Planter's Paradise: Nature, Culture, and Hawaiʻi’s Sugarcane Plantations

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian sugar industry rose from economic insignificance to become one of the world’s most efficient and productive sugarcane plantation systems. "Planter's Paradise" traces the transnational environmental history of cane planting in Hawaiʻi, from Polynesian settlement to the early twentieth century, to explore how an export-based mono-culture plantation system eclipsed diversified farming, how cultural encounters between indigenous and Euro-American groups influenced agriculture and natural resource use, and how the politics of planting contributed to the rise of American hegemony over the islands. With research grounded in plantation records, agricultural association publications, popular media, and personal correspondence, I address sugarcane planting as a point where ideas about nature, methods of converting nature into commodities for consumption in distant markets, and nature itself influenced each other within the context of U.S. imperial expansion. I argue that the ascendance of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry was the result of cultural encounters, economic relations, and environmental conditions at the local level, but cane planting also connected the archipelago to particular transnational networks of economic, ecological, and cultural exchange. Sugarcane planting introduced to Hawaiʻi foreign ways of relating to the natural world, a host of alien organisms, and advances in agricultural science and technology that impacted all of Hawaiian society. These introductions contributed to planters' power. By the early twentieth century, Hawaiʻi had become a planter's paradise: a society and environment transformed for the industrial cultivation of sugarcane.

Grantor dc:publisher

Temple University. Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Kessler, Lawrence Helfgott

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Isenberg, Andrew C. (Andrew Christian)

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Goedde, Petra, 1964-
• Bailey, Beth L., 1957-
• Immerman, Richard H.
• McNeill, John Robert

• History
• Agriculture
• Environmental studies
• Hawaiʻi
• Pacific world
• Plantations
• Settler colonialism
• Sugar

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Dc Identifier Other

965642592

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/1603