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• The Slave Trade: In the 1860s, brutal slave raids captured over a thousand inhabitants. Those repatriated brought smallpox, turning the island into a "vast charnel-house."
• Capitalist Extraction: European traders later burned huts and destroyed crops to force the starving survivors off the land.
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By 1888, the island was annexed and reserved for tens of thousands of sheep owned by a Scottish company, irrevocably transforming the landscape into an indistinct meadow for wool production.
The Rapa Nui had cultural practices that limited the exploitation of fisheries, debunking the "Tragedy of the Commons" myth. Their collapse wasn't a result of "innate selfishness," but of Hilaire Belloc’s chilling observation: "Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not."
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