The Musket Wars rearranged the population of New Zealand with considerable violence between roughly 1807 and 1845 (historians argue about both dates, which keeps them writing learned articles on the matter). They began with a mechanism that was straightforward and resulted in consequences that were not.
When Europeans arrived they began trading along the northern coasts. Ngāpuhi, whose territory sat conveniently close to where most of this trading was happening, found themselves first in line for muskets. Their traditional rivals had not yet acquired them. This created what military historians call a significant asymmetry, and what everyone else would call a catastrophic problem.
The man who made the most energetic use of this situation was Ngāpuhi's paramount chief Hongi Hika. In 1820 he sailed to England, met King George IV, and was given an assortment of gifts appropriate to the occasion. The gifts included a suit of armour.
On the voyage home, Hongi Hika stopped in Sydney and exchanged the entire collection — armour and all — for somewhere in the vicinity of 300 muskets. He then returned to New Zealand and put them to use. The armour would have stopped bullets from hitting him. The muskets ensured there were a great many more bullets available which required stopping. He chose the muskets.
Soon everyone wanted muskets which resulted in a simple economic equation:
To get muskets, one needed trade goods → To get trade goods, one needed to grow food for ships = POTATOES (central to the whole business and justified in claiming naming rights, though Musket Wars is more martial than Potato Wars)
The campaigns that followed were extensive and devastating. Hongi Hika led Ngāpuhi forces into the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, and the East Coast, defeating opponents armed with the weapons of the previous era. What made the Musket Wars particularly complex was not just what happened in these raids, but what happened afterwards. The iwi on the receiving end naturally were forced to move — sometimes retreating to defensible ground, sometimes relocating entirely, pushing into territories occupied by other iwi, who were then pushed in turn. It was less a series of discrete conflicts than a slow-motion wave, each collision producing another displacement further along until everyone had moved somewhere. The wars were, depending on your perspective, either a catastrophic unravelling of the social order or an extremely vigorous reorganisation of the tribal map. Historians tend toward the former description.
The ripple effect even reached the South Island. Te Rauparaha of Ngāti Toa, finding the North Island crowded and full of people actively trying to shoot him, headed south, eventually controlling much of the top of the South Island. He composed the haka Ka Mate during this period, which is now performed at international rugby matches, not an outcome anyone involved could have predicted.
The wars wound down as muskets spread widely enough that the advantage evaporated, everyone had muskets and potatoes. Christianity arrived with inconvenient views on killing people, and then in 1840 the British Crown turned up and declared itself in charge.
The Musket Wars reshuffled the population of New Zealand so thoroughly that almost nobody was living where their great-grandparents had lived. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, communities destroyed, ancestral territories abandoned, often by groups who intended to return when things improved, and for whom things did not always improve in time.
The question of whose land was whose now had to contend with the fact that the answer was different depending on which year you asked the question. Do you go back to pre-1800 ancestral territories? The boundaries at 1840? The lands conquered during the wars? The lands fled to? None of these answers are obviously wrong, but none are entirely satisfying either. The Waitangi Tribunal, which hears Treaty grievances today, essentially works through this tangle for a living. The lawyers involved have found it professionally rewarding, which is perhaps the most diplomatic way of noting that the questions are genuinely hard.
Hongi Hika died in 1828 from a musket wound, which has a grim symmetry to it - perhaps he should have kept that armour.