During the nineteenth century, Maori women produced letters and memoirs, wrote off to newspapers and commissioners, appeared before commissions of enquiry, gave evidence in court cases, and went to the Native Land Court to assert their rights. He Reo Wahine is a bold new introduction to the experience of Maori women in colonial New Zealand through Maori women's own words – the speeches and evidence, letters and testimonies that they left in the archive. Drawing from over 500 texts in both English and te reo Maori written by Maori women themselves, or expressing their words in the first person, He Reo Wahine explores the range and diversity of Maori women's concerns and interests, the many ways in which they engaged with colonial institutions, as well as their understanding and use of the law, legal documents, and the court system. The book both collects those sources – providing readers with substantial excerpts from letters, petitions, submissions and other documents – and interprets them. Eight chapters group texts across key themes: land sales, war, land confiscation and compensation, politics, petitions, legal encounters, religion and other private matters. Beside a large scholarship on New Zealand women's history, the historical literature on Maori women is remarkably thin. This book changes that by utilising the colonial archives to explore the feelings, thoughts and experiences of Maori women – and their relationships to the wider world.

The seminal work on the interaction of New Zealand's indigenous population with the Old Testament message brought by missionaries in the 19th century

Keith Sinclair's The Origins of the Maori Wars is a fascinating account of the Waitara purchase and the cause of war in Taranaki in 1860. The seeds of conflict were sown in the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, when colonists arrived to take up land for which they had paid before it had been procured. The King party, one of the earliest national movements among M&āori, reacted against this imperial expansion. The story of the developing crisis features good intentions, self-interest, obstinacy and miscalculations &– elements involved in the origins of many wars. Written over ten years, The Origins of the Maori Wars is a pioneering study that comes complete with scholarly apparatus, including maps, appendices, notes and an index. First published in 1957, The Origins of the Maori Wars quickly established itself as a classic of New Zealand historical scholarship. This is the second edition.

For Europeans during the nineteenth century, the Urewera was a remote wilderness; for those who lived there, it was a sheltering heartland. This history documents the first hundred years of the ‘Rohe Pōtae’ (the ‘encircled lands’ of the Urewera) following European contact. After large areas of land were lost, the Urewera became for a brief period an autonomous district, governed by its own leaders. But in 1921–22, the Urewera District Native Reserve was abolished in law. Its very existence became largely forgotten – except in local memory. Recovering this history from a wealth of contemporary documents, many written by Urewera leaders, Encircled Lands contextualises Tūhoe’s quest for a constitutional agreement that restores their authority in their lands.