Colonizing Hawai'i and Colonizing Elsewhere: Toward a History of U.S. Imperial Law

The colonization of Polynesia is usually placed well toward the end of the broader narrative of European and American overseas conquest and colonization. European contact with many island peoples occurred in the late eighteenth century or after, with formal claims to control of the islands coming later. Japanese and U.S. imperial expansion in the region became important forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet characterizing colonizing in Polynesia as peculiarly sudden can create distortions. The preoccupation with the study of first contact has shifted attention from the important decades leading up to formal colonization. The emphasis also threatens to reproduce early European representations of the islands as sheltered, idyllic havens peopled by colorful innocents. And portraying Polynesian colonizing as unique in timing and pattern has distanced it from the ...

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