Hawai'i Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Hawai'i

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Zusammenfassung von Hawai'i

Name: Hawai'i
Rating: 4.2 (33 reviews)
Author: Sumner La Croix

Sumner La Croix

Eight Hundred Years of Political and Economic Change

4.2 (33 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

'Hawaii' by Sumner La Croix is a historical and economic account of the Hawaiian economy, its development, and the societal changes that occurred from the early 19th century until statehood in 1959.

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Geschichte der USA Wirtschaft der USA Politik der USA

Inhaltsübersicht

Hawai'i
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What’s in it for me? A detailed economic examination of a little-understood paradise.

When you picture Hawaii, what do you see? Most of us imagine a paradise of volcanic sand beaches, dramatic jungle mountainscapes, and gently swaying palm trees. It’s scenes like these that have attracted visitors for the past eight hundred years, from the earliest Polynesian colonists to your Aunt Helen who went there on a cruise last winter. Your aunt might not understand that much about Hawaii’s history, but she’s not alone. Even historians knew very little about Hawaii’s past until recently. That’s because there was no written language in Hawaii before it was integrated into the world economy in the early nineteenth century.

But we can still learn much about its centuries of history. For example, we can interrogate the archaeological record and compare it with the mo'olelo – Hawaiian fables and legends passed down orally for hundreds of years. As a result, we can glean a new sense of how this unique Pacific community came to be what it is today. But we can only fully understand this history if we consider economics. Resources, trade, and the politics of compensation have played an outsized, unexpected role in this island paradise’s story.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Polynesian voyagers sustained themselves on long sea journeys;
about the complex social order of premodern Hawaii
how guns, germs, and sandalwood changed Hawaii’s history forever.

When humans first settled Hawaii, it offered them an agriculturally rich, politically egalitarian paradise.

Hawaii was the last major land area on the planet to be settled. The first humans to live there were twelfth-century Polynesian settlers, who had traveled over two thousand miles in search of new land.

Captain James Cook was the first European to set eyes on the islands, in the eighteenth century. He assumed that Polynesians had gotten to Hawaii because the wind had blown their canoes off course. But subsequent research has proved this to be statistically almost impossible. These voyages were intentional.

So why did small groups of Polynesians choose to leave their homes in canoes and set out for the great unknown? Maybe they were inspired by the potential to discover, or maybe they hoped to find opportunities they didn’t have at home.

The key message here is: When humans first settled Hawaii, it offered them an agriculturally rich, politically egalitarian paradise.

Setting out on a voyage of thousands of miles in an outrigger canoe is, of course, risky. All manner of accidents could happen on open water, or you might just run out of food and water. But Polynesians had been traveling like this for more than three millennia. They had learned to minimize the risks.

To navigate, they observed the stars, the sun, the wind, the tides, and seabirds. They carried hardy breadfruit paste and a single giant taro root that would last for months. A fully outfitted canoe could travel about 100 miles per day.

Nobody lived on the islands at the time, so settling them was straightforward. For one, Polynesians didn’t have to contend with pushback from native people. Instead, the colonists devoted their time to implementing irrigation and other infrastructure. They built canoes for fishing, they made fish hooks, and – as we’ll see in the next blink – they started huge families.

Economic history teaches us that when land is sparsely inhabited, large land grants are common. The islands of O'ahu and Kaua'i, with their rain-fed, protected valleys, are well-suited to agriculture. So settlers set up huge taro farms, with intricate irrigation technology imported from Polynesia. For the most part, people worked for themselves, and there was no significant wealth differential.

Historians believe that Hawaii’s early settlers had an egalitarian society during the first century or so of settlement. There was plenty of arable land for everyone, so no in-fighting was necessary – at first.

Early population growth made Hawaii’s social order more complex.

We don’t know if the Polynesians were the world’s best farmers, or if the land was just incredibly rich. What we do know is that Hawaii’s thirteenth-century taro farms produced huge agricultural surpluses; these surpluses were greater than what American farmers produced as late as the nineteenth century. But the good times couldn’t last; surpluses sparked some permanent changes in the Hawaiian social order.

First, there was incredibly high population growth. Based on the estimated settlement date and Hawaii’s modern population, scholars estimate that women gave birth to four children on average. The settlers kept this up through droughts, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, and even during the wars that would become a regular occurence. These birth rates are hypothesized to be some of the highest ever.

The first meeting between Europeans and Native Hawaiians quickly transformed Hawaii’s politics and society.

In 1778, Captain Cook’s white-sailed ships appeared off the coast of the island of Kaua'i. Life in Hawaii was poised to change forever.

Three subsequent events were critical to the future of Hawaii. First, the opening of trade. Second, a big decline in the Native Hawaiian population. Finally, the further consolidation of power under King Kamehameha I. Ultimately, these events led to changes in social structures, and to the Māhele – a major redistribution of land that would establish private property in Hawaii for the first time.

The Māhele laid the groundwork for the eventual dominance of Big Sugar.

With the establishment of the Māhele, the king, the ali'i, and the maka'āinana could now own their land, in the European sense. All that the ali'i and the maka'āinana had to do was register an official claim in exchange for a title. But most of the lower-class maka'āinana didn’t do this – partly because there was little communication but also because the concept of property was still a totally foreign idea. Ultimately, much of the land allocated to the maka'āinana went unclaimed. So it was sold by the government.

The ali'i, on the other hand, not only claimed their land but promptly used it to gain access to a profitable new global market: sugar. And the growing sugar trade would eventually lead to America’s annexation of Hawaii.

The US government and sugar barons worked hand in glove to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy.

As the sugar industry grew, the Hawaiian king’s bargaining position weakened. So, when it was time to renegotiate the free trade treaty in 1883, the US government tried to get more favorable terms. It worked. When the treaty was ratified again, King Kalākaua had granted the US government a new concession: an American military port in Pearl Harbor.

At the same time, sugar barons were becoming increasingly unhappy with the Hawaiian government. They wanted higher spending on infrastructure to support sugar production. The king’s position seemed more and more unstable.

Even as Hawaiians gained political rights, the Big Five continued to dominate the islands.

In 1900, the US Congress passed the Hawaiian Organic Act. This established a territorial government and gave US citizenship to Hawaii’s residents – including Native Hawaiians, most white people, and the children of Asians born in Hawaii. They were now free to form political and social organizations, publish newspapers, and establish schools. People dissatisfied with the prevailing order finally had a way to lobby for change.

What’s more, the Act established a two-house legislature elected by males over the age of 21 who could read Hawaiian or English.

When Hawaii became a state, the majority of its residents got greater access to the political system.

Statehood for Hawaii was a hot topic throughout most of the colonial era. But Congressional leaders, especially white senators from the Jim Crow-era South, were terrified of it. They feared the specter of “Mao-suited Chinese senators” in Washington, allegedly “communist” labor unions, and the impact Hawaiian legislators might have on the looming civil rights debate.

For decades, the Big Five were opposed to statehood because it wouldn’t impact their bottom line. Why bother with such a fuss if there wasn’t that much to gain?

After statehood, voters used their new power to distribute land more equitably.

By the twentieth century, Native Hawaiians lagged behind all other ethnic groups in employment, education, and cultural life. The colonial era had been a disaster for them. Statehood didn’t fix that. It also didn’t address another problem: the vast majority of Native Hawaiians and working class Hawaiians couldn’t hope to afford owning land in their lifetimes.

In the United States, the owner of a house almost always owns the land it stands on, too – except in Hawaii.

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Worum geht es in Hawai'i?

Hawai’i (2019) is a detailed history of the economic forces that have shaped Hawaiian society. Author Sumner La Croix traces the arc of commerce, from traditions first established in the twelfth century by Polynesian colonists to the modern Hawaiian state. Along the way, he examines what has changed and what has stayed the same.

Wer Hawai'i lesen sollte

Anyone interested in the dark side of paradise
Students of colonialism
Labor historians

Über den Autor

Sumner La Croix is a professor emeritus at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa and a research fellow with the University of Hawai’i Economic Research Organization. He has published dozens of academic articles on the economic history of Hawaii and East Asia.

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