Lands of Red and Gold
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Hrrm. The Moa so far seems to be a roughly analogous parallel to Pere David's Deer.
Edit: Also, I have to say while there is clearly resistance by the Maori to the Pilari religion, I could see it really meshing well with their culture. I wonder if in the social chaos following the introduction of Eurasian plagues there will be more acceptance by the Maori to consider new ways?
Edit: Also, I have to say while there is clearly resistance by the Maori to the Pilari religion, I could see it really meshing well with their culture. I wonder if in the social chaos following the introduction of Eurasian plagues there will be more acceptance by the Maori to consider new ways?
This is assuming that Maori has remained one language. True, there wasn't an incredible amount of time for the dialects to diverge, but there are more people ITTL's New Zealand, and the common folk likely roam within smaller territories due to better yield per acre. But more importantly, the development of states and the introduction of written language means there will be a multitude of competing literary standards developing, at least initially.
Hmm. This decentralizing of industry into the cities is going to have repercussions in other places, however. One important area is scientific advancement - one of the prime social functions of cities is to concentrate people with ideas, where they can influence and be inspired by each other. With a more distributed population, we're not going to see as much of that TTL. Additionally, one advantage of cities to industrialization was that ideas made in one industry could spread quickly to other industries, since the advances were made down the street instead of across the country. OTOH, with wattles, people are more likely to have more free time to learn and educate themselves on their own. What we may see is a world where discoveries that require cross-disciplinary an/or specialized knowledge are discovered slower relative to us, and discoveries that can be made by a guy or two working in his toolshed for years are made faster. The physical sciences and engineering are likely to be more advanced than the social sciences.
It's certainly possible that the moa will get wiped out. As eschaton pointed out, there have been analogies in OTL (Pere David's Deer), and they haven't always made it to the present.
Looking at OTL, Pere David's Deer was wiped out in China, saved only by illegal exports to Europe. On the other hand, the European bison did survive down to the present thanks to captive animals.
So there's at least a chance that the moa may survive to the present. Rule of cool may apply in these circumstances.
Glad you like it!
Yes, this sort of division cuts both ways. Easy for Europeans to find local allies; equally easy for those local allies to switch sides, too. The stuff of life.
Plus, of course, a society where more or less every adult male knows how to fight is not always the nicest one to try to hold down.
They will, aided also by both geography (lots of forest-covered, rugged terrain) and a tradition which makes them experts at raids and irregular warfare.
Conquering the Maori even in OTL was a stone-cold bitch for the British to do. TTL's Aotearoa is a couple of orders of magnitude worse than that, and doesn't even have the lure of relatively empty land in the South Island to allow the British to establish a relatively secure base.
The Maori have been hit by Aururian diseases for a couple of centuries. They're not quite as resistant as the native Aururians (genetic resistance takes a bit longer than that to fully develop), but they are more resistant than Europeans.
When it comes to facing Old World diseases, the Maori, like the Aururians, have had the exposure to at least some epidemic diseases which is needed to strengthen their adaptive immune systems. So they will be somewhat more resistant than in OTL, although Old World diseases will still hit them very hard.
There are a few products which will be of some interest to Europeans. There is gold in Aotearoa, although much less than in Aururia, and I haven't worked out whether the Maori have found it yet. The biggest gold fields are in the more southerly regions (central Otago) where population is lower. This may trigger a gold rush eventually; then again, it may not.
Greenstone (jade) is another product which is of great value in China if anyone decides to ship it there. Whether it's worth the effort of conquest is another story, though, since the Maori are perfectly willing to trade it.
Mercenaries are, well, the Maori certainly wouldn't be averse to that if paid in kind. No need to conquer them to provide mercenaries, it's more like "show us the cash". Come to that, some Maori may be willing to pay Europeans to charter their ships and go a-conquering elsewhere. It happened in OTL, after all...
I haven't worked out an exact figure for Aururia's population, but somewhere around or over 8 million is likely.
2 million in the Yadji Empire, 1 million or so in Tjibarr, a bit less than 1 million total for the other two Murray kingdoms, 1.5 million in the Atjuntja, somewhere between 300-400,000 for the Mutjing and Nangu together, a few hundred thousand in *Tasmania, and then throw in all of the peoples on the eastern seaboard and the Monaro plateau.
Aotearoa has somewhere around 3.5 million, give or take, in 1618. And the population is still growing; it hasn't reached the limits of its food supply yet.
I haven't figured out the exact casualty rate from Old World diseases, although it will be at least two-thirds, probably more; worst case is around 80%. Even at worst, this leaves the demographic lowpoint at around 700,000, give or take military casualties.
Short of deliberate genocide, the Maori are going to remain the demographic majority, yes. Although what's probably going to be interesting is the proportion of "mestizos". This is partly because immigrants in these settings tend to be overwhelmingly male (and wealthier to attract native women), but also because people of mixed-race descent are going to be overall more resistant to diseases, since they will have some immunity against both Old World and Aururian plagues. This could lead to its own interesting demographic trends...
That doesn't necessarily follow. If European colonisation succeeds, and then Europeans are in the dominant social and economic position, particularly if they are in charge of education, then a European language may predominate. This happened to a certain degree in OTL - the Maori often asked that their children be educated in English, since it opened up more opportunities to them.
I certainly think that the Maori language would be healthier than the 10,000 or so fluent speakers it's estimated to have in OTL, but it's not necessarily going to be the majority language.
If Maori can still be considered one language - dialects will probably have sprung up by now. Mutually intelligble ones, to a greater or lesser degree, but mutually intelligble dialects can sometimes be considered as separate languages, particularly if they are politically separate. There's no shortages of historical examples for that.
Unless Plirism takes stronger hold, I'm not even sure if the Maori would think of themselves as being associated with Aururia at all. Quite a different cultural background.
Of course, there isn't that much of a historical comparison for this ratio of language speakers, so it's hard to judge.
There's been a very strong trend for cannibalism to be present in societies which are organised at a band level, but to vanish as the societies become more organised at a chiefdom or state level. The Aztecs were something of an exception, but only a partial one, and even then their state had only really been organised for a century or so. I expect that cannibalism would have faded or vanished from the Aztecs, given time.
Yes.
No. Moas appear to have been mostly browsers, with probably some grazers, too. Emus are omnivores.
Maybe not that challenging, depending on how it was done. If I remember right, a common Maori practice was to chase moas into covered pits. If the tradition is that you just have to use a spear, things get more challenging.
Of course, no matter how easy a moa is to kill, their heads would still look pretty impressive when stuffed and placed on the nearest wall - with neck included.
They didn't breed fast enough, basically. Moas took ten years to reach adult size - that was true of both big and small moas. (The bigger ones just grew faster).
I'm not sure whether moas were any easier to kill than, say, emus. Maybe they were; some people have speculated about that, but no-one can really prove it. What does matter is that emus breed a hell of a lot faster, and so are better able to replace hunting losses than the moa were.
I haven't worked out the details yet, but if any of possums or wallabies have made the trip, they're going to be ecologically devastating. Nothing to hunt em except for people; they'll breed the place bare. Wombats may not be quite as bad; they're a nuisance, but not quite as devastating.
Overall, I'd think that it would be more likely that people would come to Aotearoa to recruit mercenaries. That wouldn't be a problem.
Pretty much. Why pay for 1000 muskets and lots of powder, plus the soldiers to wield them, when you could just sell the muskets to the Maori in exchange for flax anyway?
Yup. Everything about the place is a pain for conquest, from the people to the topography to the people to the long sailing times to the people... oh, and did I mention the people?
Oh, my, yes. Everyone wants a piece of the action, and may even be able to get it. If the Maori have some Gunnagal advisors, they may even work out the usefulness of balance of power politics, too.
Could be entirely possible. Proxy wars galore, although the Maori would be more than capable of starting wars on their own anyway.
Long-term result... could be interesting. The geographical barriers make solidifying rule of the whole country pretty difficult, but certainly there could be some major polities there - big enough to present a strong front to Europeans.
Perhaps not quite as implausible as you might think. The Maori even in OTL managed to pull off an overseas conquest (of the Chatham Islands) by chartering a European ship. An organised Maori state, even if it only consists of, say, two-thirds of the North Island, might go a surprisingly long way as long as it doesn't touch areas which affect European interests.
That's certainly a possibility, too.
Yes. They now build ships, rather than canoes.
Not sure if they're quite that advanced yet. Bows, certainly. Crossbows, probably not. Their engineering isn't that good; they're only a couple of centuries from the Stone Age. A very busy couple of centuries, yes, but still only a couple of centuries.
There's certainly something in common with that, and with other species preserved for hunting purposes (European bison, I'm looking at you).
Plirism hasn't spread that far yet for a variety of reasons. One is that the Nangu don't visit that often enough to push it yet. Another is that with the Maori so xenophobic as it is, you don't want to cut off your trade contacts by pushing religion on them.
The third reason is that the Nangu version of Plirism tends to frown on the sort of small-scale tit-for-tat warfare that is part of Maori life. The Nangu tend to be more of the "do it decisively, or don't do it at all" school of thinking. When it's plain that your small-scale warfare isn't gaining anything, really, why invoke the sort of violence which disturbs the balance without fundamentally changing things. Actual big battles, they don't have the same problem with - c'est la vie.
Of course, religions can change some of their tenets to fit in with new circumstances, too.
That, or more sustained Nangu contact giving them more of a motivation to push their religion.
There will certainly be different dialects, although I'm not sure how distinctive they will be. We don't know enough about how the Maori started in OTL to know whether they came with differing dialects (and had one or two win out), or whether they started out as one dialect and diverged more slowly.
Of course, mutual intelligibility isn't the only thing which defines a language. The 500-odd Bantu languages have been described, mischievously and somewhat inaccurately, as 500 dialects of the same language.
Merci.
Possibly some in *Tasmania, but the Maori aren't in that much contact with the main nation-states in Aururia to do much in the way of hiring out as mercenaries. Not yet, at least.
True, although people can still travel, and universities and the like will still exist.
Interesting possibility! Will make all sorts of more complications for figuring out the future of this world, but certainly something to take into account.
Perchance a map, good sir?
Quite possibly, if you want to volunteer to draw it.
Yes, and we have Ireland, for example, where well-developed language with ancient written tradition almost went extinct without wholesale genocide of its speakers (with famine and oppression, yes, but still they were hit lighter than the Maori).
However, modern sub-Saharan African states, with this or that European language as the instruction medium in their schools, still mostly have non-European-speaking majorities (Angola and Ivory Coast may be exceptions, but even South Africa is still more Xhosa- and Zulu-speaking than Anglophone nation).
And, of course, we have India, where domination of English in the press, education, business, etc., still does not make English the majority language.
The Maori ITTL may go both ways, but I think that preservation of their language (or languages, if they get two or more written standards) as the majority one is much more likely than thorough Anglicisation (as in OTL).
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Interesting update on New Zealand and the Maori. Comprehensive as per usual.
So far as population goes, well, I guess it is quite possible for an ATL NZ to carry a much greater population than it did or even does now. In ATL NZ’s population has trebled or so since WW1, through immigration and natural increase. I imagine NZ would have a much higher population now if emigration was not so easy, nor such a tempting prospect (see the hundreds of thousands of NZers living in Australia).
In a pre Modern NZ, there is no real easy exit strategy for most people, so any natural increase is going to have to be absorbed by the country
This of course is going to have pretty terrible effects on the indigenous species, so what the new pests do not exterminate, people will. It has been hard enough IOTL to reduce the incidence of extinction, with a much lower human population. We are just lucky IOTL that as the population has started to shoot up in the 20th century we have also developed both the will and some technical ability to try and mitigate some of our impact on these species.
I also do not see much scope for widespread immigration to NZ in ATL. In OTL there was not a huge amount of immigration to NZ from Britain (local born British outnumbered Britain born British by the mid 1880s iirc) pre 20th century and this during a benign period for British settlement, where the South Island was empty and the Imperial government willing to indulge in long term campaigns to pacify the North Island, alongside the support that British Australian colonies could supply as well (providing a market for NZ produce, for one). All of which probably will not be present here. Why indulge in a costly colonial war over decades in NZ, when you have no real economic reason?
On another note, I disagree that NZ presents huge geographic barriers to consolidation. Obviously there are some barriers yes, but nothing too serious. The local equivalent of the Hindu Kush (the Southern Alps) for example, close off the western half of the upper SI from the eastern half but the net effect of that for human settlement is not a big issue. The mountains and the West Coast provide very little in the way (narrow coastal shelves + river valleys) of land that would be easy to intensively settle. I would imagine that in ATL, as in OTL, the East Coast of the SI is the place where most settlement would take place. In any event, even where there are isolated, yet settle-able areas, the coastal access route is going to be an issue, as it is for any island with worrisome neighbours. I would think it quite possible that the Maori consolidate into half a dozen units, which could consolidate further as a result of war, marriage, or other alliances.
So far as the language goes, well, without any substantive immigrant communities and close, involved control from an outside colonial power, I don’t see how the Maori language will decline. It simply is too far away from any competing forces. In OTL it took a combination of factors (too many to list) to get Maori to the point of near collapse mid 20th century, before the revival started. Many of these competing factors will not occur IOTL – widespread dispossession from all the best areas of land, imposition of a comprehensive English language school system by the colonial government, deliberate legally sanctioned destruction of various cultural practices (see the Tahonga Suppression Act).
The real key to the language debate will be who provides the Missionaries. IOTL the English speaking churches or missionary societies provided most of the missionaries and it was these people who did a lot of the early work on making Maori a written language. Their influence put a decidedly English tinge on written Maori, as did the influence of the importation of the Bible (see KJV). So if in Jarod’s TL there is no widespread British missionary movement in NZ, then Maori will be a very different language
So far as population goes, well, I guess it is quite possible for an ATL NZ to carry a much greater population than it did or even does now. In ATL NZ’s population has trebled or so since WW1, through immigration and natural increase. I imagine NZ would have a much higher population now if emigration was not so easy, nor such a tempting prospect (see the hundreds of thousands of NZers living in Australia).
In a pre Modern NZ, there is no real easy exit strategy for most people, so any natural increase is going to have to be absorbed by the country
This of course is going to have pretty terrible effects on the indigenous species, so what the new pests do not exterminate, people will. It has been hard enough IOTL to reduce the incidence of extinction, with a much lower human population. We are just lucky IOTL that as the population has started to shoot up in the 20th century we have also developed both the will and some technical ability to try and mitigate some of our impact on these species.
I also do not see much scope for widespread immigration to NZ in ATL. In OTL there was not a huge amount of immigration to NZ from Britain (local born British outnumbered Britain born British by the mid 1880s iirc) pre 20th century and this during a benign period for British settlement, where the South Island was empty and the Imperial government willing to indulge in long term campaigns to pacify the North Island, alongside the support that British Australian colonies could supply as well (providing a market for NZ produce, for one). All of which probably will not be present here. Why indulge in a costly colonial war over decades in NZ, when you have no real economic reason?
On another note, I disagree that NZ presents huge geographic barriers to consolidation. Obviously there are some barriers yes, but nothing too serious. The local equivalent of the Hindu Kush (the Southern Alps) for example, close off the western half of the upper SI from the eastern half but the net effect of that for human settlement is not a big issue. The mountains and the West Coast provide very little in the way (narrow coastal shelves + river valleys) of land that would be easy to intensively settle. I would imagine that in ATL, as in OTL, the East Coast of the SI is the place where most settlement would take place. In any event, even where there are isolated, yet settle-able areas, the coastal access route is going to be an issue, as it is for any island with worrisome neighbours. I would think it quite possible that the Maori consolidate into half a dozen units, which could consolidate further as a result of war, marriage, or other alliances.
So far as the language goes, well, without any substantive immigrant communities and close, involved control from an outside colonial power, I don’t see how the Maori language will decline. It simply is too far away from any competing forces. In OTL it took a combination of factors (too many to list) to get Maori to the point of near collapse mid 20th century, before the revival started. Many of these competing factors will not occur IOTL – widespread dispossession from all the best areas of land, imposition of a comprehensive English language school system by the colonial government, deliberate legally sanctioned destruction of various cultural practices (see the Tahonga Suppression Act).
The real key to the language debate will be who provides the Missionaries. IOTL the English speaking churches or missionary societies provided most of the missionaries and it was these people who did a lot of the early work on making Maori a written language. Their influence put a decidedly English tinge on written Maori, as did the influence of the importation of the Bible (see KJV). So if in Jarod’s TL there is no widespread British missionary movement in NZ, then Maori will be a very different language
From a point of view of survival, not all that much. The ecology is ruined, but I don't know how much they will care. The Maori in OTL developed (eventually) a sophisticated cultural system which set limits on what could be hunted and so forth, which allowed them to maintain some sustainability.
ITTL, the Maori can rely on domesticated plants and animals, so they haven't developed this ethos.
Even Welsh did pretty badly, too, although most of that collapse was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It's no coincidence that this was the time of improved communications and universal schooling.
The difference with all of these examples is that the peoples in question were not particularly vulnerable to Old World diseases (for obvious reasons); indeed, most of those regions had diseases to which Europeans were more vulnerable. The sort of social disruption which accompanies these diseases is going to make things a lot worse for the Maori (or Aururians) than in sub-Saharan Africa or India.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the Maori language is going to get wiped out, of course. But it does mean that the pressure is a lot worse than in the Old World.
I can safely say that the majority language of Aotearoa in 2010 isn't English.
Make of that what you will.
More written records of their beliefs and traditions, but as a practicing religion it's more or less extinct by the equivalent of the late twentieth century (neo-revivalist movements and syncretic elements in other religions aside). Too much competition from evangelical religions of various stripes.
Danke schon.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I figured. Higher carrying capacity, and this isn't the sort of society which hits the demographic transition in a hurry. The limits to its population will mostly be Malthusian.
Quite. The NZ ecology is unfortunately going to be worse off ITTL. The tuatara will probably survive; the offshore islands where it held on in OTL hold no particular interest to the Maori. But a lot of birds and invertebrates are in big trouble. The kakapo, saddleback and kokako, for instance, are long gone from the mainland. (I'm not sure about offshore islands. Maybe.)
Barring the equivalent of Uitlanders in a Central Otago or west coast gold rush, or a couple of other rather specialised circumstances, I agree.
To consolidation into a half-dozen political entities, there's no particular problem. To consolidation into one political entity, I think that there's a problem. Not an insurmountable one, but it's still going to be awkward.
Yes, Westland will be relatively thinly-occupied (and Fiordland almost deserted). The area around OTL Nelson will have a few more people, but on the whole, yes, Canterbury and Otago are going to hold most of the South Island's population.
The North Island is probably actually worse, from the perspective of geography. A few areas which promote easy local consolidation (eg Bay of Plenty, Northland/Auckland), but not that accessible between them.
The thing about TTL's New Zealand is that land communications are harder than they were in Eurasia around TTL. No beasts of burden, which makes roads of less use to build. The Maori have bronze only, not more abundant iron, which means that they haven't cleared all of the forests yet - there's still abundantly forested areas between the major zones of settlement. There's also the not-completely-insignificant detail of being divided into two big islands. So while the geographical barriers aren't on the scale of the Hindu Kush or the Andes, they're not insigificant, either.
It's the getting down from 6 to 2 or 1 which I think is the difficult part. Not impossible, certainly; as you point out, there are various ways it could happen. But I'm not sure that it's completely likely.
Of course, given the cultural outlook which the Maori had even in OTL, if they do manage to unite, they may even look beyond their own borders.
I certainly agree that this is the minimum required get Maori to decline - and even then it's not guaranteed.
Interesting that you should mention that!
As I alluded to earlier in this post, the native Maori religion doesn't really survive. What it's replaced by will be a major determinant of Aotearoa's future. In linguistic terms, that may just mean that the form of written Maori changes, and which other language provides the greatest proportion of loanwords.
I am really looking forward to your treatment of the missionary/language issue. I take it you are familar with the several (I forget how many) Maori charasmatic movements that arose during the late 19th/early 20th century? Say Ratana or Ringatū?
If we use this as a base, we could end up with something quite new and powerful, maybe akin to an OTL Bahai or Mormon equivalent, that has a very strong NZ base and spreads out to the Islands and beyond.
If you could pull that off, well that would be quite impressive. Imagine a new, persistent monotheist/Christian religion that arises in a non European population in the late Modern era!
If we use this as a base, we could end up with something quite new and powerful, maybe akin to an OTL Bahai or Mormon equivalent, that has a very strong NZ base and spreads out to the Islands and beyond.
If you could pull that off, well that would be quite impressive. Imagine a new, persistent monotheist/Christian religion that arises in a non European population in the late Modern era!
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
I would guess the kiwi is gone as well?
Now a question about Maori dogs, IIRC in OTL the dogs the Maori brought with them did not establish large feral populations like the dingo did because there was not as much for them to prey on in New Zealand.If possums and wallabies are established and breeding like crazy in the wild would that not give the dogs more of an incentive to go feral? If that is the case would that help to keep the numbers of these introduced marsupials in check and lessen the damage they cause?
Well, if it helps, I suggest you visit the Department of Conservation's website for more information on current threatened species (or, as I used to call it as a young child, the Department for Conversation(apparently it took quite some work to convince me I was wrong))
What about the Moriori of Chatham Islands? Have they had any contact with Māori or are they still isolated? I'd think that more populated Aotearoa might encourage exploration and settlement of nearby islands, even if they're more hostile enviroment than Aotearoa.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, Moriori migrated to Chatham islands before 1500, maybe their ancestors had already had contact with Aururians before leaving Aotearoa? Could some of the Aururian crops grow in Chatham islands?
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, Moriori migrated to Chatham islands before 1500, maybe their ancestors had already had contact with Aururians before leaving Aotearoa? Could some of the Aururian crops grow in Chatham islands?
I know of them in broad terms, although I'm not really familiar with the details. Been too long since I covered that subject. I will look them up, though.
That's certainly an intriguing possibility, although there's some other entertaining ones too.
The native Maori religion will gradually be displaced by one or more evangelical religions. Of those, the only realistic contenders are Plirism and various forms of Christianity. Even if the Maori do adopt one of those religions, though, they will certainly put their own slant on it, along the lines of the charismatic movements or some other alternatives.
And if the Maori do adopt an evangelical religion, they may well decide to share the love, in a manner of speaking.
Some of its species are almost certainly gone, although the great spotted kiwi at least is likely to survive; some of the alpine regions it inhabits are so rugged that mammalian predators don't really get established there in numbers, so it may persist. Perhaps some of the other species, too, such as the common (brown) kiwi, if only in offshore islands.
Hadn't really looked into that, but it makes sense. The early Maori wiped out out most of the really big prey animals (mostly moa).
Wallabies, yes. Dogs won't prey on possums in any significant numbers. Possums spend a lot of time on the ground, but they're fast and agile enough (and stay near trees as a refuge) that dogs won't be able to use them as a consistent food source.
To a degree, but wallabies breed pretty fast and possums won't be that easy to hunt, so there would still be severe ecological damage.
What will be interesting too is how much the Maori take up the various Aururian dog breeds.
Useful source; thanks!
This is one area where modern sources differ, to say the least. The most reliable date I've seen for the Maori settlement of the Chathams was 1500, give or take. And this was a Maori settlement; the Maori evolved into the Moriori over the next few centuries.
With more active exploration, the Maori might find the Chathams and settle them a bit earlier. Then again, they might not; the Chathams aren't all that welcoming, really.
Unsurprisingly, the ever-reliable Polonopedia gives contradictory dates for the date the Moriori reached the Chathams. The article on the Moriori says both that they settled in the sixteenth century, and that they settled there before 1500. Go figure. (For what it's worth, the main article on the Chathams supports the 1500 date, too.)
Should do, although getting climate data on the Chathams isn't actually all that easy. They're on about the same latitude as Christchurch, albeit probably more windswept, and all of the main Aururian staples (red yams, cold-adapted wattles, murnong) will probably grow there.
The early Maori who settle the Chathams ITTL will definitely have access to those staple crops, too (although not necessarily the full crop package). The Chathams will have more people, although I doubt that the carrying capacity is that high. A few tens of thousands at most, perhaps less.
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
Will you be giving us a bit more info on them?I bet any emu Wrangling breeds will be popular
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