To be honest, I think that these PODs- 'what if there were no indigenous Americans and Europeans met mammoths?', 'What if there were no indigenous Australians and Europeans met carnivorous kangaroos?'- are in pretty bad taste.
There's something racist about treating the tangata whenua as disposable so that we can have a conversation about how Europeans would have interacted with Haast's Eagle.
Which is completely irrelevant to my point.
I'm not accusing you of an agenda.
You tagged me and asked for my response to the question, and I answered it honestly.
The scale of New Zealand's ecosystem might provide it some protection - isolated populations of Moa possibly survived into the 1700's, so the Moa might survive colonisation, until the beginnings of the conservation movement.There are ways to handle WI scenarios which involve the disappearance and non-existence of different ethnic groups and other populations. This include ethnic groups and other populations which have been subjugated or minoritized. I can imagine scenarios where the Welsh are as thoroughly assimilated as the Cornish, say, or ones where French is a dead language. I can also imagine scenarios where the proto-Maori never made it to New Zealand; navigation on the high seas is risky.
Key, I think, is making it clear that this scenario where one group or another does not exist is not a utopia. "If only these people never existed, things would be so much better!"
Turning to this scenario, I suspect that the New Zealand ecology will be thoroughly ravaged. Leaving aside salutary examples like terraformed Ascension, 19th century globalization tended to wreak havoc on isolated ecosystems. Absent someone remarkably conservation minded, New Zealand would differ only in scale.
The key problem is that whilst it is reasonable to assume that a 19th century settlement might be more willing and able to try and control impact of humans on a virgin territory, the settlement would likely be quite slow and sporadic anyway. So in the first wave of settlers there could be many who do just go hog wild hunting for decades with little care, supervision or opprobrium
Thanks. As you are New Zealander, I was waiting for your reply. Indeed, I tagged you.
What about my other question: Would a New Zealand without Maori be part of Australia?
I think there are too many variables. It could even be there isn't an Australia, so big the POD is.
If we are talking about a scenario where the proto-Maori never come to New Zealand and the archipelago remains unpopulated, this might have relatively few butterfly effects on world history. Th Americas had come, by the time of Columbus, to be populated over tens of thousands of years by tens of millions of people whose civilizations had a major effect on the world environment. New Zealand, for its part, seems to have had a peak pre-colonization population of 100 thousand or so descending from a migration in the 13th century or so.
Depending on the POD that led to the non-settlement, even Polynesia might be unaffected. I am inclined to think the chain of events that led to the ascension of western European maritime powers to global influence can and will proceed as OTL.
I believe JV is referring to how this would greatly impact British settler colonisation in Australia and potentially mean the federation if those colonies never actually occurs.
