Scholars of Stevenson's Samoan period have tended to focus on the author's fascination with the imperial wrangling of the three great powers, Britain, Germany, and the United States, and their disastrous involvement in local politics. The critical consensus is that there was a notable shift in the forms as well as the tone of Stevenson's writing of this period which was dictated by these circumstances. Stevenson wrote about the political life of the Islands in letters to The Times and to his metropolitan correspondents. Perhaps not since his account of his first Atlantic sea journey had he written in such an unromantic and documentary vein. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western colonialism had become a major force across the Pacific, and Stevenson expressed his views about this in his fiction as well as his non-fiction. Yet, for all that they enlighten, studies of Stevenson's later work whose sole contextual focus is politics arguably do not go far enough in addressing the impact of Samoa on his writing, because they overlook what was foundational to Samoan life: religion. As Ronald Crawford emphatically asserts in his account of the nineteenth-century Samoan church, ‘In practically every aspect [of Samoan society], religious conceptions and practices form an important, and perhaps indispensable part.’ By not acknowledging the specifically religious character of Samoan society, we miss many of the subjects and themes that animated Stevenson's work of this period, since, as we have already seen, he was himself highly conscious of the importance of religion in the Islands.

One way in which to confirm this is by turning to perhaps the most explicitly political work that Stevenson ever wrote, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892). In this long pamphlet, he vividly portrays a period in which the Samoan political system was upturned by the interference of Britain, Germany, and the United States. By 1892, when it was published, the two rival claimants to the Samoan throne, Malietoa Laupepa and Mata‘afa Iosefo, were backed or opposed by different colonial factions. Stevenson made no bones about his preference for Mata‘afa: ‘I have visited and dwelt in almost every seat of the Polynesian race, and have met but one man who gave me a stronger impression of character and parts.’