How does law transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured
social world characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a
cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century
colonialism. It was simultaneously a means of transformation and a
marker of the seductive idea of civilization. Sally Engle Merry reveals
how, in Hawai'i, indigenous Hawaiian law was displaced by a transplanted
Anglo-American law as global movements of capitalism, Christianity, and
imperialism swept across the islands. The new law brought novel systems
of courts, prisons, and conceptions of discipline and dramatically
changed the marriage patterns, work lives, and sexual conduct of the
indigenous people of Hawai'i.