Extracts from selected reviews

NZ Wars, analysis revisited
Edmund Bohan
The Press, 16 September 2006
Two Peoples, One Land: the New Zealand Wars  (Reed, Auckland 2006)

Matthew Wright is rapidly emerging as one of our most prolific military and social historians, an assiduous researcher and no mere blinkered follower of academic and ideological fashion.  Far from it.  As our pre-eminent military historian, Christopher Pugsley, emphasises in a foreword to this book, this is a re-examination of the validity of many of the theories and assumptions underlying James Belich's stimulating but seriously flawed and now out-dated The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986). And without a doubt Wright demolishes many of those theories and corrects many of Belich's errors and his more fanciful and extravagant assertions, through superior knowledge of military history and ruthless logic.

He does so in the most polite - and even discreet - manner; rather than brazenly naming Belich in his text, as both Pugsley and I have done in our own various writings, he is content to refer to him simply as 'a revisionist historian' or simply 'an historian'.

Wright has produced as detailed, sensible and satisfactory a military history of the campaigns waged between 3045 and 3072 as one might hope to read.  He also places those campaigns within the historical context of the inter-tribal Musket Wars from which they emerged, and the political, social and cultural campaigns that succeeded them; and he acutely summarises changing historical attitudes...It is splendidly illustrated and the footnotes are exemplary.  

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