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This chapter examines how this changing political context and enhanced economic value of livestock in the Pacific translated into new systems of land tenure. Rancheros in California called for an end to the mission system, as the missionaries’ herds competed with their own. In 1834, the Mexican government secularized the mission lands with the claimed intention of their redistribution among the Indian converts. A few Indian ranches thrived for a brief time; however, most of the mission lands found their way into the hands of Mexican rancheros and the increasingly numerous Anglo-American immigrants. Until 1849, the Hawaiian royal family and nobility controlled Hawaiian land. In 1849, under foreign pressure, Hawaiʻi instituted a land reform called the Great Māhele. The Māhele allowed Hawaiian commoners access to land ownership, but after 1850 it also allowed foreigners to purchase Hawaiian lands. Europeans and Americans with herds of cattle soon established large ranches on several of the islands. These parallel land reforms served as an important turning point in Euro-American imperial projects in the Pacific, as the expression of Euro-American power during land reforms concentrated land in the hands of colonial powers and closed off many avenues of native profit from cattle.

This chapter describes events from 1845 to 1869. By the time of the Mahele, much of Molokai was a shadow of its former self, its population having dropped steeply from a reported 6,000 in 1832 to about 3,400 in 1850; then, after recovering a few hundred by 1855, dropping further to 2,864 in 1860. The ruins of former hamlets, fishponds, and kalo loi were visible seemingly everywhere. Yet, because of its isolation, the island bore few marks of the new world outside: few haoles lived there, and almost all land was in Hawaiian hands; most residents subsisted on traditional farming and fishing, with some seasonal labor at Lahaina in the whaling economy; little shipping stopped there, and few of the biological intrusions such as invasive species and grazing animals had made an appearance. Nevertheless, a transition to the market economy was going on.

This chapter examines the relationship between the genesis of the kīkā kila on the one hand, and the climate of political havoc in which it was created on the other. The chapter examines various origin stories of the instrument, then focuses on the life of Joseph Kekuku, the young man from Lā’ie, O’ahu, who is credited with first developing the steel guitar, largely at the Kamehameha School for Boys. The chapter also considers the aftermath of the Great Māhele, the royalist politics of his family in relation to the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893, and the decision by the United States to formally annex the Islands in 1898. The chapter studies the musical reaction to these events in the Islands, and contemplates the decision by so many Hawaiian dancers and musicians, including Kekuku, to leave the Islands following the overthrow.

Chapter 1 begins with the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of “free labor” and “free trade” revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of “free trade” on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839-1842) and the imposition of a “free labor” ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.

Why did Hawaiʻi’s ruling chiefs reorganize property rights to land in the mid-nineteenth century? It is that the integration of Hawaiʻi’s economy with global markets increased the profitability of deploying rapidly evolving technologies of sugar production on fertile Hawaiʻi lands. Another way to say this is that Hawaiʻi’s rapid integration into the global economy gave it a comparative advantage in sugar production, as the development of U.S. West Coast markets in the 1840s increased the price of sugar for Hawaiʻi producers vis-à-vis prices for yams, sweet potatoes, and taro, the traditional goods produced by Hawaiʻi farmers. Globalization did for the Hawaiʻi economy what it does for all small economies that become closely linked to the global economy: changes in rents and wages lose their direct ties to changes in the country’s population and become more closely tied to changes in the prices of goods bought and sold in global markets.

For Native workers returning to Hawaiʻi in the second half of the nineteenth century, they found an almost unrecognizable economy and environment. Following the Māhele, Euro-American settlers had made Hawaiʻi their home and were intent on reorganizing labor and land to serve global capitalism. Chapter six examines the rise of the sugar plantation system in Hawaiʻi, and how Hawaiʻi’s sugar history—so often linked with histories of U.S. empire—was actually part of the same trans-Pacific story of oceanic industrialization through sandalwooding, whaling, guano mining, and gold mining. But the new migrant workers at this time were not Hawaiian “kanakas,” they were Chinese “coolies.” George Beckwith’s plantation at Haʻikū, Maui, is used as a case study for exploring the intersections and entanglements of Hawaiian and Chinese labor in this period. By 1880, Chinese and other non-Natives outnumbered Hawaiian workers in the sugar industry, and across the Pacific World the collapse of extractive industries such as whaling, guano mining, and gold mining left Hawaiʻi’s diasporic working class disjointed and disempowered. The end result was the dismemberment of the Hawaiian working class.

This chapter examines the impact of the Mahele and Kuleana Act on landholding in Hā'ena. It first explains how Hā'ena was awarded to Abner Pākī, a powerful ali'i closely allied with the Kamehameha family, by virtue of Mahele 1848. It then discusses Pākī's appointment of Kekela, a close relative, as konohiki of Hā'ena. It also considers how maka'āinana can receive an award of land under the Kuleana Act of 1850; selling of ahupua'a to groups of maka'āinana who organized hui kū'ai 'āina (cooperatives to buy land) as a means to raise the cash necessary to purchase lands being offered for sale; and the kinds of hardships faced by maka'āinana as they adjusted to the new property regime.

This chapter focuses on Hui Kū'ai 'Āina o Hā'ena (Hā'ena Cooperative/Company to Purchase Land), one of many hui (organizations, gatherings together of people) formed by the people to buy land in the aftermath of the Mahele and Kuleana Act. The manner in which hui organized themselves, as indicated by the bylaws they drafted to guide the activities of their organizations, is a reflection of their desire to retain some features of the traditional life ways of the ancestors. This chapter first considers the original shareholders of Hui Kū'ai 'Āina o Hā'ena before discussing its purchase of the ahupua'a (land division). It also considers the legal wranglings that led to the partition of hui lands, resulting in the fragmentation of the communally based system that had served the Hawaiian people so well.