Origins of the Maori Wars

Keith Sinclair's The Origins of the Maori Wars is a fascinating account of the Waitara purchase and the cause of war in Taranaki in 1860. The seeds of conflict were sown in the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, when colonists arrived to take up land for which they had paid before it had been procured. The King party, one of the earliest national movements among Māori, reacted against this imperial expansion. The story of the developing crisis features good intentions, self-int