Book Chapter

Imagining New Zealand’s economy in the mid-twentieth century

Abstract

Mid-twentieth-century British commentaries on New Zealand were usually positive, focusing on the industrial peace and general high living standards that New Zealanders enjoyed—all conceived as to some extent the opposite of the British experience. Many explanations of New Zealand’s apparent success focused on its fortune in terms of natural resources and its distance from political instability. Other, more sceptical, voices did however argue that New Zealand was a dependent economy reliant on the UK, and that its economy would find it difficult to deal with the removal of British patronage. This chapter explores the oscillating balance between these two interpretations, and examines some of the deeper intellectual reasons behind their adoption by different writers and policy-makers, throughout the post-Second World War era.

Attached files

Authors

O'Hara, Glen S.

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of History, Philosophy and Religion

Dates

Year of publication: 2018
Date of RADAR deposit: 2018-01-09

---

“Copyright © 2018, Springer Nature. Users may view, print, copy, download and text and data-mine the content, for the purposes of academic research, subject always to the full conditions of use. Any further use is subject to permission from Springer Nature.”

---

Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of Imagining New Zealand’s Economy in the Mid-Twentieth Century
This RADAR resource is Part of Imagining Britain’s economic future, c.1800–1975: Trade, consumerism, and global markets [ISBN: 9783319712963] / edited by David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson, Richard Toye, Richard (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).