A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages through Tropical Time

This is a book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space. It spans the centuries from the first, pre-European, Melanesian and Polynesian settlement of Islands from New Guinea to Tahiti and Easter Island, until the present day. Indigenous social, economic and political systems are examined and then the post-sixteenth-century European 'discovery' of the Pacific. Cultural, political, trading, social and personal exchanges in island worlds are analysed and described, from 1767 to the year 2000.