new technologies socially – the disaster of the Musket Wars arose because Maori had the guns but not yet the social institutions to restrain their use;

            - the nineteenth-century pandemics of foreign viruses were not only more destructive to an immunologically virgin population than the 1918 flu epidemic or Covid-19, but they damaged the Maori population more than all the nineteenth-century wars;

            - the alienation of Maori lands, particularly the 1867 and 1873 legislation which converted customary land ownership to individual ownership, undermining the community foundations of traditional Maori society.

Yet, despite these setbacks, Maori have thrived. They have done so by being more occupationally specialised than their tipuna. They are involved in the monetary economy and they transact commercially using prices. They have taken on debt to own their own homes rather than living in whare they build themselves; those who rent usually live in dwellings which the landlord (including the state) has run up debt to provide.

Every successful Maori business has had recourse to debt financing. Whether you want to call that business (or a home owner or a worker) ‘colonial’ is a matter of terminology. For Maori to flourish they must continue to take up the opportunities even if we call them by the meaningless term ‘colonial’. It would be a tragedy, for all of us, if in a fit of ‘decolonialisation’ Maori were to abandon the technologies and opportunities opening up their world.

From Dominion. A.R.D. Fairburn, 1938.

Smith

a refugee from the Black Country

suffers the insults of the foreman

that his family may live

in the discomfort to which they are accustomed

with deductions by the Commissioner of Taxes.

Smith has four sons,

hands-in-pockets, fronting chaos;

limbs of a ring-barked tree, losing sap.

Smith is an English immigrant.

Consider the curious fate

of the English immigrant:

his wages were taken from him

and exported to the colonies;

sated with abstinence, gorged on deprivation,

he followed them: to be confronted on arrival

with the ghost of his back wages, a load of debt;

the bond of kinship, the heritage of Empire.