Makers of Fortune : A Colonial Business Community and Its Fall

So many businesses rose and fell in nineteenth-century Auckland that the city was called a 'graveyard of enterprise'. By far the most serious and general collapse came during the decade of depression and banking crises which overtook the whole colony after 1885. Auckland's commercial elite, which had dominated the city's business for a generation and had launched some of New Zealand's most important financial institutions, was discredited. Some of its members were impoverished. In the 1890s this failure was explained in moralistic terms. It was seen as the just penalty for speculati