The first, his favoured one, was something akin to our post-1980s conception of the Treaty of Waitangi but expressed as ''a holy covenant to be revered in biblical terms'', in other words, with the missionaries offering useful guidance to the governors.
The second was the emergence of the Westminster-style democracy that effectively sidelined the governors into ceremonial positions. Colonies had not been democracies, but within a decade of signing the treaty demands for full internal self-government rapidly overtook more timid ideas. We held our first elections in 1853 and were fully self-governing three years later in all but international relations.
Newman sees this as a bad thing, arguing that ''the Crown had abdicated its responsibilities from 1852, when it granted New Zealand the right to rule itself through provincial and, ultimately, a settler government''.
But was this ever realistic once large-scale migration got under way?
For a start, most settlers (a majority of the population by the mid-1850s) would have disagreed. Many felt proud of the colony's generous franchise, far wider than contemporary Britain's one.
And what was ''the Crown''? As Maori petitions to London showed, many saw the Crown as the monarch or her representative rather than the monarch advised by the ministers in Parliament.
Newman is often a little hazy on constitutional matters, stating for example that ''the ineffectual Sir Hercules Robinson was replaced by Sir Arthur Gordon as governor-general [sic] amid rising concerns about race relations in New Zealand''.
Ineffectual? Robinson was anything but that! In his short term here in 1879-80, he masterfully outmanoeuvred the wily Sir George Grey, now briefly a dysfunctional premier trying to spark a constitutional crisis, and he so impressed the Colonial Office in London that it promoted him to the governorship of Cape Colony.
While he admires Gordon's sympathies for Maori around the time of the Parihaka invasion, Newman overlooks the fact that constitutionally Gordon failed spectacularly - he even said as much, stating that all his gifts were ''those of a despotic and not of a constitutional ruler''.
None of that undermines the importance of telling the often appalling events of colonial New Zealand that make up so much of the content of Beyond Betrayal - the wars, the vague, unfair land purchases and above all, the massive confiscations of Maori land.
Some of his later chapters rightly highlight the innovative Maori response to these trials through passive resistance, through excelling at education (the Young Maori Party) and by the creation of new religions.
We had much to teach the world, despite all our imperfections, as Newman shows towards the end when he relates the story of more recent changes.
He remains optimistic and has a message for non-Maori New Zealanders that's worth noting. Acknowledging that it is not easy to build a nation, he concludes that ''the challenge is to become more familiar with our own [culture] - and to shake off the persistent and uncomfortable myth that Pakeha New Zealanders do not have a culture - before the next wave of cultural colonisation makes our stories seem even less important''.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
