As a result of the voyage of Columbus, Pope Alexander the VI canonized the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493, to justify the conquest of the “New World,” leading Spain and other European powers to invade non-Christian lands.[11] While the Church’s purpose was to expand Christianity, European royalty saw opportunities to fund their wars, gain wealth, and increase their access to land and resources for their populations. Hence, Europeans began their systematic assault on Indigenous peoples, their culture and their lives. First, by providing European technologies, such as weaponry and metal tools, thereby transforming economic systems. Next, by introducing Christian teachings in order to convert the native, while attacking their cultural traditions and identity. Then finally, by politically exploiting the traditional divisions between tribes, clans, nations, and religions. Yet, this is where the similarities between Imperialism and colonialism ends. One of the main differences concerning the two is the “presence or absence of significant numbers of permanent settlers from the colonizing power.”[12] It is important to understand these concepts of political and economic expansionism in order to better appreciate how the colonial experience in Hawaii was different from other Indigenous groups.
Imperialism, as defined by George Steinmetz, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, is a “strategy of political control over foreign lands that does not necessarily involve conquest, occupation, and durable rule by outside invaders.”[13] Western empires divvied-up their claims of authority to the lands, resources and peoples throughout the non-Christian world. Imperialist administrators were then free to establish their dominance over political and economic functions, and designate the inhabitants of their new colony as subjects under their crown dividing the people by means of “race,” tribe or religion. Henceforth, ruling under “indirect rule,” where white governance designated native leaders as surrogates for the crown, dictating policy, laws, and taxing without representation. Then imperial court systems further divided peoples, maintaining a system of “confusion, [which] resulted from the overlap between the criminal jurisdictions” of differing courts or being subjected to the authority of an “absentee court” held in Europe.[14] Further jurisdictional conflict came into question within the government allowed native courts, where authority was given to the elite or elderly natives within the community [to] administer native laws and customs” to their own people, however they had no authority to bring a white man to court.[15] Imperialist nations largely were represented on the continent of Africa and through Asia and much of the Pacific.
Settler-colonialism on the other hand, “employs a “logic of elimination.”[16] The goal of settler colonialism is not just to exploit labor and resources as other forms of colonialism do, but to eliminate Indigenous communities so that they can more freely claim lands, resources and install their own “civilization.” Extreme violence and forced assimilation mark the actions of settler colonial nations, with policies of genocide, removal, and acts of erasure of the Indigenous peoples.[17] Throughout the Americas and Australia, examples of settler-colonial violence were perpetrated against Indigenous communities for the purpose of instituting white-rule to subjugate and erase.[18]
Nancy Shoemaker, a historian who has categorized twelve different forms of colonialism, the “foreign intrusion and/or domination” of another country.[19] In “Typology of Colonialism,” Shoemaker argues that Hawaiʻi did not suffer from settler-colonialism, but what she coined as “rogue colonialism.” While Hawaiʻi demonstrated signs of “settler-colonialism, imperialism, and planter-colonialism as motivating factors,” Shoemaker points out that rogue colonialism “raises critical questions about how individuals and the state interact in the colonizing endeavors.”[20]