Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law

by Sally Engle Merry

Overview

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 imperialism swept across the islands. The new law brought novel systems of courts, prisons, and conceptions of discipline and dramatically changed the marriage patterns, work lives, and sexual conduct of the indigenous people of Hawai'i.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691009322
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2000
Series:	Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History , #10
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sally Engle Merry is Class of 1949 Professor of Ethics in the Anthropology Department at Wellesley College. Her books include Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans, and The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation, coedited with Neal Milner. She is currently president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	A Note on Language and Terminology	xiii
1	Introduction	3
Part 1	Encounters in a Contact Zone: New England Missionaries, Lawyers, and the Appropriation of Anglo-American Law, 1820-1852
2	The Process of Legal Transformation	35
3	The First Transition: Religious Law	63
4	The Second Transition: Secular Law	86
Part 2	Local Practices of Policing and Judging in Hilo, Hawai'i
5	The Social History of a Plantation Town	117
6	Judges and Caseloads in Hilo	145
7	Protest and the Law on the Hilo Sugar Plantations	207
8	Sexuality, Marriage, and the Management of the Body	221
9	Conclusions	258
	Appendixes
A	Cases from Hilo District Court	269
B	Accompanying Tables	325
	Notes	331
	References	349
	Index	365

What People are Saying About This

Don Brenneis

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

From the Publisher

"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

Hiram Levy

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, Northwestern University School of Law

Annelise Riles

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

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2002 Williard Hurst Prize in Legal History

From the Publisher