By Keith Rankin – This article was also published on Scoop.co.nz.

STUDIES OF POPULATIONS and migrations commonly use the term ‘safety-valve’ to describe opportunities that relieve population pressure in particular places. One example is ‘For Spirit and Adventure’ by Angela McCarthy, in ‘The Heather and the Fern’, a 2003 study of Scottish migration and New Zealand settlement edited by Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman. This study asks: Was this migration a “safety valve or a haemorrhage” for Scotland?

Australia has been commonly regarded as a safety valve for New Zealand from the 1980s, a period of three decades in which the working age population was an unusually high proportion of the total population. The argument is that unemployment in New Zealand would have been significantly higher had this trans-Tasman migration not taken place.

Demographics in New Zealand before World War 1 were unusual in part for similar reasons. The biggest influx by far of British immigrants took place in the 1870s, and these settlers looked substantially to building this country from its ‘grass roots’ (literally) through rural homesteads and provincial townships. Families which began from the late 1860s (often in the UK before migration in the 1870s) to the mid-1880s grew on the basis of one child every two years until around 1900. Families with 10 plus children were common in and around places like Pleasant Point and Foxton. What role would all those children play?

It’s commonly understood in development economics that rural-urban migration is the principal dynamic of accelerated economic growth and industrialisation. The key idea is that the ‘marginal cost of labour’ on the family (or otherwise traditional) farm is zero. What it means is that, while farm tasks are shared around between family members, when one of these members leave then the farm output does not fall. There is a simple rise of productivity on the farm (unchanged output divided by fewer workers), and the person who leaves is in a position to add to the output of the destination (urban or frontier) economy.

In 1914, these huge first generation families were abundant with adult and adolescent children. Almost all good agricultural land was already settled. Work was available in the cities, but these were still small relative to the scale of rural underemployment that then existed. Further, with a national economic dynamic of rural exports and manufactured imports, the opportunities for industrialisation as a ‘safety-valve’ for this rural surplus was limited. There was no vast frontier land to New Zealand’s east ripe for settlement by New Zealand’s rural surplus.

Martial cultures, and venture cultures, develop where there is an increasingly intense level of competition within one’s domestic environment. It’s what happened in New Zealand in perhaps the fifteenth century when hapu could no longer replicate to fill out their Aotearoa environment, and in which unsustainable hunting of seals meant a new mode of equilibrium economy had to be forged. Likewise Scotland for centuries had been a cradle of men who would wander the world finding economic opportunities in armies, in empire, in engineering projects, and in new frontiers.

The huge willingness to serve king and country on foreign fields can be understood in this context. And while many personal losses unfolded – comparable to those faced by families in Scotland (and many other places) whose children emigrated, never to be seen again by their parents and siblings, never seen at all by many prospective brides – there was little economic loss because the marginal product at home of those who left for war was close to zero. (This was much more so in WW1 that in WW2, and it meant that the need for female labour to cover for the departed men was quite small.)

In the 1920s the population featured many men whose lives were profoundly affected by their adverse war experiences, and many maiden aunts who lived their lives in their parents’ households, on the farm or elsewhere. (The trauma of loss was compounded by the influenza pandemic of late 1918.) Many of the relatively able veterans turned to farming short-lived backblocks’ farms that required breaking in, and, with hindsight, never could be profitable ventures. New technology on the dairy farms – especially electricity and milking machines – meant that the much smaller families formed after 1900 would still shed huge amounts of labour to our cities in the late 1920s.

In the Great Depression of the early 1930s, the extant viable farms were once again full of older children and young adults displaced from urban employment. Thanks in large part to progressive growth-oriented policies (as distinct from the preceding austerity policies) from 1934 to 1938, the rural labour surplus was largely absorbed by 1939. Labour shortage in New Zealand was substantial in WW2, unlike WW1. 

What might have happened to those men who served, had there been no war? To a large extent they were younger sons of very large rural families. These men would have required alternative ventures, in an era where venture-opportunities were running out. Further, New Zealand demographic experiences, while more extreme than most, were matched in the rest of the Anglo-world, and in substantial parts of industrialising Europe. Was World War 1 a Malthusian event, a demographic corrective as the age of economic expansion was drawing to a close? 

I cannot answer that. But I can be sure that the counterfactual to World War 1 would also have involved huge dislocation and distress, as the new global economic system sought to absorb a generation that was born as if expansion could continue (indeed accelerate) forever. While Karl Marx and his subsequent acolytes would have their answers, and we might look to Spain in the 1930s as a nation riven by clashing interests, we can only speculate.

We should speculate though, because we see that too many young people in the world today are entering adulthood with high expectations and diminishing opportunities. These speculative questions need to be addressed, even if they cannot be answered with any degree of certainty.

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By Keith Rankin, 25 April 2015 – Article also submitted to TheDailyBlog.co.nz. [caption id="attachment_3638" align="alignleft" width="221"] The Fat Boy nuclear bomb explodes over Nagasaki, Japan.[/caption] THIS TIME LAST YEAR I was on my way, with my family, to Nagasaki (Letter from Japan on ANZAC Day). It is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, built like Wellington around a superb natural harbour and surrounded with hillside suburbs. On 9 August 1945 Nagasaki played host to an American plutonium bomb (‘Fat Man’). This was the symbolic endgame of a long era of imperial militarism (and the beginning of a new era of “Cold War” military posturing). Fat Man was intended for Kokura, on the northern tip of Kyushu, but bad weather nearly aborted the drop. The weight of the bomb was possibly too great for a safe return to Tinian, and the precise location of Fat Boy’s performance was incidental. Plan B. The clouds cleared over Nagasaki as the plane flew over, so the weapon of mass destruction was detonated there. (See “Seconds from Disaster Nagasaki“.) Fortunately, if that’s the right word, Nagasaki’s geography limited the carnage compared to the Hiroshima bomb dropped three days previously. This act of terror achieved nothing. Subsequent research shows that neither the American nor the Japanese authorities were particularly concerned about civilian lives. The Japanese wanted to save their Emperor system, and eventually surrendered when they realised they could do a better deal, re the Emperor, with the Americans than the Soviets. The Americans had a plutonium bomb to deploy – distinct from the previously untested uranium bomb (‘Little Boy’) dropped on Hiroshima. With the Soviet entry into the Pacific War, time was running short. After Fat Boy it was still six days before surrender; that bomb served no military purpose whatsoever. The Soviet declaration of war, not the bomb, ensured the Japanese surrender to the Americans. Japan’s military adventurism began 77 years before 1945, with the ‘Meiji Restoration’ in 1868, precipitated by young moderniser/imperialists overthrowing the Shogunate. In Ottoman Turkey, a similar group of moderniser/imperialists overthrew the Sultan, in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. In seven years this very similar group of modernisers did as much as their Japanese equivalents had done in seventy, including declaring war on the ‘Triple Entente’ (Britain, France, Russia) in 1915, and what Pope Francis has called the first great genocide of the twentieth century (by Turks on Armenians). The Ottoman Empire shifted from a relatively benign Islamic caliphate to a ruthless military empire. Hundreds of thousands of Arab subjects were conscripted, mainly from ‘Greater Syria’, and sent to battle in Gallipoli (and other places). (See Al Jazeera’s World War One Through Arab Eyes.) Much of the killing and starvation of Armenians also took place in Greater Syria. About half of all soldiers deployed by the Young Turks on the Gallipoli peninsular were Arabs from Greater Syria. Thus about half of all deaths on Gallipoli were Arabs; not Turks, not British, not French, not Australians, not New Zealanders, not Indians. (See here [nzhistory.net.nz] for total casualties in the Gallipoli campaign, noting that both Ottoman and French casualties include Arab subjects of their empires.) This is what ‘our boys’ blundered into; this crucible of modern Turkish national identity. (Gallipoli was the founding victory that eventually led to the birth of the modern Turkish Republic; the victorious general was Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk.) World War 1 was a geopolitical maelstrom which was at least as much about the future of the ‘Middle East’ as it was about German-French or German-British rivalry. Indeed the Turks and the Germans had a more immediate rival to deal with than the British and French: Russia. The Young Turks needed to preserve their country’s natural blockade of Russia. The British and French had a lot of investments in Russia, and in the Middle East. Not least was the Suez Canal. All the imperial powers called upon the men of their empires, making this truly a ‘world’ war. New Zealand already had a very strong sense of national identity. In accordance with its times, it was a national identity within the British Empire, not an identity apart from it. Likewise, Australia had its identity within the empire. Each sought to prove itself to the British establishment; to put on a good performance. Further, this was an era of ‘social Darwinism’, of overt racism, of eugenic thought. Performance mattered; only the fittest prospered. There were crucial differences between Australia and New Zealand. Australia’s identity had been tied to its convict past, and Australians needed to rectify that image. An Australian academic friend, in a private correspondence, says of historian John Hirst: “He would say the reason why Australia was so concerned to impress the British with a good performance lay in its hope to cleanse the stain of convict blood through prowess in combat.” Blood trumps blood. New Zealand lay in Australia’s shadow – as seen from Britain. Even today ‘studies’ of the British empire tend to see Australia as the empire’s eastern fringe (eg BBC’s Jeremy Paxman’sEmpire which never once mentioned New Zealand in five programmes.) We in New Zealand – almost to a man and woman – knew that the British race was tops, and that we in the Britain of the South were the ‘better British’, the best of the best. We deserved to be the rulers of the rulers, not some tinpot independency or convict-stained appendage such as Tasmania. But how would Britain’s top brass know this? Only by a good performance out of the shadow; a very good performance. Gallipoli became a ‘theatre’ of war. The venture started badly for us. The first New Zealand contingent arrived at Suez in the same ‘fleet’ as the Australians; purely a matter of logistics. To the British we were ANZACs, and that’s how it stayed. So much for our desire to differentiate ourselves from the Australians. The reality was that our soldiers volunteered in substantial numbers to join their provincial regiments. We fought and died on the Gallipoli peninsula – above ANZAC Cove, and with the British at Cape Helles – as the Otago or Auckland or Canterbury regiments; not side-by-side with the New South Welshmen or Tasmanians. The greatest glory of the campaign went to the Wellingtons, at Chunuk Bair. That short-lived victory was our victory – no Australians (or poncey Aucklanders for that matter) – a great performance of bravery and combat, at great cost. It was the pallid Poms who failed to follow up. It is right that we remember our men. They lived so far from the hub of empire; the empire into which our national identity was embedded. They welcomed the chance for an adventure that would also allow them to visit their tūrangawaewae. Today similarly motivated young men leave to base-jump off cliffs and climb dangerously high mountains. Risk-taking and venturing, fame and fortune, are in the make-up of young men (especially though not only men) from the world over. The martiality of the times always meant that their adventures might involve killing people; people with whom they had no grievance. The underlying racism of the era meant that they underestimated the military capability of their opponents. We remember our men; boys sent to kill and be killed in a theatre far far away. In these terms, they performed well. At the end of The First World War, a British TV series (Channel 4, adapted from the book by Oxford professor Hew Strachan) that recently screened on Maori TV, New Zealand gained its own special mention from an esteemed British source. “Many allied memorials spelled out the values felt to be at stake during the war. In the stained glass window in Canterbury University in New Zealand, the central powers are depicted as the dragon of brutality and ignorance; the allied troops have humanity and justice on their side, and are naturally victorious.” We served, we lost, we won, we remember. Was God on our side? It’s not that simple. –]]>