New Zealand Wars map

The first major conflict occurred at Wairau in 1843, when 22 settlers and between two and six Maori were killed. There were subsequent clashes near Wellington and in the Bay of Islands (the Northern War) from 1845 to 1846.

Fighting resumed on a larger scale in the early 1860s. Following an inconclusive campaign in Taranaki from 1860 to 1861, British imperial troops invaded the Waikato between 1863 and 1864 in an effort to assert colonial authority over the King movement and to open up land for European settlement.

After the confiscation of vast tracts of land from so-called rebel Maori, the millenarian Pai Marire movement gathered momentum. Pakeha associated Pai Marire (or Hauhau, as they called it) with violent resistance to the Crown, and between 1865 and 1867 there was a series of clashes in eastern Bay of Plenty and around the East Coast.

Late in that decade new leaders emerged – Titokowaru, in southern Taranaki, and Te Kooti, in the east of the North Island. A series of bitter and protracted guerrilla campaigns continued into the early 1870s.