If the Governor's decision to wage war in Taranaki over Waitara in 1860 was heavy-handed and aggressive, the invasion of the Waikato launched by Sir George Grey in July 1863 amounted to a blatant lunge for power. Indeed – as a narrow victory of numbers – it presaged the takeover by settler New Zealand that deluged Maori. From the 1860s the scales of power tipped to the settler society. Within a generation, Maori shrank from being the majority of the population to a small minority. The amount of land in Maori ownership, already much diminished, halved between 1860 and 1891. But pockets of Maori resistance nurtured a proud legacy that would recalibrate relations a century and more later.

New Zealand wars

Thanks to James Belich's revisionist scholarship, the New Zealand wars have come to be seen as instances of British ‘small wars’ of imperial conquest that invaded autonomous Maori sovereignty, played a significant part in defining Pakeha and Maori as ‘us’ and ‘them’, and created the national debt. Maori resistance was effective rather than futile until numbers overwhelmed them. ‘New Zealand wars’ can be used to include a first phase of significant battles in the Bay of Islands through 1845 into 1846 – the northern war – as well as clashes on both sides of Cook Strait from 1843 to 1847, notably at Wairau in Marlborough. But the wars proper raged from 1860 to 1872 across the central North Island, after a decade of peace. There is vigorous debate about the nature and legacy of these conflicts, fought over land and sovereignty and begun by the government. Power, propinquity and possession decreed that war would flare in the North Island, where tribes still owned most of the land in the 1860s. Most Maori lived in the North Island, which remained under tribal control outside the isolated coastal towns. By contrast, the South Island was, legally, already in settler hands. That left Ngai Tahu the long task of fighting their claim on paper and later in parliament.