Colinxy: Did Māori Invent Trench Warfare?

A popular claim, one promoted most prominently by Professor James Belich, whom John Campbell once introduced as “Our National Treasure”, is that Māori not only invented trench warfare but that their innovations directly influenced British military doctrine in the First World War. Belich’s early work goes further than celebrating Māori ingenuity: it explicitly implies a causal line from nineteenth‑century pā fortifications to the trench systems of the Western Front.

It’s a striking narrative. It is also historically indefensible.

James Kierstead: Why English is the Lingua Franca

Why does so much of the world speak English?

As someone who was born in Canada, educated in the UK and US, and has now been living in New Zealand for more than a decade, the question has always fascinated me. It’s also the question that the New Zealand historian James Belich sought to answer in his classic Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, which I’ve just finished reading.

Mike Butler: Lest we forget our murderous past

When New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery planned to exhibit the $1.5-million painting titled A view of Mount Egmont taken from New Plymouth with the Maoris driving off settlers’ cattle, a former treaty claims negotiator kicked up a fuss over the depiction of his Taranaki forebears as thieves.

Factual depictions of 19th-century New Zealand history, like that painting, have become shocking to some because information that show Maori in poor light has been steadily dropped from official accounts.