Nancy Shoemaker - Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

This project was supported by a residential fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I thank Conrad Wright, Kate Viens, and others at that remarkably resource-rich and friendly institution for the supportive and intellectual camaraderie they provide to all their research fellows. I also received crucial research travel funds from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.

The majority of written records related to Fiji history before 1860 are at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. I shamelessly overworked the staff with my requests. They were always prompt, gracious, and welcoming, and I feel supremely grateful for their patience and endurance. I also owe special thanks to the staff at the National Archives at Boston, John Thomson of the First Baptist Church of Beverly, Joan Duffy in Special Collections at the Yale Divinity School Library, the staff of the National Archives of the Fiji Islands, and the University of Connecticut interlibrary loan office.

The several opportunities I had to present portions of this work were extraordinarily fruitful in prodding me to think through my objectives. For anyone who may have contributed suggestions or questions along the way, I appreciated your engagement with the history of a place that, for nearly all of you, was far outside your own areas of expertise. To Seth Rockman, who invited me to speak at the Nineteenth-Century History Workshop at Brown University; Konstantin Dierks, who invited me to participate in an early American globalism workshop at Indiana University; and the organizers of the Human Trafficking Conference at the McNeil Center, thanks for allowing me to share my work in these venues as these discussions greatly influenced the course taken by various chapters in the book.

Other historians sharing my interest in the Pacific, the role of maritime trade in the history of America and the world, and history in general supported this project with advice and encouragement. I particularly thank Ann Fabian, Edward Gray, Vicki Luker, Brian DeLay, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Ann Plane, Brian Rouleau, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and my University of Connecticut colleagues Peter Baldwin, Martha Cutter, Cornelia Dayton, Shawn Salvant, and Chris Vials. When I first conceived of this project, I had an opportunity to speak with Ian Campbell and David Routledge while in Fiji, and I greatly appreciated their insights and recommendations.

Michael McGandy (acquisitions editor at Cornell University Press), Amy Greenberg (coeditor of Cornells United States in the World book series), and two anonymous manuscript reviewers also offered invaluable suggestions that have found their way into the book. I thank them for the attention they showed the project.

Note: (1) Dates in parentheses indicate that the exact dates are unknown. (2) The source column gives the most direct information on that voyage, but readers wanting to know more about a particular voyage should also refer to the sources listed for other vessels in Fiji at the same time.