Colonizing Hawai'I: The Cultural Power of Law
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...
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"This is an important study which details a crucial (and often ignored) chapter in American legal history. It stands to make an important contribution to the anthropology of law, to the history of colonial legality, and to the methodology of ethnography in the archives."—Annelise Riles, Cornell University"This is a work of exceptional merit: substantively innovative and valuable, interpretively cogent and insightful, stylistically lucid and engaging. It reads very well as a significant account of the historical Hawaiian situation and as a major contribution to a multidimensional examination of colonial law and, especially, of a crucial and fairly singular American colonial enterprise."—Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on Language and Terminology1Introduction3Pt. 1Encounters in a Contact Zone: New England Missionaries, Lawyers, and the Appropriation of Anglo-American Law, 1820-18522The Process of Legal Transformation353The First Transition: Religious Law634The Second Transition: Secular Law86Pt. 2Local Practices of Policing and Judging in Hilo, Hawai'i5The Social History of a Plantation Town1176Judges and Caseloads in Hilo1457Protest and the Law on the Hilo Sugar Plantations2078Sexuality, Marriage, and the Management of the Body2219Conclusions258App. ACases from Hilo District Court269App. BAccompanying Tables325Notes331References349Index365
