Over the past three decades, a rich historiography on nineteenth-century Hawai‘i has argued that too often the islands have been understood as marginal, and their people as passive in the face of American colonialism. This literature recovers the voices of the colonized, stressing the crucial ways in which Hawaiian history is not American history, but rather that of an independent people whose politics and culture were eroded by imperialism. This article offers an overview of this scholarship, asking how it might help scholars of U.S. history understand Hawai‘i as offering a different perspective for viewing the United States, from the outside in.