America was willing to sacrifice short-term economic interests and the defense of particular companies. Economic recovery in the capitalist world, combined with increasingly globalized telecommunications, advertised the West’s advantages far more effectively than any propaganda. In pre-contact Hawaii, he reminds us, all land belonged to the king. The kanaka, kept in their place by an elaborate religious system of taboos called kapu, handed over the majority of products they harvested from this land to the chiefs who held it as royal vassals. Traditional Hawaiian society was brutally hierarchical; it practiced human sacrifice as a means of gaining power from defeated enemies and punishing kapu violators.American-style capitalism began to make disastrous inroads on Hawaiian autonomy after the passage in 1850 of the Kuleana Act, which gave the kanaka ownership of land they had tended for generations, and the Alien Land Ownership Act, which allowed foreigners to buy it from them. This unfortunate conjunction, Haley writes, “had the net effect of evicting thousands of native Hawaiians from the countryside and leaving them worse off than they were before.” Concurrently, the whaling industry went into terminal decline, and sugar plantations came to dominate the Hawaiian landscape and economy.
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AuthorMy name is Curtis Lowe. I am in 10th grade at Kamehameha Schools. Archives
March 2019
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