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
The New Zealand Company also established a settlement at Wanganui in 1840, chiefly as a spillover settlement, the site of the rural land promised to Wellington purchasers. A traveller in the colony at the time described Wanganui as "one of the unwholesome, mushroom settlements engendered by the New Zealand Company for the purpose of removing to a distance a portion of the clamorous script-holders who, on arriving from England, looked, and looked in vain, for their land." The Wanganui settlement was beset with problems when settlers arrived to find Māori on the land, denying it had been sold. The company also sent surveyors down the east coast of the South Island to consider further sites, where they made contact at Akaroa with the fledgling French colony established there under the auspices of Jean-François Langlois's Nanto-Bordelaise Company.