Robert Louis Stevenson, in A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), details the activities of the great powers battling for influence in Samoa—the United States, Germany and Britain —and the political machinations of the various Samoan factions within their indigenous political system.
Even as they descend into ever greater interclan warfare, what most alarms Stevenson is the Samoans' economic innocence.
In 1894 just months before his death, he addresses the island chiefs:
There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children’s, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will in that case be cast out into outer darkness".
He had "seen these judgments of God," in Hawaii where abandoned native churches stood like tombstones "over a grave, in the midst of the white men’s sugar fields".
