Musket wars

The Musket Wars
Date 1807–1842 Location New Zealand Result Territory gained and lost between various tribes
Belligerents
Māori
Casualties and losses
Up to 40,000 Māori 1,636 Moriori 30,000 enslaved or forced to migrate

The Musket Wars were a series of as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought throughout New Zealand as well as the Chatham Islands among Māori between 1807 and 1845, after Māori first obtained muskets and then engaged in an intertribal arms race in order to gain territory or seek revenge for past defeats. The battles resulted in the loss of between 20,000 and 40,000 lives and the enslavement of tens of thousands of Māori and significantly altered the rohe, or tribal territorial boundaries, before the imposition of colonial government in the 1840s. The wars are seen as an example of the "fatal impact" of indigenous contact with Europeans.

The increased use of muskets in intertribal warfare led to changes in the design of pā fortifications, which later benefited Māori when engaged in battles with colonial forces during the New Zealand Wars.

Responsibility for the beginning of the musket wars is usually attributed to Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika, who in 1818 used newly acquired muskets to launch devastating raids from his Northland base into the Bay of Plenty, where local Māori were still relying on traditional weapons of wood and stone. In the following years he launched equally successful raids on iwi in Auckland, Thames, Waikato and Lake Rotorua, taking large numbers of his enemies as slaves, who were put to work cultivating and dressing flax to trade with Europeans for more muskets. His success prompted other iwi to procure firearms in order to mount effective methods of defence and deterrence and the spiral of violence peaked in 1832 and 1833, by which time it had spread to all parts of the country except the inland area of the North Island later known as the King Country and remote bays and valleys of Fiordland in the South Island. In 1835 the fighting went offshore as Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama launched devastating raids on the pacifist Moriori in the Chatham Islands.

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