This edited collection investigates New Zealand’s history as an imperial power, and its evolving place within the British Empire. It revises and expands the history of empire within, to and from New Zealand by looking at the country’s spheres of internal imperialism, its relationship with Australia, its Pacific empire and its outreach to Antarctica.

The book critically revises our understanding of the range of ways that New Zealand has played a role as an imperial power, including the cultural histories of New Zealand inside the British Empire, engagements with imperial practices and notions of imperialism, the special significance of New Zealand in the Pacific region, and the circulation of ideas of empire both through and inside New Zealand over time.

The essays in this volume span social, cultural, political and economic history, and in testing the concept of New Zealand's empire, the contributors take new directions in both historiographical and empirical research.