Social mobility and the foundations of an egalitarian society, 1880-1940
Erik Olssen, Clyde Griffen & Frank Jones
This is the first systematic analysis of urban social structure in New Zealand in the period 1880-1940, and of workalike, marital and intergenerational mobility.
In this micro-history of a particular community – the suburbs of southern Dunedin, one of the country’s most densely-settled areas at that time – the authors demonstrate how the colonists and their descendants made class less central to social organisation than it had been in Britain while creating a class-based politics to protect and advance their more equal society.
While class was our central concern, we also explored how religious and ethnic identities were rendered more marginal than in comparable communities in urban Britain and North America. The final chapter, mainly written by Olssen, asks to what extent the remarkably fluid social patterns in southern Dunedin resulted from deliberate choices made by the first settlers and their descendants or the inevitable consequences of a small society, the dominance of small-scale handicraft trades, and the skilled workers’ tradition of artisan radicalism. However one weighs the several factors, however, these suburbs contributed to making New Zealand a laboratory for social reform in the 1890s-1900s and the 1930s-40s. Where historians have overwhelmingly viewed these periods of r form as the achievement of politicians and bureaucrats based mainly in Wellington, the capital, these essays show how ordinary folk, women as well as men, made the reforms possible.
