Colonizing Hawaiʻi : the cultural power of law / Sally Engle Merry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Merry, Sally Engle, 1944-2020.

Series:

Princeton studies in culture/power/history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hawaiians--Government relations.

Hawaiians.

Hawaiians--Legal status, laws, etc.

Hawaiians--Politics and government.

Customary law--Hawaii.

Customary law.

International relations.

United States--Foreign relations--Hawaii.

United States.

Hawaii--Foreign relations--United States.

Hawaii.

Local Subjects:

Customary law--Hawaii.

Hawaiians--Government relations.

Hawaiians--Legal status, laws, etc.

Hawaiians--Politics and government.

United States--Foreign relations--Hawaii.

Hawaii--Foreign relations--United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 371 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2000]

Summary:

How does law transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured social world characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was simultaneously a means of transformation and a marker of the seductive idea of civilization. Sally Engle Merry reveals how, in Hawai'i, indigenous Hawaiian law was displaced by a transplanted Anglo-American law as global movements of capitalism, Christianity, and imperialism swept across the islands. The new law brought novel systems of courts, prisons, and conceptions of discipline and dramatically changed the marriage patterns, work lives, and sexual conduct of the indigenous people of Hawai'i.

Colonizing Hawai'i traces the complex and uncertain process of colonialism from the vantage point of a small town in windward Hawai'i. Caught in global movements of capital and imperialism, local actors nevertheless shaped the practices of the lower courts. Merry examines a century of court records from this town to illuminate striking changes in everyday social life, demonstrating the cultural power of law to articulate a new cultural order on the fragments of the old. The book is a groundbreaking analysis of the intersection of the global and the local at a nineteenth-century crossroads. As a study of transnational law and the changes it wrought in a local community, it offers insights into globalizations past with implications for globalizations present and future.

Contents:

Part 1 Encounters in a Contact Zone: New England Missionaries, Lawyers, and the Appropriation of Anglo-American Law, 1820-1852

2 The Process of Legal Transformation 35

3 The First Transition: Religious Law 63

4 The Second Transition: Secular Law 86

Part 2 Local Practices of Policing and Judging in Hilo, Hawai'i

5 The Social History of a Plantation Town 117

6 Judges and Caseloads in Hilo 145

7 Protest and the Law on the Hilo Sugar Plantations 207

8 Sexuality, Marriage, and the Management of the Body 221

A Cases from Hilo District Court 269.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [349]-363) and index.

ISBN:

0691009317

0691009325

OCLC:

41266257