Bibliographical Essay

Historians of violence in the colonial Pacific have had ready access to a colossal body of published works. Any studies on this topic should commence by consulting the immense work by Rodrigue Levesque (ed.), History of Micronesia: A Collection of Documentary Sources (Gatineau: Levesque Publications, 1992-2002).

The bedrock of the many scholarly treatments of the Cook voyages since the 1950s is the landmark work of J. C. Beaglehole who compiled and annotated the voyage journals of James Cook and other principals and lower-ranking chroniclers of Cook's three epic voyages in five volumes: The Journals of Captain James Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). Subsequent historians have worked over these sources, with some having problematised the inherent violence within these accounts more than others. In O. H. K. Spate's sweeping three-volume masterwork, The Pacific since Magellan (Canberra: Australian National University Press): vol. I, The Spanish Lake (1979), vol. ö Monopolists and Freebooters (1983) and vol. iii, Paradise Found and Lost (1988), violence is a consistent feature in the Pacific colonial histories he recounted. Spate's focus on the era after colonial contact entails details of colonial conquest, piracy, encounters and explorations.

Since the 1990s histories have attempted to tell a story about violence from Indigenous perspectives. For instance, Anne Salmond's Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992) attempted to do this from the viewpoint of New Zealand's Maori. The scholarly tsunami created by the intense debates sparked by Gananath Obeyesekere's The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Marshall Sahlins's How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) plumbed not only the circumstances surrounding the killing of Captain Cook in Hawai'i but also the politics of scholarly position and the limitations of Western scholarly enterprise. For scholars interested in violence in its colonial context, these debates and their ramifications were considerable. For Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask in her provocative work From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), colonial violence was redefined, expanded and given renewed contemporary relevance in current debates about Indigenous rights. Trask also homed in on the politics of gender and how central violence towards women was in the forging of Pacific empires. This theme was highlighted in works by Teresia Teaiwa, notably 'Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans', Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994), 87-109, and Patricia O'Brien's The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), as well as in the works of Margaret Jolly, including her co-edited work with Serge Tcherkezoff and Darrell Tryon, Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2009). Recently David Igler has recognised the prominent place of violence in Pacific colonial history in his ‘Hardly Pacific: Violence and Death in the Great Ocean', Pacific Historical Review 84.1 (2015), 1-18. More specifically, a special edition of the journal Colonialism and the Colonial History 18.1 (2017), ‘“Rough Justice”: Punitive Expeditions in Oceania', edited by Chris Ballard and Bronwen Douglas, again signals a growing interest of scholars in violence as a historical frame of Pacific colonial history.