Gimelli Maori wars The Maori wars, also known as the New Zealand Land Wars, stretched from 1843 to 1872.. These continued periods of confl ict occurred because of the British colo-nizati
Trang 1justifi cations of continentalism to militant advocacy of
intervention beyond the borders of North America to
the Caribbean and Central America Under the guise
of Manifest Destiny, American fi libusters supported or
engaged in revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and
Cuba “Young America,” a political and literary group
affi liated with the Democratic Party, advocated armed
intervention in the Caribbean and urged American
sup-port of revolutionary uprisings in Giuseppe Mazzini’s
Italy and in the Hungary of Louis Kossuth
Beginning in 1885 a new Manifest Destiny arose,
popularized by John Fiske, the
historian-philoso-pher and Darwinian evolutionist Fiske extolled the
virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race and looked forward
to the time when its institutions would be diffused
around the world Congregational clergyman Josiah
Strong embraced Manifest Destiny in the same year
when he linked “a pure Christianity,” “civil liberty,”
Anglo-Saxonism, and Darwinism, and declared that
the Anglo-Saxon was “divinely commissioned to be
his brother’s keeper.” He predicted a “competition of
races” in which Anglo-Saxons would prevail In the
1890s, the Republican Party endorsed Manifest
Des-tiny and identifi ed itself with intervention and insular
imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacifi c President
William McKinley endorsed the idealism expressed
by Manifest Destiny when he justifi ed his decision to
retain the Philippine Islands at the end of the
Span-ish-American War Other Republicans spoke of
America’s mission to regenerate and extend the
bless-ings of civilization to less fortunate peoples around
the world
Although the phrase Manifest Destiny fell into
dis-use in the 20th century, the sentiments expressed by
the slogan have continued Its idealism can be found in
modern American foreign policy statements that link
U.S operations overseas with an American mission to
spread liberty, freedom, and democracy
See also Darwin, Charles; Lewis and Clark
Expedi-tion; political parties in the United States
Further reading: Horsman, Reginald Race and Manifest
Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981;
McDou-gall, Walter A Promised Land, Crusader State: the American
Encounter with the World Since 1776 New York:
Hough-ton Miffl in, 1997; Sampson, Robert D John L O’ Sullivan
and His Times Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press,
2003
Louis B Gimelli
Maori wars
The Maori wars, also known as the New Zealand Land Wars, stretched from 1843 to 1872 These continued periods of confl ict occurred because of the British colo-nization of New Zealand, a process that began in the late 18th century In 1840 the British offi cially annexed New Zealand as a colony with the signing of the Waitangi Treaty, which formally allowed the British
to colonize certain parts of the archipelago and pro-vided for the Maori to retain many of their territorial homelands But the Waitangi Treaty held the British government to contradictory positions of protecting the Maori people while at the same time allowing Euro-pean immigrants to colonize parts of the islands Since there was only so much land available within the archi-pelago, land and cultural clashes inevitably occurred between British settlers and the native Maori
After the Waitangi Treaty, there was a continued infl ux of British settlers, driven by the New Zealand Company, which promoted emigration from the British Isles to New Zealand As the British settlers increasingly sought land, they began to try to purchase land from the Maori This was a problem for the Maori, however, because there was not a concept of individual property ownership within their society Property was held not
by the individual, as in the British tradition, but by the group as a whole Also, the Maori who signed the Waitangi Treaty provided for the use, not necessarily the sale, of land Because the Maori did not individually own property there were a number of battles fought between different Maori groups when a small leader sold land to settlers
The Wairau Affray, otherwise known to the settlers
as the Wairau Massacre, was the fi rst bloody confl ict
in New Zealand A neighboring Maori group killed 22 settlers from Nelson, a city created by the New Zealand Company, when the colonizers tried to use a dubious treaty to expand into the neighboring Wairau Valley This was soon followed by the Flagstaff War or Heke’s Rebellion, a war in Northern New Zealand where Hene Heke and other Maori leaders battled against the Brit-ish, who were aligned with Tamati Waka Nene’s Maori group Eventually the British and the “loyalist” Maori
broke the pa, an earthen fort, defense of the Maori in
late 1846, but only after a long siege campaign employed
by the new governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey Grey gave clemency to Heke and the losing Maori groups, thus ending the Flagstaff War
After a peaceful decade in the 1850s, the tension between the Maori and the settlers began to climax