The Meeting Place

Book excerpt: An account focusing on the encounters between the Maori and Pakeha—or European settlers—and the process of mutual discovery from 1642 to around 1840, this New Zealand history book argues that both groups inhabited a middle ground in which neither could dictate the political, economic, or cultural rules of engagement. By looking at economic, religious, political, and sexual encounters, it offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pakeha power over a static, resistant Maori society. With fresh insights, this book examines why mostly beneficial interactions between these two cultures began to merge and the reasons for their subsequent demise after 1840.