The ‘slow sell nation’ – the cultural heritage factor. “Britain’s farm” not a “city upon a hill”

So how much is where we’re from to blame for our ‘slow sell nation’?

It’s fun, if not enlightening, to check out the different immigration paths of NZ and the US.

[This post is the 2nd in a series on the 'slow sell nation' - see part 1 Good makers, poor marketers]

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks of the power of cultural legacies. “It is only by asking where [successful people] are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

And that can mean going back a long way.

Gladwell looks at the success of Jewish men in the tough, anti-Semitic environment of the New York law fraternity mid last century.

These often rough hard men, the sons of poor Eastern European immigrants, ended up running the city’s leading law firms and amassing billion dollar fortunes.

Unlike the Irish and Italians immigrants, who were in the main impoverished peasants and tenant farmers in the Old World, the Jews were people of the cities.

According to Gladwell 70% of Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island immigration centre in the 30 years before WWI had some kind of occupational skill or owned stores.

They arrived in the US at a time of opportunity, but they had the skills, including an understanding of commerce, an ability to sell and an inclination to work like crazy to take advantage of these opportunities.

Some made it rich in their own lifetime, but many families had to wait a generation for these virtues to pay off.

They’re traits that were also on the Pilgrim’s first ship, The Mayflower. The ship’s short manifest included tailors, a merchant, a doctor, printer and people of learning.

One of the early Pilgrims wanted to create a colony “as a city upon a hill”.

New England went on to become a centre of learning, commerce and trade.

So we come to New Zealand – who are our immigrants and what’s their cultural legacy?

Famously our dream was not “a city upon a hill” but to become “Britain’s farm”.

Wave after wave of immigration to this country was to fulfil this ideal. We had nothing comparable – at least till mid last century – to the commercial heritage of a Mayflower or Jewish Diaspora.

In the 1840s NZ Company agents enticed mechanics, gardeners and agricultural labourers from southern England and Scotland by offering free passage.

According to historian Jock Phillips:
“A third of the adult men were farm labourers, and another two-fifths were ‘mechanics’ – traditional rural craft workers such as builders or blacksmiths. These skilled rural folk looked to New Zealand to fulfil dreams of independence through land ownership. There were few industrial workers or even clerks.”

And after provincial governments took over attracting immigrants in the mid 1850s, agents were still instructed to go after agricultural labourers and builders.

My recollection of NZ history is that Maori quickly and easily shifted into European mercantilist mode and may have developed into a real commercial force if it wasn’t for having the stuffing knocked out of them in the land wars.

In the 1900s farm labourers were still in demand along with businesses wanting skilled workers, and middle-class families wanting domestic servants, says Phillips.

And so it was till WWII when “about 1,100 escapees from Hitler, mostly Jews, were accepted (many fewer on a per capita basis than the numbers taken in by the United States and Britain). Of those who came, many made distinguished contributions to cultural and business life”.

The change of focus continued with the 1947 immigrant assistance scheme which saw 100,000 come to NZ over the next 30 years, mostly city people with industrial skills.

BTW – my father, an agricultural worker, snuck in under this scheme.

The 1970s saw the start of an influx of unskilled Pacific Island immigrants. The other more recent significant shift away from serving “Britain’s farm” was the Asian immigrants of the 1990s who were, as Phillips says, educated and comparatively wealthy.

So (for the moment ignoring the recent past) that adds up to a powerful “cultural legacy” that’s not really in tune with the modern international market place that rewards commercial nous, skill in spotting business opportunities and salesmanship.

I think we are still working our way through this legacy (one of growers, not sellers), but the legacy of the more recent past offers hope.