Leading of from Rifleman's mention of 'frontier history' and it's lack of relevance:Originally Posted by Rifleman
A very left-or-arc question, but does the American audience even know what I am talking about if I mention the Maori wars? They were concurrent with the American civil war, and are a great example of a series of 'small war' campaigns against a militarily capable indigenous population. It would be easy to describe it as 'counter-insurgency' if you are so inclined.
As an aside it always perplexed me in that, in New Zealand schooling, we would undertake a compulsory module on Native American Indians when we were 14 years old (approx). I never studied the era too much at the time, and since my main exposure to the colonisation of the States has been through the memoirs of Sir Harry Flashman.
Even in my limited exposure to the two wars I think a lot more of relevance can be gained from the Maori wars, if anyone is interested. To provide a simple narrative summary, the Maori's dominated the tactical engagements but were strategically impotent against the combined economic/political/military advance of the British empire. The political treaty that resulted in many ways reflected the cost involved in inflicting any decisive defeat upon the opposing tribes and made many concessions to the Maori - equal citizenship under the empire being one example.
Lots of bad history has arisen from the Maori Wars literature, including some ludicrous claims that the Maori "invented" trench warfare and the British empire could have avoided the Somme had they paid attention to the Maori and that the Maori wars saw statistically greater concentrations of artillery fire than WW1 did (both claims are absolute rubbish) however the study of the British Empire vs the Maori tribes may be of relevance and interest to today's environment, perhaps more so than the Indian Wars.
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