Julius Vogel

English-born prime minister of New Zealand (1873-1875, 1876)

• Born: February 24, 1835
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 12, 1899
• Place of death: East Molesey, Surrey, England

Remembered for his innovative and daring fiscal policies, Vogel was the first New Zealand prime minister to set a serious agenda for the island nation. His policy of massive borrowing to build railroads was much debated in his own day but laid the modern foundations of New Zealand.

Early Life

Julius Vogel (VOH-gel) was born the son of Leonard Vogel, a Protestant immigrant to England from Holland, and Phoebe Isaac Vogel, a member of a moderately prosperous Jewish family in London, where he was born. Religious differences between his parents may have contributed to the breakup of their marriage around the time he was six. Raised in the Jewish religion, Julius was educated in both London and Kent and prepared for a career in trade. As an adolescent he studied in the Government School of Mines.

In 1852, when Vogel was seventeen, he decided to emigrate to Australia, whose economy was booming after the discovery of gold. After arriving there, he tried to sell various goods to miners in Victoria. He met with little success over several years and then turned to journalism during the mid-1850’s. He wrote for several western Victoria newspapers, advocating free trade policies with verve and flair. However, by 1861 the combination of a region economic downturn and his failure to win a seat in the Victoria legislative assembly led him to seek new opportunities across the Tasman Sea, in New Zealand.

Not long after settling in Dunedin, New Zealand, Vogel cofounded the Otago Daily Times , the first daily newspaper in all of New Zealand. He soon began accruing political influence in the South Island. He also became active in the region’s community and cultural affairs. In 1863, he was elected to the Otago provincial council, on which he served until 1869.

Life’s Work

In 1867, Vogel married Mary Clayton. He had already favored woman suffrage, but the influence of his wife strengthened his support of that goal. He also became known as a strong advocate of free trade and of increasing South Island’s influence in New Zealand, which had traditionally been dominated by the more heavily populated North Island. Vogel and his wife moved to Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, where Vogel took up another newspaper editorship and got involved in national politics. He soon became the finance minister for the entire New Zealand colony, under premier William Fox.

Although Vogel held a subordinate portfolio, he quickly became the dominant figure in the colonial government. After a lifetime of theorizing, he was finally able to put his ideas into practice. He advocated expanding New Zealand’s economy by any almost means possible. To do that, he needed more human resources and thus became an emphatic supporter of increased immigration to New Zealand. The Maori wars that had ravaged the North Island from 1840 to 1870 left disrupted Maori society, and Vogel purchased some of the lands that been allotted to the Maori by treaty and arrogated it for the use of new European immigrants. He also put some of the land to use for railroad construction. Having seen what the building of transcontinental railroads had done for the United States and Canadian economies, he applied a similar vision to the far smaller territory of New Zealand, working to improve the country’s transportation infrastructure until it was one of the most extensive and efficient in the world.

New Zealand’s economy remained primarily agricultural and was dependent on exports of wool, lamb, and grain to England. As Vogel’s economic expansion schemes were not self-financing, he embarked on an extensive program of borrowing money, a plan that some deemed improvident but which quickly became popular as the islands’ economy began to grow. To attract investment funds and to promote New Zealand’s image abroad, Vogel traveled extensively in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States, where he not only secured needed financing but also saw how those more advanced economies operated.

Although Vogel had been an advocate of provincial autonomy when he lived in Dunedin, he quickly became frustrated by the way provincial safeguards prevented the implementation of his colony-wide fiscal policies. By 1875, he had maneuvered the abolition of the provinces. Another challenge that he faced was creating an efficient civil service with the type of trained bureaucracy that existed in the civil services of other English-speaking countries. He was hampered by the fact that implementation of his economic policies depended almost solely on his personal leadership. After Fox’s government fell in 1872, he remained as treasurer and de facto premier.

In 1873, Vogel became prime minister of New Zealand himself. He held the post into 1875, when he was knighted by the British crown, and returned for another brief tenure as prime minister the following year. In that capacity, he became the first practicing Jew to lead a country in the English-speaking world. (Great Britain’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was of Jewish descent, but his family had converted to Christianity.) As a Jew, Vogel encountered some anti-Semitism, but remarkably little, even though New Zealand differed from Australia, Canada, and the United States in not having substantial Jewish communities.

Vogel had a clear future vision of New Zealand as a power in the South Pacific Ocean and envisaged its expanding its influence into Polynesia. However, that dream was thwarted by growing American influence in the Pacific and lack of British support. After leaving the government in 1876, Vogel spent several years as New Zealand’s agent-representative in London. When he returned to New Zealand and reentered local politics in 1885, he found the country in an economic recession for which he was blamed. In 1889, he resigned his seat in parliament.

In later years, Vogel turned to literature, writing a novel of the future, Anno Domini 2000: Or, Woman’s Destiny (1889), which correctly predicted that in the year 2000 women would hold all major political offices in New Zealand but incorrectly predicted that Melbourne, Australia, would become the capital of a British Imperial Federation. In recognition of the novel’s significance, the major award for science fiction writers in New Zealand was later named after Vogel, who died near London on March 12, 1899.

Significance

Sir Julius Vogel appeared suddenly in New Zealand politics, and then vanished after a relative short period of intensive activity. Because New Zealand was not his lifelong home and because the Liberal-Radical government that took office in 1890, after he left politics, set the course for New Zealand’s political future, his contributions are often overlooked in standard accounts of new Zealand history. However, his borrowing policies established the backbone of the modern New Zealand economy, and in their emphasis on deficit spending anticipated the Keynesian economics of the mid-twentieth century.

Vogel’s abolition of the provinces made New Zealand the only English-seeking settler colony with neither states nor provinces—a fact that spared New Zealand the conflicts of federalism that played major roles in American, Canadian, and Australian history. Although abolishing the provinces seemed to override local rights, that action actually helped South Island, which then became part of a unitary state in which its interests were not neglected because of sectional rivalries.

Bibliography

Bassett, Michael. The State in New Zealand, 1840-1984. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998. Emphasizes the speculative elements of Vogel’s economic policy but does not see him as a forerunner of the post-1984 New Zealand free market economic policy, which the author strongly endorses.

Belich, James. Making Peoples: A History of New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. The leading New Zealand historian of his generation, Belich sees Vogel’s tenure as prime minister as both a time of economic growth for New Zealand and—perhaps paradoxically—a period of increased dependence on Britain.

Brigg, Peter. “Sir Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000: Or, Woman’s Destiny: On Mispredicting the Future.” Extrapolation: Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 42 (2001): 357-361. This study of Vogel’s science-fiction novel examines his attitudes toward women, colonial ties with Britain, and the organization of society. The brief article is useful, not merely for students of Vogel’s literary output but also for those interested in his public career.

Dalziel, Raewyn. Julius Vogel: Business Politician. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986. The standard biography of Vogel focuses as much on his pre-prime ministerial career as his time in the land’s highest office. Dalziel analyzes Vogel against the background of the early economic history of New Zealand. She also devotes considerable space to Vogel’s overseas marketing of New Zealand, contending that his vision of social progress being tied to prosperity helped attract immigrantss from other parts of the English-speaking world.

Sinclair, Keith. A History of New Zealand. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Popular survey by New Zealand’s most famous historian. Sinclair’s sympathies are more with radical figures such as Vogel’s successors Richard John Seddon and William Pember Reeves, and the improvident nature of Vogel’s borrowing is given its due; however, Sinclair pays tribute to Vogel’s dynamism, innovation, and genuinely felt aspirations for New Zealand.