"Deryck Scarr examines the Pacific Islands' indigenous social, economic and political systems and then places in context the post-sixteenth-century European 'discovery' of the Pacific. Cultural, political, trading, social and personal exchanges in Island worlds are described and analysed, from 1767 to the year 2000. Throughout the book, the Island world and its people on land and on the sea are held firmly in the foreground."--The dust jacket.