The Musket Wars were a series of as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought throughout New Zealand as well as the Chatham Islands among Māori between 1807 and 1845, after Māori first obtained muskets and then engaged in an intertribal arms race in order to gain territory or seek revenge for past defeats. The battles resulted in the loss of between 20,000 and 40,000 lives and the enslavement of tens of thousands of Māori and significantly altered the rohe, or tribal territorial boundaries, before the imposition of colonial government in the 1840s. The wars are seen as an example of the "fatal impact" of indigenous contact with Europeans.