Powering Colonialism: Electrification, Extraction, and Empire in Aotearoa New Zealand

Powering Colonialism explores the history of electrification and its relationship to colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Exploitative electric infrastructure, Nathan N. Kapoor argues, was not inevitable, and it was not determined by geography or a coincidence of colonization—it was by design. By the twenty-first century, hydropower provided more than half the country’s electricity. Although it is now lauded as a renewable energy source, advocates for the earliest hydroelectrification schem...