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.
New Zealand Constitution Act 1852
The New Zealand Company, which was established in 1839, proposed that New Zealand should have representative institutions, and this was consistent with the findings of the Durham Report, which was commissioned during 1838 following minor rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. The first settlement of the company, Wellington, briefly had its own elected council during 1840, which dissolved itself on the instruction of Lieutenant Governor William Hobson. The first New Zealand Constitution Act was passed in 1846, though Governor George Grey was opposed to its proposed division of the country into European and Māori districts. As a result, almost all of the Act was suspended for six years pending the new Act of 1852, the only operative part of the 1846 Act being the creation of New Zealand's first provinces, New Ulster Province and New Munster Province. In the meantime, Grey drafted his own Act which established both provincial and central representative assemblies, allowed for Māori districts and an elected Governor. Only the latter proposal was rejected by the Parliament of the United Kingdom when it adopted Grey's constitution.