Geoff Parker
Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour-blind society.
In the video What Does It Mean to Be Pākehā in 2025?, Ella Henry and Andrew Judd present the familiar modern narrative: that colonisation was an unprovoked assault on a flourishing Māori world, that Pākehā are ‘only here because of the Treaty’ and that Māori could have negotiated their own international relationships – even with the French. But this version of history collapses the moment you compare it to the actual record of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
The truth is sharper, less romantic and far more inconvenient: British colonisation ended the deadliest period in Māori history, protected Māori from other imperial powers and introduced the first stable national authority New Zealand had ever known.
1. Isolation Was Impossible – New Zealand Was Already in a Global Contest
By the early 19th century the Pacific was being carved up by major powers:
- France was expanding aggressively;
- Spain still controlled a huge Pacific empire with a brutal colonial model; and
- American whalers and naval forces were everywhere.
With the arrivals of Tasman, Cook and Marion du Fresne, New Zealand’s fate was sealed: the outside world had found it. From that point on, isolation was impossible. The only remaining question was which foreign power would claim sovereignty – and few alternatives would have been kinder to Māori than Britain, given the strong humanitarian and church-driven reform movements shaping British policy at the time.
2. Ngāpuhi Were Not ‘Negotiating a Treaty’ With France
Henry’s claim that her people were exploring a treaty with France does not align with the historical record. Ngāpuhi’s dominant memory of France came from the Marion du Fresne incident of 1772, when, after killing the French captain and members of his crew for violating tapu, Māori then attacked the French hospital. The French (few in numbers by comparison to the attackers) repelled the assault with firearms, killing around 250 warriors – an overwhelming show of lethal force.
This event created a deep, lasting, fear of the French. Ngāpuhi as a whole did not seek them out as an alternative relationship. If anything, it reinforced the preference for British presence over French revenge.
3. Māori Leaders Themselves Requested British Protection in 1831
The clearest evidence comes from the 1831 petition signed by 13 northern chiefs, asking King William IV for British protection against two major threats:
- French intentions in the region; and
- Marauding Māori tribes whose musket warfare was devastating entire populations.
Far from rejecting foreign power, these wise chiefs openly sought British intervention to restore stability.
4. Colonisation Did Not Create Conflict – It Ended a Catastrophic Cycle
The Musket Wars (1807–1837) were the deadliest period in Māori history:
- Tens of thousands killed;
- Tribes displaced or annihilated;
- Massive enslavement and revenge cycles.
There was no central authority capable of stopping the violence. British governance introduced the first enforceable peace New Zealand had ever seen – courts, policing, written law, and national order.
5. ‘You Are Only Here Because of the Treaty’ Is Historically False
The idea that Māori held the power to permit or deny European settlement ignores one basic geopolitical fact: no tribal society – fragmented, often at war, and without modern weaponry – could have resisted any organised European empire. This was clearly illustrated in the New Zealand wars (1843–1869), when the Crown quelled the rebellions of a few activist tribes.
Māori had no firearms production, no naval capability, no artillery, no logistics systems and no unified national command. Any major empire – French, Spanish, American, Russian, or British – would have been militarily unstoppable.
6. Māori Did Not Invent Trench Warfare
While Māori fortifications were innovative, the structured science of trench warfare was developed centuries earlier in Europe, particularly by French military engineers. Correcting this myth does not diminish Māori ingenuity – it simply rejects a politicised fiction.
7. Disease Was Inevitable – No Matter Who Arrived
Henry implies Britain uniquely brought disease. In reality, any foreign contact – French, Spanish, American or otherwise – would have carried influenza, measles, tuberculosis and more.
Traders, sealers, whalers, and roaming ships introduced illness long before 1840. Blaming Britain for biological inevitabilities is inaccurate.
CONCLUSION: Colonisation Brought Stability, Security and Long-Term Survival
The historical record shows:
- Ngāpuhi feared the French; a ‘French treaty’ was highly unlikely.
- Northern chiefs invited British protection in 1831.
- British governance prevented the re-emergence of the Musket Wars and introduced the first national legal order.
- New Zealand could not have escaped foreign takeover.
- Disease and global contact were unavoidable.
- Māori could not have resisted any major empire alone.
British colonisation delivered literacy, medicine, infrastructure, government, economic development and the longest period of sustained peace the country had known.
It was not the catastrophe Henry and Judd describe: it was, relative to the alternatives, the most stable and least violent path New Zealand could realistically have taken.
“Let me acknowledge first that, in the whole world I doubt whether any native race has been so well treated by a European people as the Maori” – Sir Āpirana Ngata (1940)
A version of this article was published on Breaking Views.
