The Red Menace
Banned
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/new-zealand-could-have-been-part-of-the-united-states-1791602740
So, if New Zealand joined USA in 1860s-1870s how would it reflect on geopolitics in the Pacific Ocean? What impact would it have on relations with the British Empire? What about relations with Australia?...there was a brief period in the 19th century when it looked like New Zealand might join the United States. And there were a lot of perfectly logical reasons for it.
New Zealand became a British colony in 1841, but white emigration to the island nation, which was inhabited by the native Maori people, didn’t really surge until gold was discovered in 1861. The gold rush saw New Zealand’s population explode in the 1860s from roughly 99,000 at the start of the decade to 256,000 by 1871. The gold rush brought plenty of Californians, and the colony became inundated with a relatively small but rowdy bunch of Americans who didn’t acknowledge any allegiance to the United Kingdom.
As historian Gerald Horne explains in the 2007 book The White Pacific, “When gold was discovered in Otago in 1861, it was the New Zealanders who attracted attention from California to the point where there was very temporary talk of New Zealand becoming a part of the United States. In both England and New Zealand it was widely believed that an independent New Zealand would gravitate toward the U.S. sphere.”
If the small colony of New Zealand had sought independence from Britain in the 1860s or 70s, Americans could well be calling it a territory, or even a state. After all, there were just 33 American states in 1860.