New Zealand Company
The New Zealand Company, chartered in the United Kingdom, was a company that existed in the first half of the 1800s on a business model focused on the systematic colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principles devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who envisaged the creation of a new-model English society in the southern hemisphere. Under Wakefield’s model, the colony would attract capitalists who would then have a ready supply of labour—migrant labourers who could not initially afford to be property owners, but who would have the expectation of one day buying land with their savings.
National Mortgage and Agency Company of New Zealand
Perthshire-born George Gray Russell (1828–1919), a London ship and insurance broker, came to New Zealand in late 1864 and set up in business as a general merchant selling from premises in Dunedin's Stafford Street: brandy, fencing wire, nails and corrugated iron, oats and timber and other goods. Once established he also represented British pastoral investors, shipping lines and merchants, and shipped wool, grain and produce to Britain. In this he was assisted by John Macfarlane Ritchie (1842–1912) who as planned arrived a few months later than Russell at the beginning of 1865.