ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by Edward Meurant, government interpreter, in furthering the goals of protective governance in New Zealand in the 1840s. The chapter considers one of the strategies of protective governance in this period-legal assimilation-and the practices which underpinned it. It looks beyond the formal officers of the protectorate to a lesser-known participant, interpreter Edward Meurant, whose activities were crucial in promoting protective governance. Meurant straddled two legal worlds-that of the settlers and te Ao M?ori. He was in a very real sense a legal go-between. He facilitated not just a translation between the two worlds, but assimilation of one to the other.
