Musket Wars

The Musket Wars were a series of as many as three thousand battles and raids fought across New Zealand, including the Chatham Islands, among Maori between 1806 and 1845, after Maori first obtained muskets and then entered an intertribal arms race to gain territory or avenge past defeats. The fighting killed between twenty thousand and forty thousand people and enslaved tens of thousands more, including roughly three hundred Moriori killed and about seventeen hundred enslaved on the Chatham Islands, and it reshaped tribal territorial boundaries across the country before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.