ABSTRACT
Economic historians work in the long and distinguished tradition of the social sciences, where the task of the researcher is to pose verifiable hypotheses based on theory, to gather data for testing, and then to determine if the results are adequately explained by the theory. The ethnoeconomic historian working on how American Indians and Native Hawaiians have produced, consumed, and traded must work under unusual constraints. The challenge for the economic historian, therefore, is to make judicious use of reports and documents created by the conquering and occupying US power. On the other hand, there is a dearth of sources created by American Indians or Native Hawaiians about how they viewed their own economies. They offer a public choice model for theorizing about the level of conflict, and then provide data taken from US Army records about why warfare seemingly became a primary choice for solving disputes.
