To the last shilling and the last man: the presentation of the 1909 naval crisis by the New Zealand press

Abstract

1909 saw panic sweep the British Empire when Britannia's claim to rule the waves was challenged by German naval ambitions. New Zealand reacted to this imperial crisis with the unprecedented offer to pay for the addition of a battleship to the Royal Navy. This thesis examines the presentation of the 1909 naval crisis by the New Zealand press, and explores what naval supremacy was claimed to mean to New Zealand, the Empire, and the world. Extensive contextualization is undertaken to establish this little known event as a significant episode in New Zealand history, and to situate the naval crisis in the context of the Anglo-German naval arms race and New Zealand's dependence on a declining Britain. The emphasis on context also enables a number of criticisms to be made of the historiography of this period, particularly the arguments that New Zealand's imperialist policy and sentiment were signs of national immaturity, and that New Zealand society was militarized before the First World War. This thesis also examines serious shortcomings in previous historical studies of newspapers and in their utilization as source material. Problems in focus and methodology are compounded by neglect of critical structural factors in both newspapers and the newspaper industry, in particular the monopoly of the United Press Association over domestic and international news. Historians have also failed to engage with the vast amount of research on the media produced by other disciplines. To address this problem a number of concepts derived from studies of the media were applied to the naval crisis, with a particular focus on the "moral panic" model developed by Stanley Cohen. These concepts proved to be extremely valuable, while their flexible and general nature rendered them well suited to historical study. Analysis of the presentation of the naval crisis revealed a striking consistency in the views articulated by the New Zealand press. These views centred on total loyalty to the Mother Country and the absolute importance of continued naval supremacy to the security of the Empire and the maintenance of an entire way of life. This conception was underpinned by a worldview in which conflict between nations was endemic. New Zealanders were also assumed to be party to an overwhelming patriotic consensus, defined and enforced by a process through which any sign of dissent was exaggerated, distorted, and deemed to emanate from a dangerously subversive minority. This thesis argues that New Zealand's imperialism and anxiety in this period reflected a keen awareness of its position as a dependent colony in age of aggressive imperial rivalry. However, it is a key finding of this thesis that these critical contextual factors, among others, have been overlooked by many historians. Significant events and features of New Zealand history have been neglected, and historians have rendered judgment on this period on the basis of ahistorical and insular reasoning. Asking the wrong questions, they have therefore come up with the wrong answers.