Powering Colonialism

Powering Colonialism explores the history of electrification and its relationship to colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the 1880s, the Phoenix Mine in Otago installed a hydroelectric system to power its mining equipment, making gold mining one of the first industries in the colony to harness the potential of electric power. By the twenty-first century, hydropower still provided more than half the country’s electricity. While it is now lauded as a renewable energy source, advocates for the earliest hydroelectrification schemes were more concerned with extracting greater profits and highlighting British technological superiority. Settlers, miners, and politicians saw electricity as a tool for achieving modernity, wealth, and self-sufficiency, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s vast river system, once a barrier to colonial expansion, was now used to justify it. The electrification projects Nathan Kapoor examines in this book—from hydroelectric power for gold mining to Māori-led geothermal energy plants—illustrate how, from the very beginning of Aotearoa New Zealand’s transition to electric power, settlers designed and used electric power systems in service to their colonial mission. Exploitative electric infrastructure, Kapoor argues, was not inevitable, and it was not determined by geography or a coincidence of colonization. It was by design.