Muddied Waters: Crofter Colonisation and the Contingency of ‘British’ and ‘Scottish’ Whiteness in 1880s New Zealand

The British and the Aotearoa New Zealand governments in the mid-1880s proposed a trial colonisation of Scottish Hebridean crofter fishing families in the southernmost Otago province. These settlers were envisioned as more than mere labour; they were intended to develop a nascent export fishing industry while rehabilitating themselves from a perceived state of poverty and malaise. In doing so, the project sought to restore faith in the vaunted images of British and Scottish imperial ‘might’ that had come under unprecedented stress. Yet, the scheme imploded within a year without a single crofter settled. Using under-examined archival records, newspaper accounts, and parliamentary debates, this article brings this forgotten attempt at state-sponsored social engineering to light. It argues that the project’s fall was driven by growing doubts that the Hebrideans could indeed return themselves, Otago, and New Zealand to a reified past, or whether this was something the colony even desired. Both grew ascendant, causing the ‘Othering’ of the Hebrideans. This affords a broader investigation into how Scottishness, Britishness, and whiteness were not automatic entries to privilege, but conditional performances. The Hebrideans ‘muddied’ multiple binaries – settler-indigenous, Anglo-Saxon-Celt, Pākehā-Māori, traditional-modern, metropole-periphery, core-borderland – a confuson necessitating their exclusion, not just in 1885 New Zealand, but continuing into contemporary narratives surrounding settler colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and identity formation.