Sublime

Hawaiians' authenticity as an autochthonous people was and is often tied to their relationship to land and ocean.

China grew quantitatively, not qualitatively. Part of the reason, Elvin argued, was the inward turn we have noticed already: the shrinking of China’s external contacts as the Ming abandoned the sea.

Turning their back on a maritime future may have been a concession to their gentry officials (who disliked eunuch influence), but it was also a bow to financial constraints and the supreme priority of dynastic survival.

As ambassadors of aloha, Hawaiian women have been susceptible to the eroticization of their bodies and the insistent commodification of their aloha.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

Commodified Hawaiian culture—the “luau,” the “hula girl,” and “aloha”—became part of the American vernacular and everyday life.

China’s communications, as well as the managing of its fragile environment – dependent on water, threatened by floods – required an unusual degree of bureaucratic liaison between centre, province and district.

We should react sceptically to grand generalizations about stasis and stagnation. Nor should we be too quick to assume that China’s very limited participation in international trade after c.1690 signalled its incorporation into the subordinate ‘periphery’ of a European ‘world system’.76 Indeed, closer inspection may suggest that the reconstruction