Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. x, 378 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3949-9.
Hawai‘i’s status as one of the world’s premier tourist destinations requires little explanation given its extraordinarily picturesque landscapes, comfortable climate, and genuine “aloha spirit.” How the islands shifted from a unified sovereign state governed by indigenous Hawaiian monarchs and ruling chiefs to become a strategic part of the United States is a rather complex and tragic story. That story has been told repeatedly from different perspectives, by historians and Hawaiian scholars. In her account of the ascent of the sugar planters in politics and economy in Hawai‘i, Carol MacLennan digs deeply to produce an impressively intricate story of the subterfuge and web of connections that led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the rise of sugar capitalists who reshaped landscapes and land ownership and tenure, undermined community self sufficiency, and introduced new labor ethnicities into the islands after 1850. MacLennan focuses her research on the period of immense social change that began in the 1840s but does not ignore the social and political preconditions that may have facilitated epochal events. She states that her goal is to unravel “the relationships between the industrializing developments of the sugar industry and Hawai‘i’s human and natural landscapes” (7). Her account illuminates the process by which small scale production of sugar by Hawaiians with the help of Chinese immigrants was overtaken in the 1850s largely by American missionary residents and their Hawai‘i-born descendants who were emboldened by the support of local merchants and overseas investors. These new sugar planters/capitalists grew the industry into the most technologically sophisticated and productive, if not always the most profitable, in the world. MacLennan’s meticulous documentation of how and why the planters achieved their immense status, including the monarchs’ mounting financial indebtedness, presents a powerful study of the inner workings of capitalism and the relentless and ruthless path to profits. Thus she argues that while the heritage of Hawai‘i’s sugar industry is obvious in the alteration of indigenous landscape ecologies, because of impacts on society and culture the full extent of the industry’s legacy may yet be revealed.
The book consists of eleven chapters, an introduction, and conclusion plus useful appendices. Chapter 1 discusses three waves of human-nature interaction: the first wave is associated with Polynesian settlement around 1000 CE. By the early 1800s the rapidly growing population had cleared native vegetation and planted the major valleys and fertile leeward slopes of the major islands up to 1500 feet elevation. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Captain Cook and the early European traders set off a more intense second wave of social and environmental changes, including the precipitous decline of the indigenous population from introduced diseases. The third wave of change began in the 1880s, commencing with the peak of industrial sugar production which began a process of intense alteration of the islands’ environments.
Chapter 2, entitled “Sugar’s Ecology,” highlights the natural, scientific, and technological resource demands of sugar production. MacLennan compares Hawai‘i with other cane sugar producing areas in the world highlighting the unique features of Hawai‘i’s sugar industry, such as its heavy reliance on irrigation and scientific farming practices, unified plantation mill-field ownership, and vertical integration to form a sugar industrial complex. But crucial to industrial success was the achievement of economies of scale and the crafting of a corporate lock on the economic and political power of the Hawaiian nation.
The remaining chapters dwell on questions the author says are at the heart of the book: 1. How did sugar production, a precarious endeavor at best before the 1870s, survive and eventually thrive? 2. What were the environmental effects of sugar’s development? 3. What role did the Hawaiian nation play in the industry’s development? 4. What role did sugar planters play in the demise of an independent Hawaiian state? 5. What is the true ecological legacy of one hundred and fifty years of sugar production in Hawai‘i? Ample answers are provided through the explication of the rise of the four families (chapter 4) and five companies (chapter 5) that persisted through years of production and financial uncertainty (primarily 1866–1875) to triumph because they were able to impose private property ideology, eventually convincing the Hawaiian monarchs to abandon a system of communal land use-rights in favor of a private property regime. Sugar planters forged access to private ownership and/or leases of extensive tracks of land to undertake large-scale sugar production. Nevertheless, the five dominating companies (“The Big Five”) might not have grown so big without outside capital from San Francisco, Germany, and Great Britain, or without securing a Reciprocity Treaty with the United States (1875), the manipulation of the body politic (e.g., the Bayonet Constitution of 1887), or the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy (1893) and eventual incorporation into the United States in 1898 through territorial status.
The remaining chapters examine the agricultural landscapes, plantation centers, and plantation community as well as the ethic of strong cooperation and management linkages between sugar planter families and business entities. Workers’ responses to wages and living conditions are discussed. All of this is worthwhile reading not least because the author goes behind the scenes to reveal the bundle of actions and reactions, failures and successes, that changed the life of the land and communities in Hawai‘i.
The conclusion focuses on two decades—the 1970s to 1990s—when all but one of the sugar plantations closed (the last plantation, the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company, has announced the shut down of its 36,000 acre plantation by the end of 2016). Sugar is no longer sovereign but its impact over 150 years of growth and decline in Hawai‘i cannot be undone. While the book provides much less discussion of the specific impacts of industrial-scale sugar production on the natural landscape than promised, the book’s closing discussion highlights four environmental issues that have accrued from the study. Overall, the book is a valuable source of information about the political economy, social relationships, and general landscape alteration that characterized sugar’s reign in Hawai‘i.
Sonia P. Juvik
University of Hawai‘i, Hilo, USA
pp. 957-959