That isn’t what I’m talking about, though. The later period, once the plantation system of firmly established, the ruling class purposefully adopted western monarchial styles in order to argue that they were indeed western and civilzed. Many also adopted Christianity. Even the attempts to stop the planter class from overthrowing the monarchy through popular democratic demand did nothing to stop the overthrow of that government and the installation of a foreign power. And again, the existence of previous kinds of imperialism (which I don’t know if you’d call it imperialism, as I’d assume that the Tahitians and Hawaiians were probably more equal in cultural and technological power than the 19th century Hawaiians and the US at the time) doesn’t justify what happened. Period.
And please… no one thinks that Europeans invented imperialism–that completely flattens the differences between the different imperial systems historically and it downplays the continued impact of European and American imperialism. They aren’t all the same and to imagine that they are and that the existence of previous empire building justifies the continuation of the system is really missing the point.
The modern verison of Euro-centric imperialism carried with it a racist ideology to justify itself and the extraction of resources under the guise of the civilizing mission. Those structures have created the world we live in today and continues to lead to negative outcomes for countries that were colonized.
