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 Company
Instead, in late 1836, he set his sights on New Zealand, where his theories of "systematic" colonisation could be put into full effect. He gave evidence to a House of Commons committee which itself comprised many Wakefield supporters, and when the committee handed down a report endorsing his ideas, he wrote to Lord Durham explaining that New Zealand was "the fittest country in the world for colonisation". Wakefield formed the New Zealand Association, and on 22 May 1837 chaired its first meeting, which was attended by ten others including MPs Molesworth and William Hutt, and R.S. Rintoul of "The Spectator". After the association's third meeting, by which time London banker John Wright, Irish aristocrat Earl Mount Cashell and Whig MP William Wolryche-Whitmore were also on board and the group was attracting favourable newspaper attention, Wakefield drafted a Bill to bring the association's plans to fruition.