New Zealand Journal of History, 46, 1 (2012) 52 Owning the Otago Peninsula THE ROLE OF PROPERTY IN SHAPING ECONOMY, SOCIETY AND ENVIRONMENT, 1844–1900* UNCOVERING THE HISTORICAL OPERATION of property systems can show us the blueprint of our desires and reveal the patterns of human endeavour within nature’s economy. Economic, social and ecological relationships are all manifested in the way we see the world as property, which we then express in law. As William Cronon has observed, because ‘law is the foundation on which property rests’, it is ‘the formal expression of a community’s relationship with nature’. 1 This article explores how Kāi Tahu whānui and British settler systems of property in land (real property, as the lawyers say) engaged with the ecology of Muaupoko, the Otago Peninsula, north-east of the present-day city of Dunedin. 2 By examining how different systems of property worked to shape the peninsula’s human and ecological history I intend to help redress some thematic and spatial gaps in our historical understanding. New Zealand’s historians have paid close attention to some of the roles played by concepts of property in colonisation, but have seldom examined their interaction with ecological change. Further, the almost complete neglect of human interaction with the coasts and seas surrounding these islands is surely one of the most glaring omissions in New Zealand environmental history. 3 A landmass of some 9700 hectares, dominated by volcanic cones clothed in broad-leaved podocarp forest and fringed by a harbour, estuaries, wetlands and white sand beaches, the Otago Peninsula has been a key site of Māori and settler encounter. The density of Māori settlement on the peninsula and the continuity of occupation is unparalleled in Otago. 4 The peninsula was a vital part of the ‘middle ground’ that developed in Murihiku through Kāi Tahu interaction with early European traders. The peninsula, as the site of the Weller Brothers’ principal whaling stations, was especially signiicant for shore and bay whaling, but it also was a site for sealing and lax trading. 5 In 1844 the Ōtākou Purchase split control of the peninsula between Māori and Pākehā. This was, in the words of Erik Olssen, the key ‘rupture’ in the history of Otago. 6 Kāi Tahu sold 160,000 hectares (400,000 acres) to the New Zealand Company for £2400, providing the basis for the ‘systematic colonisation’ of Otago. The question of who would control the peninsula was the most contested aspect of negotiations that spread over several weeks. The Kāi Tahu communities of Ōtākou retained the northern quarter, some 2700 hectares (6665 acres); the rest became the property of the New Zealand Company. The subsequent histories of Kāi Tahu and British settlers were lived in parallel on their respective portions of the peninsula.