Transforming Hawai'i : balancing coercion and consent in eighteenth-century Kānaka Maoli statecraft / Paul D'Arcy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

D'Arcy, Paul, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hawaii--History--To 1893.

Hawaii.

Hawaii--Politics and government.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxix, 310 pages)

Place of Publication:

ANU Press 2018

Acton, Australian Capital Territory : Australian National University Press, 2018.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This study examines the role of coercion in the unification of the Hawaiian Islands by Kamehameha I between 1782 and 1812 at a time of increasing European contact. Three interrelated themes in Hawaiian political evolution are examined: the balance between coercion and consent; the balance between general structural trends and specific individual styles of leadership and historical events; and the balance between indigenous and European factors. The resulting synthesis is a radical reinterpretation of Hawaiian warfare that treats it as an evolving process heavily imbued with cultural meaning. Hawaiian history is also shown to be characterised by fluid changing circumstances, including crucial turning points when options were adopted that took elements of Hawaiian society on paths of development that proved decisive for political unification. These watershed moments were neither inevitable nor predictable. Perhaps the greatest omission in the standard discourse on the political evolution of Hawaiian society is the almost total exclusion of modern indigenous Hawaiian scholarship on this topic. Modern historians from the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa argue that political leadership and socioeconomic organisation were much more consensus-based than is usually allowed for. Above all, this study finds modern indigenous Hawaiian studies a much better fit with the historical evidence than more conventional scholarship.

Contents:

Three Key Debates: Positioning Hawai'i in World History

Gathering Momentum: Power in Hawai'i to 1770

The Hawaiian Political Transformation from 1770 to 1796

The Hawaiian Military Transformation from 1770 to 1796

The Pursuit of Power in Hawai'i from 1780 to 1796

Creating a Kingdom: Hawai'i from 1796 to 1819

The Hawaiian Achievement in Comparative Perspective.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on: online resource; title from pdf title page (JSTOR, viewed July 13, 2020).

ISBN:

9781760461744

1760461741

Publisher Number:

10.22459/TH.06.2018