Conflict over land sales began in the north in 1845 and resumed in Taranaki in 1860. In July 1863 Governor George Grey's forces crossed the Mangatawhiri into the Waikato, and after the defeat of the Kingitanga forces the government confiscated land under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, justified as punishment of rebellion; Premier Alfred Domett had proposed the policy in a memorandum of 5 May 1863, and Te Ara records that what began as a limited proposal broadened considerably, taking land from tribes that had fought against the Crown and from tribes that had not. The Maori King Tawhiao responded by prohibiting surveying, land sales, Native Land Court sittings, road-building and gold prospecting in his territory and refusing to negotiate until the land was returned. In the Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Act 1995 the Crown formally acknowledged that it had acted unjustly and in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi in invading the Waikato and wrongly characterising Waikato as rebels, that the confiscations were wrongful, and that they had caused lasting damage - the first of the modern Treaty settlements.
The British Crown and colonial government invaded the Waikato and Taranaki and confiscated Maori land under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863
The 1857-58 Maori census counted 56,049, a population already falling steeply from disease and estimated at 70,000-90,000 in 1840; by 1896 it had reached its nadir of about 42,000. The New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 was used to confiscate roughly 1.2-1.6 million hectares in Waikato, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and Hawke's Bay, land belonging to particular iwi rather than to the Maori population as a whole.
Total deaths in the New Zealand Wars between 1845 and 1872 are usually put at between two and three thousand, of whom the substantial majority were Maori; the figures come from military returns on the colonial side, which are reasonably reliable, and from estimates on the Maori side, which are not. Deaths from disease and displacement following confiscation, particularly among communities pushed off their cultivations, were not counted and are additional.
NZHistory and Te Ara document the destruction and appropriation of Maori settlements and cultivations in the invaded districts and the confiscation of land from communities including those that had not taken up arms, findings confirmed by the Crown in its 1995 statutory apology.
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