After the New Zealand Wars ended in 1872, the King Country remained closed to Pākehā for more than a decade, until Ngāti Maniapoto leaders agreed to the construction of the North Island Main Trunk railway in the mid-1880s.
South Taranaki resisted settler incursions until 1881, when the assertive Parihaka community was dispersed by the colonial army. Resistance flared briefly in Hokianga in 1898, and parts of Urewera remained off-limits to Pākehā until 1916.
Weight of numbers and military and economic power had prevailed, though, and the map of New Zealand had been redrawn. By 1900 this was a settler society, with Māori pushed out to its fringes.
Casualties
Several thousand people died in the New Zealand Wars, most of them Māori. The numbers below group data for individual battles provided by the historian James Cowan, who sometimes overstated the casualties of Māori who opposed the settlers. The death toll was most balanced in the 1840s and in Titokowaru's War. Pai Mārire followers suffered the highest proportionate losses.
| Anti-government Māori | British/Colonists/Kūpapa | |
| Northern War (1845–6) | 94 | 82 |
| Wellington/Whanganui (1846–7) | 15 | 14 |
| Taranaki (1860–61, 1863) | 196 | 64 |
| Waikato/Bay of Plenty (1863–4) | 619 | 162 |
| Pai Mārire, etc. (1864–8) | 772 | 128 |
| Tītokowaru's War (1868–9) | 59 | 83 |
| Te Kooti's War (1868–72) | 399 | 212 |
2154 | 745 |
