The history of New Zealand

New Zealand, Aotearoa in Māori, was the last large habitable land on earth to be settled by people. Polynesian voyagers arrived around 1300 and, over five centuries, developed the Māori culture of iwi and hapū, carved meeting houses and fortified pā. British annexation followed the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, whose English and Māori texts said different things, and within a few decades war, confiscation, disease and land purchase had passed most of the country into settler hands. The colony became a pioneering social democracy, sent large armies to both world wars, and from the 1970s began to reckon with its colonial past through Māori protest, the Waitangi Tribunal and a long series of Treaty settlements.

The ancestors of the Māori belonged to the great Austronesian dispersal that began in Taiwan, passed through island Southeast Asia and reached western Polynesia, around Samoa and Tonga, roughly 3,000 years ago. After a long pause, voyagers in double-hulled canoes pushed east to the Society Islands and the Marquesas, and from there, in one of the great feats of Polynesian navigation, to Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui and finally New Zealand.

Māori tradition tells of the explorer Kupe, who discovered the land while chasing a great octopus, and of the named waka (canoes), such as Tainui, Te Arawa and Mātaatua, from which iwi trace their descent. Older European writers built these traditions into a neat scheme of an early discovery and a single "great fleet", which historians now reject. Archaeology points to settlement around 1250 to 1300: no human traces are securely dated before the ash of the Tarawera eruption of about 1314, and genetic studies suggest a founding population that arrived within a short period in planned voyages.

The settlers found a cool, temperate land without native land mammals except bats, but full of birds. They hunted the giant flightless moa, which were extinct by about 1500, and burned and cleared perhaps 40 percent of the forest, mostly in the North Island. Kūmara (sweet potato), taro and gourds grew in the north, stored through the winter in pits, while southern communities lived on fernroot, birds, fish and seals. Around the fifteenth century some voyagers settled the Chatham Islands, where their descendants became the Moriori, a distinct people with a tradition of renouncing killing.

As the big game disappeared, the early culture changed into what archaeologists call Classic Māori. The basic units were the whānau, or extended family, and the hapū, a group of related families that usually held land and acted together in daily life and war. Hapū belonged to iwi, tribes descended from a common ancestor. Chiefs (rangatira) came from senior lines but had to prove themselves, and women of rank could hold real authority. Mana, prestige and spiritual authority, and tapu, sacred restriction, shaped social life.

Competition for good land, fisheries and resources produced frequent warfare, and the hilltop pā, with ditches, banks and palisades, became a feature of the landscape. Utu, reciprocity in both gifts and injuries, governed relations between groups, alongside marriage alliances and trade in pounamu (greenstone) from the South Island. History was carried orally in whakapapa (genealogies), chants and narratives. Carving, weaving, tā moko (tattooing), oratory and the haka flourished.

The first Europeans to arrive were the crews of Abel Tasman's two ships, sent from Batavia by the Dutch East India Company of the Dutch Republic. In December 1642, at Golden Bay at the top of the South Island, a canoe of Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri rammed one of his boats and four sailors were killed. Tasman sailed on without landing, and Dutch mapmakers later named the land after the province of Zeeland.

No European returned for 127 years. In October 1769 James Cook arrived in the Endeavour, with Tupaia, a navigator and priest from Raiatea near Tahiti, who could speak with Māori in a related language. The first encounters, at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (Poverty Bay), went badly, and several Māori were shot dead. Cook then spent six months mapping both main islands with remarkable accuracy, returning on two later voyages.

From the 1790s sealers, whalers and traders from Britain, France and the United States, many sailing from Sydney, visited regularly. Māori traded food, flax and timber for iron tools and, above all, muskets. The Musket Wars, from about 1807 to the early 1840s, saw hundreds of battles, the migration of whole tribes and the deaths of tens of thousands of people. In 1835 Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama invaded the Chatham Islands, killing and enslaving the Moriori, whose population collapsed. Introduced diseases also took a heavy toll.

Christianity arrived with Samuel Marsden's Anglican mission in the Bay of Islands in 1814. By the 1840s literacy in Māori and Christianity had spread widely, often carried by Māori teachers ahead of the missionaries.

Lawlessness among settlers and fear of French ambitions led Britain to send James Busby as British Resident in 1832, though without real power. In 1835 he encouraged northern chiefs to sign He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence, which declared that all sovereign power and authority in the land rested with the chiefs of a Confederation of United Tribes. Britain acknowledged it.

By 1839 the New Zealand Company, inspired by Edward Gibbon Wakefield's schemes of systematic colonisation, was sending ships of settlers, and London decided to act. Captain William Hobson arrived with instructions to acquire sovereignty with Māori consent. A treaty drafted in English was translated into Māori by the missionary Henry Williams and his son. On 6 February 1840 it was signed at Waitangi by Hobson and about forty chiefs, and copies then travelled the country. Around 540 rangatira, at least 13 of them women, signed the Māori text, and only 39 signed the English one. Some major chiefs, including Pōtatau Te Wherowhero of Waikato, refused. In May 1840 Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the whole country, and in 1841 New Zealand became a separate Crown colony of the British Empire, owing allegiance to Queen Victoria.

The two texts differ in crucial ways. In the English version, the chiefs ceded "all the rights and powers of sovereignty" to the Crown and were guaranteed possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. In the Māori version, Te Tiriti, they granted kāwanatanga, governorship, a word coined by missionaries, while being guaranteed tino rangatiratanga, full chiefly authority, over their lands, villages and taonga, all their treasured things. Many chiefs probably believed they were admitting a governor to control settlers while keeping their own authority, and the Māori text did not clearly convey the Crown's sole right to buy land. The Crown has always read the treaty as a cession of sovereignty. That gap, between a sharing of power and a transfer of it, has been at the centre of New Zealand politics ever since.

Organised settlement began at Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, Canterbury and Otago, and dubious company purchases led to bloodshed at Wairau in 1843. In the north, Hōne Heke repeatedly cut down the British flagstaff at Kororāreka, and in the Northern War of 1845 to 1846 he and Kawiti fought British troops from pā whose trenches and bunkers resisted artillery.

In the 1850s Māori farmers fed the young town of Auckland and even exported grain to Australia, but settler numbers overtook Māori numbers around 1858 and the pressure to sell land grew. A group of central North Island iwi responded with the Kīngitanga, the Māori King movement, which installed Pōtatau Te Wherowhero as king in 1858 to unite tribes and halt land sales. Governor Thomas Gore Browne's purchase of a disputed block at Waitara from a minority of its owners led to war in Taranaki in 1860.

In July 1863 Governor George Grey, treating the King movement as a rebellion, sent an army under General Duncan Cameron across the Mangatāwhiri stream into the Waikato. At the peak some 14,000 imperial and colonial troops, with pro-government Māori (kūpapa), faced perhaps 4,000 Māori fighters. After battles at Rangiriri and Ōrākau, and an attack on the undefended village of Rangiaowhia in which civilians died, the Kīngitanga withdrew into the hill country later called the King Country. The New Zealand Settlements Act of 1863 allowed the government to confiscate the land of "rebels", and about 12,000 square kilometres were taken in Waikato, Taranaki, the Bay of Plenty and elsewhere, much of it from people who had never fought. These confiscations, known as raupatu, fuelled further wars in Taranaki and on the East Coast, the campaigns of Tītokowaru in 1868 and 1869, and the pursuit of the prophet Te Kooti until 1872, during which hundreds of East Coast men were held without trial on the Chatham Islands.

After the fighting, the Native Land Court, set up in 1865, converted collective title into individual shares that could be bought one by one, and land passed rapidly into Pākehā (European) ownership. At Parihaka in Taranaki the prophets Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi led a peaceful resistance, ploughing land taken by settlers. In November 1881 about 1,600 armed constabulary and volunteers invaded the village, arrested the leaders and dispersed its people. The Māori population, perhaps 86,000 when Cook arrived, fell to about 42,000 by 1896. Four Māori seats were created in Parliament in 1867, giving Māori men the vote, but on terms that left them heavily under-represented.

Settlers won self-government under the Constitution Act of 1852. Gold rushes in Otago from 1861 and on the West Coast more than doubled the population, Julius Vogel borrowed heavily in the 1870s to build railways and bring in immigrants, and Chinese miners faced hostility and a poll tax from 1881. The first shipment of frozen meat to Britain in 1882 made the country's future as Britain's farm, exporting meat, butter, cheese and wool.

The Liberal government elected in 1890, led by John Ballance and then Richard Seddon, broke up large estates and bought Māori land for small farmers, set up compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes and introduced old-age pensions in 1898. Women's campaigners, led by Kate Sheppard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, presented petitions with nearly 32,000 signatures in 1893, and on 19 September that year the Electoral Act gave the vote to all adult women, Māori and Pākehā alike, making New Zealand the first self-governing country to do so. Women voted in the election that November, though they could not stand for Parliament until 1919. New Zealand declined to join the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and became a dominion in 1907.

At the outbreak of World War I New Zealand seized German Samoa, and more than 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas from a population of about a million. With the Australians they formed the Anzac corps that landed at Gallipoli in Turkey on 25 April 1915; more than 2,700 New Zealanders died there, and about 18,000 in the whole war. New Zealand rule in Samoa was disastrous: influenza allowed ashore from a New Zealand ship in 1918 killed about a fifth of Samoans, and in 1929 police fired on a procession of the Mau independence movement, killing its leader Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III.

The Great Depression hit an export economy hard, and in 1935 voters elected the first Labour government under Michael Joseph Savage. Allied with the Māori Rātana movement, it built state housing and, with the Social Security Act of 1938, a welfare state promising care "from the cradle to the grave".

In World War II New Zealand declared war alongside Britain in September 1939 and sent about 120,000 servicemen and women overseas. The 2nd New Zealand Division fought in Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy, including Monte Cassino, while others served in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan. The volunteer 28th (Māori) Battalion became one of its most decorated units.

New Zealand adopted the Statute of Westminster in 1947, formally confirming its independence. It joined the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the United States in 1951, fought in the Korean War and, amid fierce protest, sent troops to the Vietnam War. Prosperity rested on selling food to Britain until Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973.

Meanwhile Māori moved from the countryside to the cities: about 80 percent were urban by the 1980s, against about 20 percent before the war. In 1975 Whina Cooper led a land march from the far north to Parliament, in 1977 and 1978 Ngāti Whātua occupied Bastion Point in Auckland for 506 days, and Māori-language preschools, kōhanga reo, spread from 1982. Pacific Islanders faced the Dawn Raids of the mid-1970s, police raids on alleged overstayers, for which the government apologised in 2021.

The fourth Labour government of David Lange, elected in 1984, transformed the country: finance minister Roger Douglas floated the dollar, removed farm subsidies and sold state assets in reforms nicknamed Rogernomics. The government banned nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships, breaking the ANZUS alliance with the United States in practice, a stance hardened when French agents bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985. Te reo Māori became an official language in 1987, and in 1993 voters chose proportional representation (MMP), first used in 1996.

The Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1975 created the Waitangi Tribunal to hear claims that the Crown had breached the principles of the Treaty, and in 1985 its reach was extended back to 1840. The Tribunal gives special weight to the Māori text, and its reports have documented confiscation and unfair purchases district by district. A fisheries deal in 1992 gave Māori a large share of the commercial fishing industry, and in 1995 Waikato-Tainui received land and cash worth $170 million, with a formal Crown apology for the invasion of the Waikato and the confiscations, given royal assent in person by Elizabeth II. Ngāi Tahu, whose claims covered most of the South Island, settled in 1997 and 1998.

Dozens of settlements followed, each combining an agreed history, a Crown apology, financial redress and cultural redress; their value is a small fraction of what was lost, and critics argue variously that the process gives too little or too much. Some settlements broke new legal ground: Te Urewera, the homeland of Tūhoe, was made a legal entity in 2014, and the Whanganui River was recognised as a legal person in 2017.

Helen Clark's Labour government (1999 to 2008) was followed by John Key's National government, in office when the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011 killed 185 people. On 15 March 2019 a far-right gunman murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch; Jacinda Ardern's government banned most semi-automatic weapons within weeks. Strict border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 kept deaths low at first, and Labour won an outright majority in 2020, the first under MMP; Ardern resigned in January 2023.

A National-led coalition under Christopher Luxon, with ACT and New Zealand First, took office after the October 2023 election. ACT's Treaty Principles Bill, which sought to redefine the principles of the Treaty, prompted the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, in which tens of thousands of people marched on Parliament on 19 November 2024, and the bill was voted down at its second reading in April 2025. The Kīngitanga crowned its eighth monarch, Ngā wai hono i te pō, in September 2024. The next general election is scheduled for 7 November 2026.