The idea that disease was a handmaiden of European colonization is by now a familiar trope. Thanks in part to widely successful (and critiqued) pop-histories such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, but also much-respected academic works by historians like Alfred Crosby, Paul Kelton, J. R. McNeil, and David S. Jones, one often hears the charge that human pathogens were the “shock-troops” of colonial conquest.Footnote ¹ Yet in his important new book, Sharks upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai'i, 1778–1855, historian Seth Archer pushes beyond such epidemiological and demographic discussions that have long dominated historiographical engagements with health in indigenous history. Instead, Archer examines the broader (and perhaps less obvious) impacts of colonial diseases on indigenous communities. That is, once we move beyond the immediacies of death tolls, how did the decimation wrought by disease impact indigenous religious beliefs and practices? How did the history of disease impact gender and class relations within indigenous societies? Or indigenous trade and labor practices? On two counts, Archer's focus on health and disease thus feels new and urgent within the subfield of indigenous health history. First, he writes about disease not for the purposes of cataloguing death, but to understand how that death had broader social and political ramifications. Second, he wants to understand how indigenous experiences of colonial disease generated internal changes within their cultures and societies. Archer's project might, then, be described as an attempt to uncover an indigenous people's social and cultural history of disease in colonial Hawaii.

Framed slightly differently, Archer's interest is in foregrounding how experiences of colonial disease drove Native Hawaiians to instigate, and sometimes less decisively embark on, courses of action that would bring significant changes within their own cultures, institutions, and societies. He has therefore written a book as committed to centering indigenous historical agency as it is dedicated to bringing health issues from the margins into the very center of significant moments in Hawaiian history. One can look forward to reading this book for understandings of how health matters influenced iconic episodes in Hawaiian history, from the successful political conquests of Kamehameha I to the death of Captain Cook. Moreover, what emerges from Archer's attention to indigenous historical agency is a reframing of the bleak history of indigenous health in colonial Hawaii, as, ultimately, a story of indigenous survival, strategic cultural adaptation, and political maneuvering in the face of colonialism's challenges – most especially, its diseases.

Notably, Archer's book intervenes in an ongoing debate that historians of indigenous health are having about the role of disease itself as an agent of historical change. Since at least the early 2000s, scholars have placed emphasis on aspects of colonialism that created conditions which allowed diseases to flourish. Archer, however, seeks to reengage with an approach that shows how diseases (simpliciter) changed the course of history. The three moments in the book that exemplify the payoff of this approach are his discussion of how a tuberculosis epidemic on Maui enabled Kamehameha I to take over that island and begin his campaign to create the Hawaiian kingdom; a second strategic moment in Kamehameha's conquest that was aided by an outbreak of “the squatting sickness”; and, in the final chapter, his discussion of three epidemics that struck during the time of land privatization (mahele), thereby influencing elites to turn to foreign labor and land leasing to counteract the impact of population losses on agricultural productivity.

Most significantly, though, his work shows why we cannot ignore that health struggles shaped Hawaiian culture. This is demonstrated most explicitly in his discussion of what happened after King Kamehameha's death. Archer convincingly argues that the two chiefesses who instigated a “cultural revolution” following the king's death (lifting the kapu, or system of religious law that had governed Hawaiian society for centuries), had done so because they were alarmed and preoccupied by a growing infertility crisis among Native Hawaiians (126). In short, Archer's contribution here is to show how a profound moment of cultural change in Hawaii was precipitated and shaped, in large part, by a health crisis. Similarly, he discusses how Native Hawaiians in the 1830s experienced a time of great “fatalism” in response to the huge loss of life and seeming inability of their people to repopulate their own ranks. Archer thereby recasts the seeming receptivity of Hawaiians to the arrival of Protestant missionaries (with their large families) as an attempt to try new ways of living brought by these newcomers, which might revive the health and fertility of their own communities.

Experts on the history of Hawaii will undoubtedly bring different and fruitful readings to this book, and perhaps engage more directly with questions it raises about the history of the kingdom, or with Archer's attempt to foreground a new history of what he calls “The Great Fatalism” (167–21). For those less versed in Hawaiian history, Archer successfully makes the nuances of Hawaiian genealogies and the chronology of complex changes in Hawaiian society comprehensible to the uninitiated. This is no small task considering that Archer has also been uncompromising (as one should be) in his fidelity to the use of Hawaiian terms, concepts, and language. The author is also up-front about his study's limitations: the fact that he and many of his historical informants are “outsiders” is one such factor (7). Though Archer is not apologetic about this, instead making a case for the value (particularly for the historical questions he is asking) imparted by outsider perspectives. His careful explanations regarding his methodological choices show that he is cognizant of considerations about positionality that are central to methodological conversations within indigenous studies. He handles these issues carefully. One senses that Archer knows he may court critiques, but invites such discussion for the sake of more rigorous engagement with the complexity of the past.

Areas for further elaboration – many of which Archer himself flags – include, first, further engagement with how these issues played out among the common folk. A side effect of Archer's focus on royalty and the upper classes as instigating cultural change is to impose a sense that cultural change is a top-down process. Second, one also wonders, given his fairly consistent pivoting to the present, and his lamenting the difficulty of accessing Native voices in the past on certain issues, whether this history might not have been substantially enriched by an engagement with more oral histories, which could provide a unique perspective on, and indeed compelling validation of, Archer's theory that illness shaped the culture of Hawaii in such profound ways. The imprint of this would surely come out in fascinating ways if one were to engage with the lasting cultural and collective memory of disease and illness during the time of the kingdom.

Archer's ready admission of the book's limits and his clear-sightedness about areas where he may have been too steadily focussed on one set of questions endears a reader to this work as one that seeks only to make modest claims. But the truth is that Archer's book has made important interventions into a nascent field of historical inquiry that has been itching for someone to ask difficult questions. Perhaps more endearing than the author's admission of the book's limits is the steadfast commitment by this historian to make a case for the need – the urgent need – for researchers of indigenous history to turn their attention to health, and for historians of health to turn their attention to indigenous peoples.