Last Among Equals is the first detailed account of Hawaii's quest for statehood. It is a story of struggle and accommodation, of how Hawaii was gradually absorbed into the politcal, economic, and ideological structures of American life. It also recounts the complex process that came into play when the states of the Union were confronted with the difficulty of granting admission to a non-contiguous territory with an overwhelmingly non-Caucasian population. More than any previous study of modern Hawaii, this book explains why Hawaii's legitimate claims to equality and autonomy as a state were frustrated for more than half a century. Last Among Equals is sure to remain a standard reference for modern Hawaiian and American political historians. As important, it will require a reevaluation of two commonly held myths: that of racial harmony in Hawaii and that of automatic equality under the Constitution of the United States.

How did early nineteenth-century foreigners understand Hawaiian chiefly politics? What kinds of cultural resources did Hawaiians themselves have to make sense of their own structures of domination and those of the West? What was the outcome in political terms of the encounter between Hawaiians and foreigners? To answer these questions, this volume takes readers on an ethnographic journey through Hawaii's early contact period. It begins by exploring the translation work done by American Protestant missionaries, who played a central role in bridging cultural differences between Hawaiians and Westerners. Evangelicalism and liberal capitalism set the stage for constructing political images of a "pagan" society, and the present work follows the subsequent evolution and transformation of these images. Inventing Politics is a theoretical statement of a new kind of political anthropology. Through an extensive use of primary sources, including many contemporary Hawaiian-language newspapers and dictionaries, it argues that what informs our current understanding of politics was already present in the early nineteenth-century encounters between Hawaiians and foreigners--a reading that translates seemingly apolitical events into the language of politics and speaks to the fundamental question of whether politics is a functional aspect of every society or an invention based on specific cultural meanings and interests.

A view of Hawai'i through the lens of class, race and gender and how the factors of money, color and sex influence local politics and society.

Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai‘i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement. Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai‘i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai‘i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai‘i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.