2021 Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific. London: Head of Zeus / New York: Basic Books
2020 Océaniens: histoire du Pacifique à l'âge des empires, tr. Pauline Dardel, preface by Eric Wittesheim, 510 pp. Paris: Anarchasis
2020 (ed.) A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier. 462 pp. London: Penguin Classics
2019 (with Elena Govor) Tiki: Marquesan art and the Krusenstern voyage. 250 pp. Leiden: Sidestone
2018 (ed., with Peter Brunt) Oceania. 325 pp. London: Royal Academy of Arts; Océanie, Paris: Fonds Mercator
2018 Oceanic art, second edition. 212 pp. London: Thames and Hudson (World of Art series)
2018 Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook, second edition. London: Penguin
2018 (with Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek and Erna Lilje) Pacific presences: Oceanic art and European museums. 2 vols., 253 pp, 511 pp. Leiden: Sidestone
2016 The return of curiosity: what museums are good for in the twenty-first century. London: Reaktion / Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2014 Body Art. 208 pp. London: Thames and Hudson.
2012 (with Peter Brunt, Sean Mallon, Lissant Bolton, Deidre Brown, Damian Skinner and Susanne Kuechler) Art in Oceania: a new history. 528 pp. London: Thames and Hudson / New Haven: Yale University Press. Winner of the Authors' Society Art Book Prize.
2010 Islanders: the Age of Empire in the Pacific. 336 pp. London & New Haven: Yale University Press. Winner of the Wolfson History Prize.
2010 (with Mark Adams, Peter Brunt and Sean Mallon) Tatau: Samoan Tattooing / New Zealand art / Global Culture. 160 pp. Wellington: Te Papa Press.
2009 (with Mark Adams, James Schuster and Lyonel Grant) Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
2005 (with John Pule) Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
2003 Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain James Cook. 505 pp. London: Penguin Press / New York: Walker [in north America: Cook: the extraordinary voyages of Captain James Cook].
2000 (ed., with Oliver Berghof) A voyage round the world by George Forster (1777). 2 vols. 860 pp. University of Hawaii Press.
1999 Possessions: Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture. 304 pp. London: Thames and Hudson.
1999 (with Mark Adams) Cook’s Sites: Revisiting History. 195 pp. Dunedin: Otago University Press.
1999 (with Richard Eves) Bad Colonists: the South Seas Letters of Louis Becke and Vernon Lee Walker. 163 pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1997 In Oceania: visions, artefacts, histories. 269 pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1996 (ed., with Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach) Observations made during a voyage around the world, by Johann Reinhold Forster (1778). 446 pp. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
1995 Oceanic art. 212 pp. London: Thames and Hudson (World of Art series)
1994 Colonialism’s culture: anthropology, travel, and government. 238 pp. Cambridge: Polity Press; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1991 Entangled objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. 259 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1990 Marquesan societies: inequality and political transformation in eastern Polynesia. 256 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1989 Out of time: history and evolution in anthropological discourse. 149 pp. Cambridge: University Press (Studies in Social Anthropology 67)
