The Purposes of Paradise is a wide-ranging comparative history of the struggle for empire on the part of the United States, and self-determination on the part of Cubans and native Hawaiians, in the primary strategic acquisitions of the United States following the Spanish-American War. The book is as much a critique of the racial and class cleavages created by the expansion of American republicanism in the nineteenth century, and hedonistic imperialism in the twentieth century, as it is of tourism itself. Skwiot uses travel as a lens to demonstrate how, in both locations, U.S. imperialism was not an exception to, but a mirror of Old World imperialism.

One of Skwiot's most useful contributions to the scholarship of tourism and imperialism relates to the broad chronological sweep of her study, beginning with an analysis of political and economic attitudes towards the “pear” of Hawai‘i and the “apple” of Cuba, which officials, including John Adams, believed would eventually fall to the United States. Skwiot ably demonstrates how nineteenth-century travel to both island outposts served as a precursor to the expectation of settlement and “white republicanism.” Much of the rest of the book examines efforts of local and imperial American officials and business interests to reconcile the dreams of a white republic with the incongruous realities of racially diverse islands.

Throughout the book, Skwiot uses the metaphor of marriage, born out in the travel literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to convey tourism as a means of drawing Cuba and Hawai‘i into the United States union. This is done most memorably in the case of the opening of Henry Kaiser's Hawaiian Village Hotel. Skwiot argues that such staged events masked more complex tensions that had wracked the islands since the point of contact with the United States.

Ultimately, The Purposes of Paradise is much more than a comparative history of tourism as a component of developments in Hawai‘i and Cuba; it is a strong social and cultural critique of American Empire as seen through the actions of tourists and developers. Skwiot notes a change in American Empire after the turn of the twentieth century, and argues that Cuba and Hawai‘i subsequently followed two very different paths, leading to revolution and statehood, respectively. In the case of Cuba, informal empire, as reflected in the Platt Amendment, and the developmental activities of individuals such as John Bowman, were enough to link the destinies of upper-class white Cubans and Americans. In Hawai‘i, however, a minority haole (white) population, in tandem with tourism developers, sold to policy makers in Washington, D.C. the vision of an integrated, mixed-race society linked to Asia.

Skwiot's book provides a unique comparative contribution to the study of American Empire based on the foundation of two geographic entities separated by thousands of miles but linked by their shared association with the United States.