Wednesday 25 September 2024, 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Taiwhanga Kauhau — Auditorium, (lower ground) National Library Wellington. Entrance on Aitken Street or on Zoom.
In this presentation, Professor Emerita Charlotte Macdonald will discuss the impact of martial law in 19th-century New Zealand. She will explore what happens when governments suspend the usual rights and freedoms of citizens.
Suspending the rights of citizens
On several occasions in 19th-century Aotearoa New Zealand the colony was placed under martial law. The presentation revisits these moments: the circumstances, debates surrounding, and consequences of such extreme actions.
It takes us to important deliberations across the wider mid-nineteenth-century empire including metropolitan England. What was the scope of ‘the rule of law’ and who had the power to make, and suspend that law? When governments suspend the usual rights, protections and freedoms of ‘the people’ — citizens or subjects — what can be at stake?
About the speaker
Charlotte Macdonald is Professor Emerita at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. She co-convenes the Aotearoa Gender History Network with Charlotte Greenhalgh (University of Waikato). Papers from a February 2023 workshop of the Network have recently appeared in a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of History (Vol 58: 1 April 2024, available through Project Muse). Her book on the 19th-century garrison world will be published in 2025.
More information can be found here.