At the peak of hostilities in the 1860s, 18,000 British Army troops, supported by artillery, cavalry and local militia, battled about 4,000 Māori warriors[10] in what became a gross imbalance of manpower and weaponry.

Violence over land ownership broke out first in the Wairau Valley in the South Island in June 1843, but rising tensions in Taranaki eventually led to the involvement of British military forces at Waitara in March 1860.

As part of broader Australian involvement in the wars, the Colony of Victoria deployed its naval forces, and at least 2,500 volunteers formed contingents that crossed the Tasman Sea and integrated with the New Zealand militia.

The clash was sparked when settlers led by a representative of the New Zealand Company—which held a false title deed to a block of land—attempted to clear Māori off the land ready for surveying.

The flagstaff had previously flown the colours of United Tribes of New Zealand but now carried the Union Jack and therefore symbolised the grievances of Heke and his ally Te Ruki Kawiti, as to changes that had followed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

[26][27] Despite the fact that Tāmati Wāka Nene and most of Ngāpuhi sided with the government, the small and ineptly led British force had been beaten at the Battle of Ōhaeawai.

Heke's confidence waned after he was wounded in battle with Tāmati Wāka Nene and his warriors, and by the realisation that the British had far more resources than he could muster, including some Pākehā Māori, who supported the colonial forces.

In April 1847 an accidental shooting of a minor Wanganui Māori chief led to a bloody revenge attack on a settler family; when the perpetrators were captured and hanged, a major raid was launched on the town as a reprisal, with homes plundered and burned and livestock stolen.

Governor Browne accepted the purchase with full knowledge of the circumstances and tried to occupy the land, anticipating it would lead to armed conflict, and a demonstration of the substantive sovereignty the British believed they had gained in the Treaty of Waitangi.

He persuaded the Colonial Office in London to send more than 10,000 Imperial troops to New Zealand and General Sir Duncan Cameron was appointed to lead the campaign.

The six-month long Tauranga campaign of 1864 was initially launched by Cameron to disrupt Māori supply lines and secure the Bay of Plenty for European settlement.

The campaign faced internal political divisions early on with Premier Frederick Whitaker supporting an aggressive approach, while Governor Grey advocated a defensive stance to prevent wider rebellion.

Following the setback, efforts to negotiate peace intensified, with Governor Grey seeking to limit land confiscations and reduce Māori resistance, leading to a temporary cessation of hostilities.

The Tauranga campaign concluded with the surrender of Ngāi Te Rangi warriors, marking a turning point in the New Zealand Wars and shaping subsequent negotiations between Māori and the colonial government.

Historian Brian Dalton noted: "The aim was no longer to conquer territory, but to inflict the utmost 'punishment' on the enemy; inevitably there was a great deal of brutality, much burning of undefended villages and indiscriminate looting, in which loyal Maoris often suffered.

[41] East coast hostilities erupted in April 1865 and, as in the Second Taranaki War, sprang from Māori resentment of punitive government land confiscations coupled with the embrace of radical Pai Marire expression.

[42] Major conflicts within the campaign included the cavalry and artillery attack on Te Tarata pā near Ōpōtiki in October 1865 in which about 35 Māori were killed, and the seven-day siege of Waerenga-a-Hika in November 1865.

He also assumed the roles of a priest and prophet of the extremist Hauhau movement of the Pai Mārire religion, reviving ancient rites of cannibalism and propitiation of Māori gods with the human heart torn from the first slain in a battle.

Te Kooti, who had been held without trial on the island for two years, asked that he and his followers be left in peace, but within two weeks they were being pursued by a force of militia, government troops and Māori volunteers.

Although initially fighting defensively against pursuing government forces, Te Kooti went on the offensive from November 1868, starting with the so-called Poverty Bay massacre, a well-organised lightning strike against selected European settlers and Māori opponents in the Matawhero district, in which 51 men, women and children were slaughtered and their homes set alight.

[61] From September 1863 the first contingents of what was planned as 5,000 military settlers—recruited on the goldfields of Australia and Otago with promises of free grants of land confiscated from "rebel" Māori—also began service in the Waikato.

[22][62][63] In November 1864 Premier Frederick Weld introduced a policy of "self-reliance" for New Zealand, which included the gradual but complete withdrawal of Imperial troops, who would be replaced by a colonial force of 1,500.

The move came at a time of rising conflict between Grey, who sought more extensive military operations to "pacify" the west coast of the North Island between Taranaki and Wanganui, and Cameron, who regarded such a campaign as unnecessary, impractical and contrary to Imperial policy.

[66] Although they were not part of a structured command system, Māori generally followed a consistent strategic plan, uniting to build skilfully engineered defensive lines up to 22 kilometres (14 mi) long.

The British Army were professional soldiers who had experience fighting in various parts of the Empire, many from India and Afghanistan and were led by officers who were themselves trained by men who had fought at Waterloo.

Many of the Māori fighters had been raised during the Musket Wars, the decades-long bitter intertribal fighting during which warriors had perfected the art of building defensive fortifications around a pā.

During the Flagstaff War, Kawiti and Heke appear to have followed a strategy of drawing the colonial forces into attacking a fortified pā, from which the warriors could fight from a strong defensive position that was secure from cannon fire.

The palisade destroyed, the British troops rushed the pā, whereupon Māori fired on them from hidden trenches, killing 38 and injuring many more in the most costly battle for the Pākehā of the New Zealand Wars.

[72] However the British force consisted of professional soldiers supported by an economic system capable of sustaining them in the field almost indefinitely, in contrast, the Māori warrior was a part-time fighter who also needed to work on producing food.

In the immediate aftermath of the wars in Taranaki, and land confiscations, a new town Parihaka was founded by Te Whiti o Rongomai,[81] based on principles of non-violent resistance.