Assembling Histories: J. G. A. Pocock, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the British World

J. G. A. Pocock’s work has made major contributions to the two fields of history and political science. In this article, we investigate the significance of his contributions to a wider field of social science and, in particular, to the discipline of sociology. Pocock’s attention to the question of sovereignty and its constant reconfiguration throughout the British world is brought together with the concerns of authors writing in an actor network tradition. Pocock’s British world, a world that moves between and connects different archipelagos, is an assemblage, one composed of political arrangements that travel but also have to be stabilised. This process is only ever provisional but is played out, Pocock claims, in a unique way in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Arguing against the claimed certainties of postcolonial historiography he suggests that the Aotearoa/New Zealand case is composed of a range of different futures involving the securing of and/or loss of sovereignty. These are currently being renarrated by its historians. This process of renarration necessarily involves a public role for the historian and has led Pocock, as commentator from a distance, into making critical interventions in what he refers to as the debate over sovereignty in Aotearoa/New Zealand.