Hinterlands and Mobile Courts of the Hawai`i Island State

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The eighteenth century Hawai`i Island state included more than 400 local communities divided among six districts, each with a resident elite. The king’s mobile court of as many as a thousand people frequently moved from one highly productive district core to another. The "capital" was wherever the king resided. Varying in time and space, hinterlands were anywhere the court was not, with the potential for disputes tending to vary with geographical or political distance. Hinterland residents included both commoners who provided nearly all the kingdom’s productive work and low-ranked government officials with whom they negotiated the payment of tax in kind, corvée labor on public works, military service, and ritual participation. Commoners negotiated double title to their lands in the form of both inheritance from parents and grants by resident officials. Commoner revolts against greedy kings and insurrections led by factions of district chiefs appear to represent negotiation by other means and may in part evince the emergence of the Hawaiian primary state during which the people’s gifts traditionally donated to be redistributed by generous high chiefs became tax revenues collected to fund the governing apparatus of politically powerful kings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25200