The New PacificWhat has happened to the pacific islanders as a result of their progressive entanglement with global society? The picture is mixed according to region, colonial history, resource distribution, and other factors. For lack of space I can only lightly sample, starting with Polynesia. To begin with, the Polynesian populations were hard hit by imported diseases. For example, in the century that followed Cook’s opening of Hawaii to the outside world, the number of Hawaiians declined to less than 50,000 a horrendous drop whether the pre-Cook population was 250,000 or closer to 1 million, as current revisionists advocate. Even harder hit were the Polynesians living on lonely Rapa Nui at the time of European contact. By 1877, 150 years after Roggeveen first sighted the island on an Easter Sunday, only around 100 members of the original population remained. After a slow decline, the population had plunged precipitously starting in 1862 and 1863 when slave raiders carried off more than 1,000 people to Peru. Most quickly sickened and died there, and he handful who were returned after an international outcry brought back smallpox, measles, and various respiratory diseases that almost succeed in finishing off those who had escaped the slave raidersDuring the nineteenth century, France, Britain, the United States, Germany, British New Zealand, and Chile took over the various Polynesian archipelagos, either through outright annexation or by imposing protectorates of various sorts, White settlers were most numerous in Hawai'i and Aotearoa, and the Hawaiians and Maori ended up losing most of their lands. They became minorities on their own islands, forced to compete with the more numerous descendants of later migrantsOther Polynesians kept control of most of their lands and have recently organized independent or quasi-independent nation-states. Because of the lack of local economic opportunities, however, many of them have left their islands. Over one-third of the 3oo,ooo-plus Samoans and more than half of the citizens of the smaller islands and archipelagos of Tokelau, Niue, and the Cook Islands live overseas in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and even in Europe. According to sonre analysts, this out-migration has radically "underdeveloped" these islands, turning them into consumer dependencies disproportionally populated by older people and young children supported largely by remittances sent by the economically active islanders living overseas.
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