Tokelau: A Historical Ethnography is the outcome of over two decades of intensive and wide-ranging research in and about the three tiny Polynesian atolls of Tokelau. It is both a comparative ethnographic study of the islands, and a narrative record of their past. The ethnographic study is set in the years around 1970. The combined stories of the atolls' traditional, contact and colonial pasts are told through the foreign documents which complement local narratives and records. Throughout, the differences and interrelationships between the three atolls are highlighted. This is a comprehensive work in which history informs ethnography; and ethnography, history.