Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xvi, 266 pp. (Illustrations, map.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4000-6.
The authors of From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill, C. Allan Jones and Robert V. Osgood, are agricultural scientists who have worked for the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association and have firsthand experience of Hawai‘i’s technological and scientific advances in the sugar industry. Tracing a direct genealogy from John Vandercook’s classic King Cane, the Story of Sugar in Hawaii (1939), From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill sets out to give a balanced view of Hawai‘i’s sugarcane industry through the complex intersections of scientific, technological, economic, environmental, and ethnic forces that have helped to shape it. Jones and Osgood discuss how world events and developments in agricultural technology shaped the sugar industry in Hawai‘i from its origins in the 1820s, with a focus on the sugar industry of Maui, the island that as of 2016 is home to the last sugar company still operating in Hawai‘i today: the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company (HC&S).
To structure this history, the authors lay out the history of sugarcane chronologically, organized into five chapters. The first chapter (500 CE to 1875) spans from when Native Hawaiian voyagers brought kō (sugarcane) to the islands, to sugarcane’s development as an industry in the mid-1800s as Hawai‘i’s population, land, and industries were affected by the Great Māhele (land division), the California gold rush, and the American Civil War. Chapter 2 (1876 to 1897) explains the effects of the Reciprocity Treaty between the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the United States that eliminated import duties, making sugar readily available to the US market. The need for imported labour and labour unrest affected the sugar economy, but agricultural developments in harvesting systems and cultivation kept the industry profitable.
The sugar industry was fundamental to the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, resulting in the annexation of Hawai‘i by the United States in 1898. The third chapter (1898 to 1929) analyzes the effects of annexation on labour and water resources as the industry boomed under U.S. control. The authors highlight how Maui’s irrigation systems and solar radiation levels gave it a boost in sugar production. In chapter 4 (1930 to 1969), the authors describe how, “In the late 1930s—prior to the US involvement in World War II—the cash wages paid by the Hawaiian sugar industry (not counting benefits like housing and medical care) were the highest paid by any sugar industry in the world” (123), but this quickly changed with the Great Depression and World War II. The industry was pressured to reduce its labour force and mechanized tools replaced hand harvesting. The economy in the 1950s and 1960s boomed, which allowed for advances in overall factory operations and sugarcane breeding.
Finally, the chapter 5 (1970 to 2014) details the modern Hawaiian sugar industry into the twenty-first century. Since the 1970s, factory costs have not matched the price of raw sugar on domestic and international markets. However, technological advances to shed labour and production costs as well as the dissolution or consolidation of companies have kept the sugar economy alive. Drip irrigation allowed most of Hawai‘i’s irrigated plantations to survive until the 1990s. In the 2000s, more and more plantations and companies closed, leaving HC&S the last remaining sugar company in the state by 2011. HC&S faces environmental, political, and economic challenges.
From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill is clearly written and organized, and one of its greatest strengths is that through the eyes of agricultural scientists, we can understand the importance of the technological advances Hawai‘i made in the sugar industry to allowing that industry to thrive. From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill also analyzes the specific history of one company, HC&S, within the broader contexts of the international sugar trade and the forces of local and world history. As authors of one of the most recent texts on Hawai‘i’s sugar industry, Jones and Osgood are able to tell the story of HC&S as the last sugar mill, and why and how HC&S has survived beyond the nineteenth century when sugar was king.
Social science and humanities readers will find Jones and Osgood’s insights into labour, politics, and ecological factors most helpful, while the scientific specificity of the industry limits the audience to agricultural specialists. Furthermore, despite From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill’s clear organization, it does not focus equally on each factor that influences the industry in every chapter—for example, focusing on labour or water rights during in each time period would help trace their chronology. Instead, the chapters focus on different factors as they become important during each period, so labour might be highlighted in one chapter but not in the next.
Overall, however, From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill brings together Hawai‘i sugar’s environmental, political, and agricultural elements to form a pragmatic perspective. Other studies have recounted sugar’s history with a focus on plantation labour and life in Hawai‘i in the early twentieth century. Rather than separating technology and culture, Jones and Osgood bring the histories of agricultural technology and societal forces together to develop insights into Hawai‘i’s sugar industry, especially in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As HC&S has recently announced that it will close at the end of 2016, meaning the end of sugar mills in Hawai‘i, From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill is a welcome addition to what has been missing in histories of the sugar industry and an important text for scholars of Hawaiiana and agriculture.
Kara Hisatake
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
pp. 214-215