Indigenous Island Empires: Yap and Tonga Considered

The indigenous social‐political‐economic spheres whose nexuses were located, respectively, in Yap and Tonga, and which included adjacent islands and archipelagoes, are frequently referred to as ‘empires’. This work summarises and examines historical and ethnographic data on these two cases, and then compares them both with one another and with more general concepts of empire. While stressing that these instances only remotely resemble modern empires, it concludes that for broader comparative purposes the Yap and Tonga spheres can usefully be termed empires.