What are the origins of the people of the Pacific and how did they come to be involved with different colonial powers?
To find material about settlement and colonisation of the Pacific you could start with using Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia as search terms. Both libraries and the internet will be rich sources of information. Refining the search with additional words quickly reduces the number of possibilities for you to look at.
Internet searching
Following the Pacific > History link from the Te Puna web site leads to a diverse collection. Of high interest is material from the Polynesian Voyaging Society which recounts recent voyages using old methods.
Libraries
A general key word search is fruitful. From the Bill Robertson Library “Polynesia” yields 85 hits, but using a guided search to which “history” is added reduces this to a manageable 20 hits. Note that many books are older publications, very important, but possibly contradicted in some respects by more recent research.
