The Maori and History: A Brief Study

Abstract

The 19th century witnessed some of the most dramatic, revolutionary and cumulative changes in the fabric of civilization, changes that differentiate one age sharply from another. It saw the diffusion of Western civilization, including Science and Knowledge as well as colonization, over the whole earth. The Europeanization of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, sweeping in a mighty current of new forces into every corner of the world, breaking down the age long barriers of isolation and antiquity, is unparalleled in its geographical range and revolutionary results on the human race. Yet it has its prototype in the first great diffusion of culture from the harbours of the Archaic civilizations of Egypt, Crete, the Aegean, Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesapotamia, up into Europe, down into India, across to China, out into Oceania and across the Pacific. Here for the first time on earth, civilization was born in the South Eastern Corner of the Mediterranean, and its elements diffused to all parts of the world in varying degrees through the contact of civilizing agents, who at different periods in historic and fore-historic times have migrated over the world in quest of precious substances, such as pearls, jade and metals, which were valued by the men of these early religious civilizations as "Givers of life." To-day the world is an economic unit. The isolation of the vast regions of Eastern Asia and the Pacific areas from Europe and Eastern America of 1815 is no more.