McAloon, Jim

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McAloon, Jim

PERSONAL:

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand. Education: University of Otago, M.A.; University in Canterbury, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Lincoln University, Auckland Office, P.O. Box 5636, Wellesley St., Auckland 1141, New Zealand. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator, scholar, and writer. Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand, associate professor and group leader of Social Science, Parks, Recreation, and Tourism. Former researcher for what was then the Ngai Tahu Maori Trust Board in its Waitangi Tribunal claims in New Zealand.

WRITINGS:

Nelson: A Regional History, Cape Catley/Nelson City Council (Whatamango Bay, New Zealand), 1997.

No Idle Rich: The Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago, 1840-1914, University of Otago Press (Dunedin, New Zealand), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Rural Canterbury: Past, Present and Future, edited by Garth Cant, Lincoln University Press, 2001; Environmental Histories of New Zealand, edited by Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, Oxford University Press, 2002; Southern Capital: Christchurch 1850-2000, Towards a City Biography, edited by John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, University of Canterbury Press 2000; and The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement, edited by Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman, University of Otago, 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including Australian Economic History Review, Journal of Historical Geography, and Business and Economic History.

SIDELIGHTS:

In his first book, Nelson: A Regional History, Jim McAloon provides a history of Nelson, New Zealand, from an overview of the Maori settlement prior to 1840 on through to modern Nelson. "Jim McAloon in his book … gives a concise account of what recent research tells us about early life in Nelson," wrote a contributor to the NZine Web site. "A review of carbon dating suggests that Nelson, like the rest of New Zealand, was settled by the twelfth century. The Maori people took quickly to gardening and hunting. The Nelson mineral belt was rich in argillite, a dark stone which made fine tools. The Nelson Maori clearly traded their tools from around the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and these tools have been found throughout the country, including Otago and South Westland." The author also writes of the early settlers who sought a new life of independence not available in Britain and who wanted to establish an egalitarian society in a promising new world.

McAloon's next book is titled No Idle Rich: The Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago, 1840-1914. "This welcome book explores and explains the nature of wealth, class, and power in the colonial context of New Zealand," wrote Philippa Mein Smith on the H-Net Reviews Web site. "Its subjects are the richest settlers in the South Island, in Canterbury and Otago, who were the first to make their fortunes."

Gathering information from probate files, national mortgage records, and other archival sources, the author develops profiles of the prominent settlers on New Zealand's South Islands, where some of the earliest fortunes in New Zealand were made. In the process, he reveals their politics, business practices, and gender roles. McAloon supports his information with detailed references to provide a comprehensive examination of a new class of capitalist-colonialist that came to power worldwide during the last half of the eighteenth century on up until around World War I. In his book, McAloon also disproves the long-held myth that colonial society on New Zealand's South Island largely reflected society in England, which was headed by aristocratic landowners. McAloon shows definitively that South Island's rich were not the idle rich but hardworking entrepreneurs and landowners. "Their origins were definitely not from the English aristocracy and few arrived in New Zealand with considerable wealth," noted Ron Johnston in the British Review of New Zealand Studies. "Most were from the lower middle-class. Their situation at their death was the result of hard and continuous work in most cases. The main advantage that most of them had was their relatively early arrival, which meant that they were able to settle the ‘best land.’"

The author begins his book by providing an overview of concepts of wealth, class, and power in nineteenth-century Great Britain and New Zealand. "There is some discussion of the definitions of class and power, with the conclusion that this book is an examination not of class, per se, but of a ‘stratum within a class,’" noted Jennifer Rogers in Australian Historical Studies. "Indeed, the point is made that the rich pastoralists did not aspire to some imagined gentility but focused instead on the accumulation of capital." The author goes on to examine topics such as partnerships among husbands and wives and the integration of wealth and politics. In the case of the latter, the author reveals that rich conservatives were ineffective in trying to prevent the reforms of the Liberals, such as universal suffrage or the Land for Settlements Act.

W.R. Garside wrote in the Canadian Journal of History that the author "highlights the rich, not as a way of recording accumulation simply for the sake of identifying social stratification or class divide, but as a means of better understanding the motivations and strategies of those challenged to make their way in a remote country." In the English Historical Review, William D. Rubinstein commented that the book "shows how imaginative and intelligent research can be used to produce important insights into the wealthy and their relationship with the rest of society."