When Women Ruled the Pacific: Power and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Tahiti and Hawai'i (Studies in Pacific Worlds) by Joy Schulz
English | August 1st, 2023 | ISBN: 1496231805 | 166 pages | True EPUB | 4.67 MB
Throughout the nineteenth century British and American imperialists advanced into the Pacific, with catastrophic effects for Polynesian peoples and cultures. In both Tahiti and Hawai'i, women rulers attempted to mitigate the effects of these encounters, utilizing their power amid the destabilizing influence of the English and Americans. However, as the century progressed, foreign diseases devastated the Tahitian and Hawaiian populations, and powerful European militaries jockeyed for more formal imperial control over Polynesian waystations, causing Tahiti to cede rule to France in 1847 and Hawai'i to relinquish power to the United States in 1893.