New Zealand

From the last great Polynesian voyages to a bicultural Pacific democracy founded on a contested treaty.

New Zealand — Aotearoa — was among the last large landmasses on Earth to be settled, reached by Polynesian voyagers around 1300 CE whose descendants developed the distinct Māori world of iwi and hapū. European contact came with Abel Tasman's 1642 sighting and James Cook's accurate charting in 1769–70, followed by missionaries, traders, and the muskets that transformed inter-tribal warfare. On 6 February 1840 the British Crown and Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, the nation's founding document, whose English and Māori texts differ in meaning and whose interpretation has been contested ever since. Through the New Zealand Wars and land confiscation, the world-first grant of women's suffrage in 1893, Dominion status, the welfare state, and a post-1970s Māori renaissance, New Zealand became a prosperous bicultural democracy still working through the Treaty's unfinished promises.