Taylor strangely discusses what Europeans are doing in the Pacific which most people think is not much. People don’t tend to associate early colonization with anything in the Pacific, due to its difficult to be reached. As Taylor points out, the region of the Hawaiian islands begins to become more frequently visited by explores and traders thus their importance in American history starts early than typically expected. I like how Taylor takes a commonly unimportant region and turns it into a crossroads of relevancy. The islands become a crossroads in the region for traders from the Far East to North America which threw the islands into new cultural encounters and transformations of their own. In the 1780s Kamehameha won the local arms race to become the dominant chief of the region. Kamehameha exploited the Europeans for their technology to better establish his dominance. One such British naval officer, George Vancouver, even provided Kamehameha with warship with which to accomplish his goals. The British believed that the islands were their protectorate and thus wanted Kamehameha to win dominance so to unify the islands, possibly under British control. There were also European mariners who would abandon ship to live on the islands. They did this because on the island they were desired for their skills military advisors and artisan so the local chiefs would provide them with land, prestige, wealth, and even a wife. Compared to the hard life at sea, this was a dream come true for the mariners.<\/p>\n

It is important to note that the Hawaiians faced many of the same problems that other natives faced such as germs causing disease, weapons, and missionaries trying to convert their people. Although, thanks to Kamehameha these shocks were limited and the people recovered from them and had no real problems with the Europeans. This makes the Hawaiian islands an exception to how many natives were dealt with. As pointed out by King, European missionaries would result to intimidation tactics or forced assimilation to convert native peoples but, according to Taylor, the Hawaiians did not face this problem. It is possible that they did face \u00a0similar problems but that Taylor felt it unnecessary to mention them but it is possible that Europeans would be less willing to convert people forcibly who were recently well armed and hard to reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taylor strangely discusses what Europeans are doing in the Pacific which most people think is not much. People don’t tend to associate early colonization with anything in the Pacific, due to its difficult to be reached. As Taylor points out, the region of the Hawaiian islands begins to become more frequently visited by explores and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Hawaii’s Importance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,180],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hawaii","tag-kamehameha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}