New Zealand is very recently settled. The Māori, of East Polynesian ancestry, were the first inhabitants of New Zealand who arrived in New Zealand around the AD 1250–1300 from Hawaiki. In 1642 Abel Tasman, a Dutch navigator, and his crew, as they searched for the southern continent (Antarctica), sighted the islands that now make up New Zealand. They managed to sketch sections of the west coasts of the two main islands but four crew members were killed and they were driven off by the Māori as they attempted to land. The next known exploration was by British Captain James Cook who made three south Pacific voyages during the years 1768—1771 and thoroughly explored New Zealand’s islands in 1769, mapping almost the entire coastline in the process. He visited the country twice more, in 1773–74 and in 1777.
New Zealand is also commonly known by the Māori name Aotearoa, although it is not certain whether they had referred to the islands as a whole before the arrival of Europeans. They referred to the main islands individually as as Te Ika a Māui (the fish of Māu: North Island) and Te Wai Pounamu (the waters of greenstone) or Te Waka o Aoraki (the canoe of Aoraki: South Island). Abel Tasman had assumed the islands were part of a southern continent connected with land discovered off the southern tip of South American in 1615, called Staten Landt, and so referred to New Zealand. Staten Landt means ‘land of the (Dutch) States-General’. Dutch cartographers named the islands ‘Nova Zeelandia’, derived from the Dutch province of Zeeland, and this first appeared i 1645. New Zealand is the anglicised version coined by Captain Cook.
The Māori population could have been over 100,000 before the first Europeans arrived. Cook’s encounters with the Māori generally peaceful and his reports attracted sealers and traders, some from the new community in Sydney and whalers from America, Britain and France. During the late 18th and early 19th century traders brought goods for trade: metal tools and weapons for Māori timber, food, artifacts and water. Settlers also began to arrive early in the 19th century, the first Christian missionaries among them. The possession of muskets transformed local warfare led to the Musket Wars and between 1801 -1840 30,000-40,000 Māori were killed. This, along with diseases like influenza, dysentery and diphtheria being introduced by outside contact, the population declined to about 40% of its previous level. In 1857–58 a census put their numbers at about 56,000. Intermarriage and time have meant an adoption of European ways by the Māori, but they still maintain a distinct cultural difference to the European ‘Kiwi’.
There was a lawless nature to European settlement so the British government sent James Busby as British Resident to New Zealand in 1832 to help bring law and order to the settlement, which he failed to do. In 1835, a group of Māori tribes calling themselves the United Tribes of New Zealand sought protection by sending a Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand to Britain’s King William IV. Eventually the Colonial Office sent Captain William Hobson to New Zealand to claim sovereignty for the British Crown and negotiate a treaty with the Māori. The United Kingdom formally annexed the islands in 1840 and established what they believed to be British sovereignty through the Treaty of Waitangi signed with Maori chiefs in the Bay of Islands on 6 February. Also that year selected groups from the United Kingdom began the colonization process in earnest. The treaty promised to protect Māori land if the Māori recognized British rule. Encroachment by British settlers was relentless, however, and conflicts over land intensified, leading to the ‘New Zealand Wars’, a series of skirmishes on the north island between colonial forces and Maori. There is continued debate over the details of Māori land and European settlement and different interpretations of the Treaty.
The capital of New Zealand moved from Okiato (1840) to Auckland (1841) then to Wellington (resolution 1863, with the first Parliament held there in 1965), a more central location on the north side of the Cook Strait. Wellington is the southernmost national capital in the world.
New Zealand’s settlement process affected it in many ways on the local level but also had a positive impact on its global economy. Transportation had increased by the end of the 19th century, ensuring greater overseas trade. The livestock industry expanded to become a foundation of New Zealand’s modern economy with wool surpassing timber and flax as export commodities. Refrigerated transport supported the export of meat and dairy products, which became staples of the export industry and lead to strong economic growth.
The New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 passed by the United Kingdom provided a representative government for the colony. The first New Zealand Parliament met in 1854 and in 1856 was granted government responsibility over domestic matters outside of native policy. Māori won the right to a number of reserved seats in Parliament in 1867. In 1907, New Zealand declared itself a Dominion within the British Empire. While in practise it exercised full autonomy internally and externally from that time, it was not formalised until 1947 by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act, at which time it became a realm of the Commonwealth and the last restrictions on the right of its parliament to amend its constitution were removed.
New Zealand’s laws during the 1890s were reflective of a very socially advanced state. By the early 20th century, it was practising its own version of a welfare state. Women gained the vote in 1893, the first in the world only three years after men’s enfranchisement, which was the year of the first general election: 1890. Old-age pensions were adopted in 1898; a national child welfare program was set up by1907; social security was established for the elderly, widows, and orphans, along with family benefit payments; minimum wages were set with a limited 40-hour workweek; unemployment and health insurance, 1938; and socialized medicine was instituted starting 1941.