Related Papers
Global Plantations in the Modern World
Plantation Colonialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i: The Case of Chinese Sugar Planters
2023 •
Nicholas B Miller
This chapter suggests the utility of plantation colonialism as a prism to study the emergence of a plantation complex in Hawai‘i, focusing on the neglected participation of dozens of Chinese merchants in the sugar boom of the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter begins by providing the political, legal, demographic, and economic background to the Reciprocity Treaty of 1874, namely the rise of Anglo-American property and labor law, the distinctive biopolitical concerns of the Kingdom polity, and the formation of migrant Chinese urban and rural communities. The second and third sections go on to describe how three Chinese merchants turned to sugar after 1874: first, the powerful mogul Chun Afong (陳 芳, 1825–1906) and second, the upstart duo of Goo Tet Chin Akina (GOO Tet-Tsin, 1838–1913) and Luke Aseu (CHANG Young Seu, 1841–1918). These three preliminary sections foreground an extended analysis of Hawai‘i’s largest labor rebellion prior to the overthrow of the monarchy, which occurred at Akina and Aseu’s plantation at Kohala, Island of Hawai‘i, in 1891.
Hawaii turns to sugar: The rise of plantation centers, 1860-80
1997 •
Carol MacLennan
HAWAI`I'S ECONOMY turned toward sugar in the decades between 186o and 1880. These twenty years were pivotal in building the plantation system. Basic features of rural factory life were established. HawaiTs government committed extensive resources to the success of sugar export. Honolulu's merchants and financiers came to dominate sugar production. The Islands turned a corner during these decades—HawaiTs dependence upon sugar began. This period was the link between the earlier failed commercial plantations of mid-century 1 and the powerful industrial plantations that dominated the landscape when Hawaii lost its independence. It was a period characterized by the plantation center. Five plantation centers changed the surrounding landscape and altered nearby Hawaiian communities. Plantations in Lihu`e, Wailuku, Makawao, Hilo, and Kohala brought an invasion of agricultural practices, technologies, and population that supplanted native production systems and repeopled the land wit...
“A Plantation upon a Hill; Or, Sugar without Rum: Hawaiʻi’s Missionaries and the Founding of the Hawaiian Sugarcane Plantation System,” Pacific Historical Review 84, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 129-162
2015 •
Lawrence Kessler
Museum Worlds: Advances in Research
nnn Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage The Case of Hawaii's Plantation Village
2020 •
Cristiana Bastos
Plantation museums and memorials play different roles in coming to terms with a past of racialized violence. In this article, I briefly review the academic literature on plantations, refer to the plantation-race nexus, address the critical and acritical uses of plantation memories, discuss modes of musealizing plantations and memorializing labor, and present a community-based museum structure: Hawaii's Plantation Village. This museum project is consistent with a multiethnic narrative of Hawai'i, in that it provides both an overview of the plantation experience and a detailed account of the cultural heritage of each national group recruited for the sugar plantations. By providing a sense of historical belonging, a chronology of arrival, and a materialized representation of a lived experience, this museum plays an active and interactive role in the shaping of a collective memory of the plantation era, selecting the more egalitarian aspects of a parallel coexistence rather than the hierarchies, violence, tensions and land appropriation upon which the plantations rested. n
Portuguese in the cane: the racialization of labour in Hawaiian plantations
Cristiana Bastos
bastos, C. 2018. “Portuguese in the cane: the racialization of labour in Hawaiian plantations”. In Changing Societies: Legacies and Challenges. Vol. i. Ambiguous Inclusions: Inside Out, Inside In, eds. S. Aboim, P. Granjo, A. Ramos. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 65-96. https://doi.org/10.31447/ics9789726715030.03
The Journal of History
THE CEBUANO PLANTATION WORKERS OF HAWAII IN THE EARLY 20 TH CENTURY, AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
2008 •
Erlinda Alburo
There were two competing discourses in representing plantation life of the Visayan workers of Hawaii during the first half of the 20th century: the positive view as represented by a 1930 laborer's manual commissioned by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, and the negative view as derived from the fiction and articles in the popular prewar Cebuano periodical Bag-ong Kusog. Against these printed texts, interviews conducted in 1988 by the researcher have shown how gender and ethnicity informed the realities of plantation life as reconstructed in the narratives of the surviving laborers and/ or their children in the islands of Oahu and Kauai.
Post-Emancipation Indenture and Migration: Identities, Racialization and Transnationalism (eds. Hassankhan, M. S., Hiralal, K., Bastos, C., Roopnarine, L. . New Delhi: Manohar. ISBN 978-81-19139-20-0.
Latitudes of Indenture: Portuguese Islanders in Post-Abolition Guiana Plantations and in Hawai'i
2023 •
Cristiana Bastos
Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies
Crossing Seas and Labels: Hawaiian Contracts, British Passenger Vessels, and Portuguese Labor Migrants, 1878–1911
2020 •
Nicholas B Miller
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, over 13,000 European men, women, and children, predominantly from Madeira and the Açores, emigrated to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i on contracts of government indenture. Their modality of migration was a contemporary anomaly, as it was restricted in other global contexts at this time to peoples racialized as non-European. This atypical conjuncture of white bonded labor and a government headed by a Polynesian monarch not only upset the contemporary racial geo-politics of the age of New Imperialism, but likewise has long complicated attempts to locate this migration trajectory in comparative histories of migration and indenture. Through a close study of the vessels used to transport European indentured laborers to Hawai‘i and the conditions of transhipment they endured aboard, this article probes a boundary case between the two commonly identified global historical migration patterns of the late nineteenth century: (i) European “voluntary” migration to the Americas and Australia and (ii) Asian “indentured” immigration to Euro-American dominated plantation colonies in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mascarene Islands, and the South Pacific. By tracking the diverse passages made by the same ship, sail and steam, in-between different migrant commissions, this article suggests that a strict delineation of the onboard experience between indentured and voluntary migration is untenable. Further, this article considers the potential and limits of the study of the onboard passenger experience to study racialization processes in migration history, including for the complex context of pre-annexation Hawai‘i.
"Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai‘i" (American Literature)
Rob S E A N Wilson
Museum Worlds
Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage
2020 •
Cristiana Bastos
Plantation museums and memorials play different roles in coming to terms with a past of racialized violence. In this article, I briefly review the academic literature on plantations, refer to the plantation–race nexus, address the critical and acritical uses of plantation memories, discuss modes of musealizing plantations and memorializing labor, and present a community-based museum structure: Hawaii’s Plantation Village. This museum project is consistent with a multiethnic narrative of Hawai‘i, in that it provides both an overview of the plantation experience and a detailed account of the cultural heritage of each national group recruited for the sugar plantations. By providing a sense of historical belonging, a chronology of arrival, and a materialized representation of a lived experience, this museum plays an active and interactive role in the shaping of a collective memory of the plantation era, selecting the more egalitarian aspects of a parallel coexistence rather than the hie...
