October 31, 2017
Dancing with the King: The rise and fall of the King Country
Dancing with the King: The rise and fall of the King Country, 1864-1885
MEDIA RELEASE
A riveting account of the twenty years after the New Zealand Wars when Māori governed their own independent state in the King Country.
When Māori were defeated at Orakau in 1864 and the Waikato War ended, Tāwhiao, the second Māori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed exile in the Rohe Pōtae, the King Country. For the next twenty years the King Country operated as an independent state governed by the Māori King – a land where settlers and the Crown entered at
risk of their lives.
Dancing with the King is the story of the King Country when it was the King’s country, and of the negotiations between Tāwhiao and the Crown that opened the area to European settlement. For twenty years, the King and Queen Victoria’s representatives engaged in a dance of diplomacy involving gamesmanship, conspiracy, pageantry and hard-headed
politics, with the occasional act or threat of violence. While the Crown refused to acknowledge the King’s legitimacy, the colonial government and the settlers had to treat Tāwhiao as a King, to negotiate with him as the ruler and representative of a sovereign state, and to accord him the respect and formality that this involved. Colonial negotiators even made Tāwhiao offers of settlement that came very close to recognising his sovereign authority.
Dancing with the King is the first account of the rise and fall of the King Country, a key moment in New Zealand history as an extraordinary cast of characters – Tāwhiao and Rewi Maniapoto, Donald McLean and George Grey – negotiated a vision of peace in the King Country and a reunited New Zealand Aotearoa.
About the author
Michael Belgrave is a professor of history at Massey University, the author of Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland University Press, 2005)
and From Empire’s Servant to Global Citizen: A History of Massey University (Massey University Press, 2016), co-author of Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand (Oxford
University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Treaty on the Ground: Where We Are Headed, and Why It Matters (Massey University Press, 2017). He was previously
research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal and has continued to work on Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements, providing substantial research reports into a wide
number of the Waitangi Tribunal’s inquiries. He received a Marsden Fund award in 2015 for study into the re-examination of the causes of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s.
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