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From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill focuses on the technological and scientific advances that allowed Hawai'i's sugar industry to become a world leader and Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company (HC&S) to survive into the twenty-first century. The authors, both agricultural scientists, offer a detailed history of the industry and its contributions, balanced with discussion of the enormous societal and environmental changes due to its aggressive search for labor, land, and water. Sugarcane cultivation in Hawai'i began with the arrival of Polynesian settlers, expanded into a commercial crop in the mid-1800s, and became a significant economic and political force by the end of the nineteenth century. Hawai'i's sugar industry entered the twentieth century heralding major improvements in sugarcane varieties, irrigation systems, fertilizer use, biological pest control, and the use of steam power for field and factory operations. By the 1920s, the industry was among the most technologically advanced in the world. Its expansion, however, was not without challenges. Hawai'i's annexation by the United States in 1898 invalidated the Kingdom's contract labor laws, reduced the plantations' hold on labor, and resulted in successful strikes by Japanese and Filipino workers. The industry survived the low sugar prices of the Great Depression and labor shortages of World War II by mechanizing to increase productivity. The 1950s and 1960s saw science-driven gains in output and profitability, but the following decades brought unprecedented economic pressures that reduced the number of plantations from twenty-seven in 1970 to only four in 2000. By 2011 only one plantation remained. Hawai'i's last surviving sugar mill, HC&S--with its large size, excellent water resources, and efficient irrigation and automated systems--remained generally profitable into the 2000s. Severe drought conditions, however, caused substantial operating losses in 2008 and 2009. Though profits rebounded, local interest groups have mounted legal challenges to HC&S's historic water rights and the public health effects of preharvest burning. While the company has experimented with alternative harvesting methods to lessen environmental impacts, HC&S has yet to find those to be economically viable. As a result, the future of the last sugar company in Hawai'i remains uncertain.
In early 1920 in Hawaii, Japanese sugar cane workers, faced with spiraling living expenses, defiantly struck for a wage increase to $1.25 per day. The event shook the traditional power structure in Hawaii and, as Masayo Duus demonstrates in this book, had consequences reaching all the way up to the eve of World War II. By the end of World War I, the Hawaiian Islands had become what a Japanese guidebook called a "Japanese village in the Pacific," with Japanese immigrant workers making up nearly half the work force on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Although the strikers eventually capitulated, the Hawaiian territorial government, working closely with the planters, cracked down on the strike leaders, bringing them to trial for an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the house of a plantation official. And to end dependence on Japanese immigrant labor, the planters lobbied hard in Washington to lift restrictions on the immigration of Chinese workers. Placing the event in the context of immigration history as well as diplomatic history, Duus argues that the clash between the immigrant Japanese workers and the Hawaiian oligarchs deepened the mutual suspicion between the Japanese and United States governments. Eventually, she demonstrates, this suspicion led to the passage of the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, an event that cast a long shadow into the future. Drawing on both Japanese- and English-language materials, including important unpublished trial documents, this richly detailed narrative focuses on the key actors in the strike. Its dramatic conclusions will have broad implications for further research in Asian American studies, labor history, and immigration history.
Holehole bushi, folk songs of Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations, describe the experiences of this particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.
Hawaii's sugar industry enjoyed great success for most of the 20th century, and its influence was felt across a broad spectrum: economics, politics, the environment, and society. This success was made possible, in part, through the liberal use of Hawaii's natural resources. Chief among these was water, which was needed in enormous quantities to grow and process sugarcane. Between 1856 and 1920, sugar planters built miles of ditches, diverting water from almost every watershed in Hawaii. "Ditch" is a humble term for these great waterways. By 1920, ditches, tunnels, and flumes were diverting over 800 million gallons a day from streams and mountains to the canefields and their mills. Sugar Water chronicles the building of Hawaii's ditches, the men who conceived, engineered, and constructed them, and the sugar plantations and water companies that ran them. It explains how traditional Hawaiian water rights and practices were affected by Western ways and how sugar economics transformed Hawaii from an insular, agrarian, and debt-ridden society into one of the most cosmopolitan and prosperous in the Pacific.
"A scholarly work but as readable as a novel, this is the first history of plantation life as experienced by the laborers themselves. The oppressive round-the-clock conditions under which they worked will make you glad they fought back in one huge strike; Takaki charts this conflict well." --San Francisco Chronicle
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift were tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers who challenged their powerful employers by joining the left-led International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, the movement "reworked race" by incorporating and rearticulating racial meanings and practices into a new ideology of class. Through its groundbreaking historical analysis, Reworking Race radically rethinks interracial politics in theory and practice.