By the time of the Hawaiian Islands’ “discovery” by Western civilization, the individual islands had already undergone a long and bloody process of unification within each island, maintaining their independence from one another. Upon the arrival of Western settlers, King Kamehameha I quickly purchased guns and ocean-going ships from the colonists and invaded and conquered the adjacent islands: first Maui and then Oahu. Once again, as in the case of the Moriori and Maori in the Chatham Islands, it was circumstances and means that made the difference, as Jared Diamond argued in his “Guns, Germs, Steel.”
