You don’t give native Hawaiians enough credit here. The Tahitians figured out how to invade the Hawaiian Islands and establish themselves as ruling aristocrats all by themselves without any white European imperialists to help them. Remember, Tahitian invasion of the Hawaiian Islands was well before Europeans were wandering the Pacific. If their own stories are to believed, they were fighting wars of aggression for centuries before Captain Cook dropped by.
Lots of societies developed imperial systems, not just Europeans. The Han Chinese built a series of empires, crushing outsiders or pushing them to the margins. I lost count of how many times they took over Tibet. The Mongols built their own empire that nearly conquered western Europe and Japan, and no, they weren’t copying European crusaders. They figured it out themselves. Islam built an empire that ruled the Mideast and North Africa. The Mexica built an empire in what is now Mexico. They didn’t need to sit around waiting for Cortez. The Inca built an extensive empire in South America. They conquered and exploited just fine without European help. The Ottomans built an empire based on their command of artillery. The Hollywood version might have dumped in Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to teach them how to cast a cannon, but that was the Hollywood version.
I admit that the European imperialist empire was unique in that it actually did span the entire world, unlike, let us say, the Mongols who only conquered two continents, but the Europeans did not invent imperialism. It has been around for millennia.
