New Zealand in the 1820s had no government or bureaucratic presence; no newspapers were published; the literate population was probably no more than a couple of dozen people at any one time. Early explorers' assessments of New Zealand were haphazard at best - few knew what to make of this foreign land and its people ... Paul Moon details how so many of the events in this decade - the introduction of aggressive capitalism, the arrival of literacy and the beginnings of M ori print culture, intertribal warfare, Hongi Hika and the British connection, colonisation as a simultaneously destructive and beneficial force - influenced the nation's evolution over the remainder of the century.