The mark of sugar. Hawai'i's eco-industrial heritage

Abstract

HawaiYs eco-industrial heritage is a landscape permanently altered by sugar cane production. Beginning in 1850 American and European-based capitalists drew heav ily from global technological advances of the nineteenth century, rapidly exploited the land and water policies of the native Hawaiian government, and set in motion environ mental change that eventually increased industrial control over non-sugar cane ecosystems. This article exams the na ture-industry exchange which culminated by 1920 in an in dustrial sugar ecology that dominated landscapes, politics, and social life in Hawaii. Industrial agriculture has permanently altered the Hawaiian Islands. At the end of the eighteenth century these islands were a Polynesian chain of chiefdoms based upon irrigated and dryland agriculture. Within a century, the Hawaiian Kingdom became an industrial colony controlled by Americans and devoted to production of sugar cane for the western U.S. market. Sixty years later Hawaii was a U.S. state. Although this archipelago of six major islands had a long evolutionary history of geological and biological changes due to natural and human forces, it was from about 1850 to 1920 that the ecological changes set in motion by industrial plantation agriculture intensified and permanently trans formed Hawaii's landscape. These seventy years forever changed the forests, water supply, human and animal landscape, marking the first eco-industrial phase of sugar production in Hawaii. It was predicated upon a steady and massive spread of cane cultivation, constant application of new technologies and scientific principles to the field and the mill, and the evolution of manage ment practices all essential features of industrialization. Address all communications to: Carol MacLennan, Department of Social Sciences, Michi gan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI 49931, USA. E-mail: camac@mtu.edu.