Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers In New Zealand And Across The British Empire

Charlotte Macdonald

‘To walk down Redcoat Lane in the 2020s is to step through time.’

From the 1840s until 1870, thousands of British soldiers lived and served in Aotearoa New Zealand. Along with ‘bluejacket’ sailors from the British navy, the ‘redcoats’ built roads, patrolled garrison towns, fought in wars, and in quieter years underpinned the colony’s fragile economy. Their presence – and the violence it often entailed – was central to the transformation of a Māori world into a settler colony.

In Garrison World, distinguished historian Charlotte Macdonald places the New Zealand Wars within the vast framework of empire. She shows how events in Aotearoa were linked to rebellion in India and uprising in Jamaica, as imperial power was tested and asserted across the nineteenth century. This imperial presence carried a common thread for Indigenous peoples – conflict, dispossession and the loss of land.

At the centre of this sweeping account are the lives of soldiers, sailors and their families: working-class men from Britain and Ireland, officers from elite backgrounds, and women and families who lived alongside them. Their stories – from battlefi elds to barracks, from makeshift homes to colonial towns – reveal a world in which military and civilian lives were closely intertwined.

Richly illustrated and deeply researched, Garrison World is a compelling history of power, people and place. It explores how the threads of empire were woven through people’s lives, and how their legacies remain with us today.

Note

Charlotte Macdonald FRSNZ is Professor Emerita of History at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading historians. She is the author and co-editor of award-winning books that have reshaped understandings of New Zealand’s past, including A Woman of Good Character (1990), The Book of New Zealand Women/Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa (1991, with Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams), My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates (1996, with Frances Porter) and Strong, Beautiful and Modern (2011). She has served as President of the New Zealand Historical Association and as Chair of the Academy Executive Committee of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Garrison World builds on the extensive research project Soldiers of Empire (supported by the Marsden Fund); this examined the British military presence in nineteenth-century New Zealand and its wider imperial context.

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