ABSTRACT
The early nineteenth-century empire in the southern seas was a distinctive historical formation; its social order was fluid and ambiguous; imperial power was yet to be installed. The pattern of engagement between Indigenous peoples and the imperial presence was marked by negotiated power relationships, the social contours of empire were defined by disorder rather than order, the boundaries between the imperial and indigenous worlds were porous and ill-defined, and agents of empire looked on the Indigenous world with an “open” imperial eye rather than through a closed system of imperial knowledge.
