Dancing with the King The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885

After the battle of Orakau in 1864 and the end of the war in the Waikato, Tawhiao, the second Maori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed isolation in the Rohe Potae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state – a land governed by the Maori King 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 the King and the Queen that finally opened the area to European settlement.

Michael Belgrave is a professor of history at Massey University, the author of Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories and From Empire’s Servant to Global Citizen: A History of Massey University, co-author of Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and co-editor of The Treaty on the Ground: Where We Are Headed, and Why It Matters. 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.