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Contact with Europeans

The first European explorers of New Zealand were Abel Tasman, who arrived in 1642, Captain James Cook, in 1769, and Marion du Fresne in 1772. Initial contact between Māori and Europeans proved problematic and sometimes fatal, with Tasman having four of his men killed and probably killing at least one Māori, without ever landing. Cook's men shot at least eight Māori within three days of his first landing, although he later had good relations with Māori. Three years later, after a promising start, du Fresne and 26 men of his crew were killed. From the 1780s, Māori also increasingly encountered European and American sealers, whalers and Christian missionaries. Relations were mostly peaceful, although marred by several further violent incidents, the worst of which was the Boyd massacre in 1807 and subsequent revenge attacks.

European settlement in New Zealand began in the early 19th century, leading to an extensive sharing of culture and ideas. Many Māori valued Europeans, whom they called " Pākehā ", as a means to acquire Western knowledge and technology. Māori quickly adopted writing as a means of sharing ideas, and many of their oral stories and poems were converted to the written form. The introduction of the potato revolutionised agriculture, and the acquisition of muskets by Māori iwi led to a period of particularly bloody intertribal warfare known as the Musket Wars, in which many groups were decimated and others driven from their traditional territory. The pacifist Moriori in the Chatham Islands similarly suffered massacre and subjugation in an invasion by some Taranaki iwi. At the same time, the Māori suffered high mortality rates from Eurasian infectious diseases, such as influenza, smallpox and measles, which killed an estimated 10 to 50 per cent of Māori.

By 1839, estimates placed the number of Europeans living in New Zealand as high as 2,000, and the British Crown acceded to repeated requests from missionaries and some Māori chiefs (rangatira) to intervene. The British government sent Royal Navy Captain William Hobson to negotiate a treaty between the British Crown and the Māori, which became known as the Treaty of Waitangi. Starting from February 1840, this treaty was signed by the Crown and 500 Māori chiefs from across New Zealand. The Treaty gave Māori the rights of British subjects and guaranteed Māori property rights and tribal autonomy, in return for accepting British sovereignty and the annexation of New Zealand as a colony in the British Empire. However, disputes continue over aspects of the Treaty of Waitangi, including wording differences in the two versions (in English and Māori), as well as misunderstandings of different cultural concepts; notably, the Māori version did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown. In an 1877 court case the Treaty was declared a "simple nullity" on the grounds that the signatories had been "primitive barbarians".

Nevertheless, relations between Māori and Pākehā during the early colonial period were largely peaceful. Many Māori groups set up substantial businesses, supplying food and other products for domestic and overseas markets. When violence did break out, as in the Wairau Affray, Flagstaff War, Hutt Valley Campaign and Wanganui Campaign, it was generally limited and concluded with a peace treaty. However, by the 1860s rising settler numbers and tensions over disputed land purchases led to the later New Zealand wars, fought by the colonial government against numerous Māori iwi using local and British Imperial troops, and some allied iwi. These conflicts resulted in the colonial government confiscating tracts of Māori land as punishment for what were called "rebellions". Pākehā settlers would occupy the confiscated land. Several minor conflicts arose after the wars, including the incident at Parihaka in 1881 and the Dog Tax War from 1897 to 1898. The Native Land Court was established to transfer Māori land from communal ownership into individual title as a means to assimilation and to facilitate greater sales to European settlers.