United States[edit]
American Protestant missionaries settled in Hawaiʻi at the beginning of the 19th century and quickly gained influence and wealth. They prohibited local traditions they disliked, like the hula or surfboarding. Reverend Amos Starr Cooke, who arrived in 1837, set up a school to educate the future monarchs. When one of his pupils rose to the throne, Cooke was appointed unofficial adviser to the king in 1843 and from this position devised a land reform that allowed foreigners to purchase land from locals in order to plant sugarcane. Cooke and other missionaries became big landowners and sugar producers, and got control of the economy.[2]
The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 between the Kingdom of Hawaii (explicitly acknowledged as a sovereign nation) and the United States allowed for duty-free importation of Hawaiian sugar into the United States beginning in 1876. This further promoted plantation agriculture, which was in the hands of foreign Whites. Hawai'i ceded Pearl Harbor, including Ford Island (Hawaiian: Mokuʻumeʻume), together with its shoreline and four to five miles of land adjacent to the shore, free of cost to the U.S.[7] The U. S. demanded this area based on an 1873 report commissioned by the U. S. Secretary of War. Native Hawaiians protested the treaty on the streets until the revolt was suffocated by U.S. marines.[2]
The treaty also included duty-free importation of rice, which was by this time becoming a major crop in the abandoned taro patches in the wetter parts of the islands. This led to an influx of immigrants from Asia (first Chinese, and later Japanese) needed to support the escalating sugar industry and provided the impetus for expansion of rice cultivation. Water needed for growing sugarcane resulted in extensive water works to divert streams from the wet windward slopes to the dry lowlands.