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refusal to accept this kapu, and this phenomenon, I argue, caused Hawaiian law to evolve a new written form; the first kānāwai were issued by the ali‘i, printed and distributed in 1823 and 1825. This book highlights the political deliberations between ali‘i over the sale of a Hawaiian woman to a British ship captain in 1825, and the fallout from three attacks on mission stations by whalers and sailors angered over the ban. The misplaced blame of the sailors further illustrates their mistaken apprehension that missionaries rather than Hawaiian chiefs were the source of law. This new history also reconsiders the arrival of American Christian missionaries in 1820 by looking back at the experiences and narrative productions of Hawaiians in New England. By looking at the continuity of missionary contact with Hawai‘i through the production of narratives of native converts, before their actual arrival in the islands, this book illuminates New England missionaries’ discursive preparations and justifications for their settlement project.

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      My view of missionary work in 1820s Hawai‘i argues against previous historians’ insistence that the ABCFM missionaries brought a vigorous colonial endeavor to the islands.¹⁶ In this respect it is both inspired by and in dialogue with important new work in native and indigenous studies, most importantly Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting.¹⁷ O’Brien has written a history of the birth of a new American discourse, a proliferation of local histories that firmly fixed non-Indian settlers and their descendants in the landscape of the new nation by repeatedly pronouncing the absence of Indians from early nineteenth-century America.¹⁸ Her work focuses specifically on the local histories written and circulated in southern New England, the same region from which the Sandwich Island Mission came. These southern New England histories “made the boldest claims to ‘firsting,’ ” which O’Brien describes as an assertion by non-Indians that they were “the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice.” In order for that narrative to address the obvious pre-existence of Indians on the land that became southern New England, those histories also had to assert that the last of those Indians had come and gone. Indian disappearance left the land unencumbered of past names and meaningfulness; the histories of non-Indians’ new nation could be built upon clean ground.

      Even though the Sandwich Islands Mission emerged from this same home, such a discourse of “firsting” and “lasting” could find no purchase in the Hawaiian Islands of the 1820s. Instead, missionary letters and publications circulated throughout America and beyond were full of descriptions of Hawai‘i and Hawaiians, made for foreign consumption. This textual production of Hawai‘i far exceeded the writings of explorers, “discoverers,” ship captains, and merchants combined. But it did not perhaps exceed the writings and oral literature of kānaka maoli themselves, written and published ma ka ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (in the Hawaiian language) over the next century after the mission arrived.¹⁹ The 1820s is an important period when, for kānaka maoli, the production of the history of Hawai‘i was moving between oral/aural production and performance, writing, and print, while at the same time the creation and circulation of non-Hawaiian views of Hawai‘i and its natives was increasing in volume.

      This book is also in conversation with histories of encounter, especially those written about Indian and non-Indian, maoli (Hawaiian, indigenous) and haole first contacts.²⁰ Encounters are important points of engagement, meeting, and coming together. But the paradigm of encounter tends to reify a homogeneity of “encounter culture,” which the parties encountering each other must unequivocally represent. Thus histories of encounter tend to emphasize fatal impacts, worlds colliding, with contention and conflict defining the interpretations of events. This book seeks a different approach, one more akin to the confluence of worlds, where the mixing of numerous languages, social practices, and ways of defining life works fluidly. It highlights what occurs when people from different meaning-making systems engage with one another; moments of understanding and misunderstanding become constitutive of historical outcomes. Concentrating on negotiations and deliberations at the confluence of worlds of words, rather than always emphasizing conflict and clashing, helps us see Hawaiian governing practices and transformations in Hawaiian law in context, a critical correction of previous histories’ characterization of Hawaiian rule through distant and deeply ideological concepts like feudalism, despotism, and tyranny.

      Early chapters examine little-known interactions between the ali‘i, merchants, and ship captains in the sandalwood trade, who each have their own, often differing concepts of debt and obligation, as well as important moments in New England missionary efforts to plan and plant a mission in the Hawaiian Islands. Highlighting these moments reveals the ubiquity of Hawaiian self-governance in the 1820s, as well as its characteristics and underlying principles. Later chapters on changes in Hawaiian law during this period examine the critical addition of written laws (kānāwai) to enhance chiefly kapu. These chapters also argue that the unruly behavior of foreigners in the islands—men who were not subjects of kapu—forced the chiefs to extend their jurisdiction over foreigners. As increasing numbers of whalers arrived at the islands, sexual encounters between Hawaiian women and foreign men would bring the ali‘i, foreign sailors, ship captains, merchants, and American missionaries into serious conflict beginning in 1825, resulting in the pronouncement of kapu by the ali‘i that sought to limit foreigners’ access to Hawaiian women. I follow the discussions that ali‘i had in the ‘aha ‘ōlelo, or chiefly council, over whether their pronouncements should also apply to foreigners or to Hawaiian people exclusively. The result is a more accurate history of Hawaiian politics, the evolution of Hawaiian law, and the extension of chiefly rule over foreigners.

      My research seeks to clear a space for understanding different value systems borne by different groups in my history. By incorporating different approaches, methods, and ways of reading sources in Hawaiian and English, I seek to narrate a more nuanced account of the story of settlement, one that illustrates the centrality of indigenous-language sources to writing histories of encounter. The challenge in writing this history has been communicating a robust Hawaiian language and sign base during the moment when these sources were just beginning to be produced, making room for Hawaiian disciplinary paradigms of historical thinking and praxis alongside powerful legitimated Euro-American narratives. Thus this work utilizes methodological and interpretive techniques that may be applied in other histories of colonial settlement, especially where native-language sources are available.

      The distance between Hawai‘i and the American and European worlds was not just one of nautical miles; it was an imaginative space enlarged by the projection and production of Hawai‘i and Hawaiians as objects of knowledge by New England merchants, missionaries, visiting transient explorers, and ship captains. Alongside that production of Hawai‘i, this book deliberately places the actions and words of maoli and haole in cultural contexts in ways that resonate with how Hawaiians of this period deliberated and acted in relation to their own constructions of the past. Numerous histories have been written detailing the background of the missionaries and merchants that came to Hawai‘i, mapping the historical trajectory of their journeys.²¹ This work argues that the actions and choices of Hawaiians cannot be interpreted unless scholars take into account Hawaiian understandings of the past and their material (embodied) relationships to that past. Hawaiians in this period under study were people to whom the past mattered. And like other people who had rigorous criteria, pedagogies, and rules for the “scripting,” maintenance, and use of that past, they made decisions—especially political and legal decisions—in reference to that past. Framing present actions with historical thought and justification ensured that the past gave meaning and a sense of order and continuity to governance in the present.

      In his theoretical piece on “the concept of language” in the historian’s work, J. G. A. Pocock warned historians seeking to study “languages of political thought” that “we wish to study the languages in which utterances were performed, rather than the utterances which were performed in them.”²² While Pocock addressed historians working with languages of political thought in early modern Europe, his theoretical piece is vital for informing this study. Like early modern European historians, Hawai‘i and Pacific historians, especially Māori and Maoli historians, are engaged in the deep study of “idioms, rhetorics, specialized vocabularies and grammars, modes of discourse or ways of talking about politics which have been created

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