Sub-Imperial Listening: The Hawaiian Protest at the 1883 Intercolonial Convention

At the 1883 Intercolonial Convention in Sydney, Australasian colonies articulated their first collective vision of regional order, the earliest blueprint of sub-imperial governance. Amid missionary petitions and settler memorials, one Pacific voice briefly interrupted: a diplomatic protest from King Kalākaua’s Hawaiian Kingdom. This article introduces ‘sub-imperial listening’ as a structured practice of colonial attention that simultaneously acknowledges and silences Indigenous voices. When Hawai‘i protested annexation plans, articulating a Polynesian confederation grounded in kuleana and Indigenous sovereignty, the Convention’s response was procedural: received, printed, referred to committee, and substantively ignored. Using historical ethnographic methods and Bourdieusian practice theory, the article reveals how settler colonies rehearsed dispositions that sedimented into durable diplomatic reflexes. Reading the Convention archival records against Hawaiian diplomatic history recovers two competing imperial visions, pan-Polynesian confederation and Australian Pacific trusteeship, that briefly occupied the same bureaucratic space. Their asymmetrical meeting illuminates 19th-century power structures that echo in contemporary Pacific relations.