Sugar has been grown in Hawai‘i since Polynesians brought it and other staples of the Polynesian diet to Hawai‘i in migrations of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries. Hawai‘i's first sugar plantation opened on Kaua‘i in 1835 and by the 1860s sugar had become Hawai‘i's leading industry. Fueled by waves of migration by indentured workers from Asia and Europe and a free-trade treaty with the United States, sugar cultivation expanded to become Hawai‘i's leading industry for the next century. The rise of Hawai‘i's tourism industry in the 1960s and 1970s, changes in U.S. programs supporting domestic cultivation, and rising land values pushed most sugar plantations out of business in the 1980s and 1990s. A couple of sugar plantations, one on Maui and one on Kaua‘i, were able to survive into the twenty-first century, but in December 2016, Alexander & Baldwin, Inc., closed the last Hawai‘i sugar plantation.
Carol MacLennan's recent book on the history of Hawai‘i's sugar industry operates on many levels to illuminate this industry's 180-year history. MacLennan is an anthropologist who has skillfully weaved together a narrative that focuses on the century from 1840 to 1940, the time that she calls “the period of industrialization,” when the sugar economy “remade the landscape, and the people and their means of livelihood” (pp. 4–5). Her work builds on the pioneering research of such archaeologists as Timothy Earle, Michael Graves, Terry Hunt, Patrick Kirch, and Mark McCoy who have emphasized how during the first 500 years of Hawai‘i history (1260–1760), Hawaiians repeatedly shaped landscapes to grow taro, sweet potatoes, and other staple crops in response to growing populations, political competition, and new opportunities. The idea that sugar plantations, sugar factors, and other corporations associated with the sugar industry engineered another major transformation of Hawai‘i's landscape and environment over the 1840–1940 period is certainly not new. Nonetheless MacLennan's careful rendition of how cooperation and competition between these corporations completely reshaped Hawai‘i's environment, society, and politics represents an important contribution to the economic and business history of Hawai‘i.
Some highlights include MacLennan's analysis of joint ventures devised by the King and highly ranked chiefs to foster nascent sugar plantations in the 1835–1860 period and to maintain control over their overall activities and expansion (Ch. 4). This discussion is paralleled by analysis of the rapid rise of the Big Five sugar factors during the mid-to-late nineteenth century and their use of British and American trustee law to vest control of sugar enterprises to a networked group of insiders. The discussion of plantation centers (Ch. 6) considers life on plantations in the 1850s–1870s when the plantations used primarily Hawaiian and Chinese labor. The author nicely describes how plantations made adjustments in labor contracts and added plantation housing, plantation stores, and food rations to make work on the plantation more attractive. The informal discussion of plantations’ use of debt at plantation stores to bind workers to the plantations relies on a few quotations from plantation managers and has little data to support its conclusion that debt at the plantation store led to worker dependency. MacLennan's analysis of the development of infrastructure for the sugar industry (Ch. 7) and the evolution of plantation communities draws upon well-known sources and provides succinct and interesting summaries of these topics. Chapter 10 emphasizes how cooperation among sugar planters put pressure on the government to accommodate sugar interests yet also correctly stresses differences among sugar interests regarding King Kalākaua's policies on government finance, alliances with other Pacific island nations, and policies towards the sugar industry. Chapter 11 provides a sweeping overview of government resource policies regarding land, forests, and water resources under both the monarchy and the U.S. territorial government.
MacLennan's book is seamlessly written and is squarely in the tradition of narrative history. She does an excellent job of marshalling important historical sources and extending her hypotheses in a detailed manner. An advantage of this approach is that the work is accessible to a general audience interested in Hawaiian and global history and makes numerous contributions to specialized historical literature on the sugar industry and environmental transformation. The analysis would have been somewhat strengthened if the author had made more of an effort to draw on research from the field of economic history, for example, Sumner La Croix and Price Fishback (Reference La Croix and Fishback2000). MacLennan's narrative rarely uses statistical analysis or theoretical models from economics or politics to establish or analyze historical trends and transformations, and this opens the door to further contributions by economists and economic historians, for example, recent articles by Brooks Kaiser and James Roumasset (Reference Kaiser2014) and Kaiser (Reference Kaiser2014).
Research by Patrick Kirch (2013) and other archaeologists on how Hawai‘i's political and economic institutions changed the environment and evolved to cope with environmental changes in ancient Hawai‘i has completely reshaped how we understand the first 500 years of Hawai‘ian history. In the same vein, MacLennan's synthetic narrative provides the foundations for a new generation of economic historians to use modern quantitative and theoretical methods to gain a better understanding of Hawai‘i's complex sugar economy.
