Voyages and Beaches : Pacific Encounters, 1769-1840

Writing from and between a variety of disciplines, scholars from European, Polynesian and Settler backgrounds show how the Pacific reveals a more various and contradictory history than that supposed by such homogenizing metropolitan myths as the introduction of civilization to savage peoples, the general ruin of indigenous cultures by an imperial juggernaut, or the mimicry of European models by an abject population.