Talk:Michael King (historian): Difference between revisions

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Discussion

Good work, there, contributors.

Query this line (where I suspect "The" should instead be "Tihei"):

The mauri ora: Aspects of Maoritanga (1978)

robinp 05:43, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

At what point should we remove the "stub" message? I think we're well beyond the stub stage now.Gadfium 08:44, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've removed the stub message. --gadfium 20:08, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Michael King's blind spots

Its a great shame that Micheal died so young as Im sure he would be now rewriting his history of NZ. Before 2000 historians like King tended to be the guardians or gate keepers of historical information. Since then the net and Wikipedia have exploded the barriers to source material and we can see that many historians had significant blind spots. King was one of them. During his time in the Waikato he got very close to many Maori and came under their influence to a very large extent.It is interesting to see what aspects of NZ history King looked into in detail and those he basically ignored.

Maori cannibalism was a huge part of Maori tikanga that King essentially looked the other way. From memory he devotes about 1 sentence to it in an offhand way. King also gives quite inaccurate impression of the early contact between European explorers and Maori. In King's history the Europeans are often portrayed as the aggressors, whereas if you read the logs of Cook and his literate crew you can can see that the opposite is the case-ie Cook's men were simply defending themselves or responding to Maori aggression.Cook was very circumspect in using muskets as weapons. He fully realised the gap between his advanced culture and that of the Maori.

King also has a problem,to be charitable , in translating French. His version of the massacre of Marion du Fresne is a dog's breakfast and bares little resemblance to what actually happened at the time. These are just 2 examples of King's "Maori" weakness.It is no coincidence that they are both examples of the rewriting of actual events which show Maori as stone age people with a very violent culture.