Eight Islands on Four Maps: The Cartographic Renegotiation of Hawai‘i, 1876–1959

Abstract

The history of Hawai‘i's relationship with the United States is marked by continued attempts on the part of the islanders to renegotiate Hawai‘i's place in the American political imagination. In three separate instances, those efforts took cartographic shape. In 1876, with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i beginning to feel the leading waves of US imperialism, the kingdom sent a modern, scientific map to the Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia, making an argument for Hawaiian sovereignty. In 1893, with the question of annexation on the table after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, haole insurrectionists endorsed a map depicting the islands' proximity to and reliance on the United States – a map that showed the indigenous Hawaiian peoples as barbarous and unable to rule themselves without Western intervention. And in 1937 the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (Dole) commissioned a tourist map of the territory that sought to tame Hawai‘i in the mainlanders' imagination even as the islands' business leaders began their first serious push for statehood. These three maps, set alongside each other, demonstrate a long and contested discussion between the islands and the mainland about how the United States understood Hawai‘i and Pacific politics: a cartographic conversation that remained thematically consistent across multiple iterations of Hawaiian governments.