For Maori population and development in the nineteenth century, the ‘elephant in the room’ was the arrival and inflow of Pakeha. The driving force underpinning the narrative here is colonization: how contact with Pakeha was followed by missionary, trade and then political intervention by British and other Europeans; then by the cession in 1840 of New Zealand to the British Crown. From 1840, New Zealand’s trajectory followed that of some other ‘settler colonies’, especially those of the ‘Anglo-World’, Australia, Canada and the United States. There white immigrants and their descendants gained more than political suzerainty, also achieving demographic hegemony and ownership of most of the territory and other capital assets. So, everywhere, a core accompaniment of colonization in the ‘settler model’ is the loss of the resources and the erosion of the culture of the ‘precursor peoples’. This is where the New Zealand case-study has much wider resonance, certainly for the settler-colonies of Anglo-America and Australia, to a degree for the southern cone of Latin America – Uruguay, Argentina and Chile – somewhat less so for southern Africa and other parts of Latin America (Belich 2009: 180, 548ff; Pool 2009). Colonization was far more than the political act of a society becoming another territory in a wider empire, however this term might be defined: Ronald Wright’s ‘ tribute (or hegemonic)…’ as against ‘centralized (or territorial)…’ empires; or James Belich’s ‘false’, ‘loose’ and ‘tight’ ‘Empire’ (Wright 2008; Belich 1996: 249).