Foreign Influence on Hawaii

Foreigners and the Economy

Impact foreigners had on Hawaii Island

The history of the discovery and consequent changes caused by the outside world dates back to the third voyage that Captain James Cook made to the Pacific with an attempt to explore more on the Northwest passage in 1778. This is when he first sighted the Islands and was well received by the locals of the islands, indeed they considered him a messenger of a god and gave him decent hospitality during his stay there. As a show of gratitude, Cook left the Hawaiians two English pigs, three goats and seeds for melons, onions and pumpkins. He then named some of the islands after his patron and this interaction can be considered the beginning of external influence on the economy of Hawaii since these gifts led to the introduction of animal husbandry and land tilling for growing the various plants Cook left them (Info Grafik Inc., 2015).

In 1795, the young chief Kamehameha I managed to conquer the islands of Hawaii and created a unified kingdom. The system that he used to rule the kingdom was the kapu system which later proved to be extremely difficult with the arrival of foreigners and this monarchy that lasted to 1893 when it was changed to a constitutional monarchy. King Kamehameha II marked an official end to the Kapu system in 1819, the sacred temples were destroyed and the gods mutilated. Having abolished the Kapu, the Hawaii locals were left with a cultural void hence they became receptive to the protestant Christianity that was introduced by the American missionaries. The Hawaiians had purely an oral tradition which was different from the written tradition of the missionaries, this meant that if the missionaries needed to convert them faster, they had to develop alphabet for the Hawaiian language. They also started translating the Holy Bible into the local language and printed other supplementary information for the Hawaiians to read. Within a short period of 20 years, the missionaries managed to establish a school system that had the qualities of the Western society as well as the protestant religion.

In the context of the native Hawaiians, there was nothing like individual ownership of land but a communal ownership system, this was rudely disrupted by the foreigners who came into the islands and within a few decades after their arrival, thousands of land had been allocated to the foreigners and even the crown land that was owned by the King and his successors were not spared and would be either sold or leased out to the foreigners as a means of payment of the debt owed through the foreign goods supplied. One significant political event that occurred and was connected to the land issue was when in 1893 the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown and the then Queen Liliuokalani was captured as a prisoner, the colonialists went too far to confiscate the remaining Crown Lands and the new government made it part of the public land. This overthrow of the queen still forms part of the contemporary politics and the basis of the Hawaiian Sovereign Movement.

The erosion of the Hawaiian culture and way of land ownership also went in tandem with the unprecedented decline in the population of the locals. There are thousands of Hawaiians who died from the foreign diseases that were introduced by the foreigners yet others were forced by the economic changes to venture into whaling ships for prolonged fishing periods. Hawaiians were known to be unusually susceptible to foreign diseases like measles, whooping cough, smallpox, gonorrhea, flu and Hansen's disease. It is estimated that by 1920, the pure Hawaiians remained to be only 23,723 and the life expectancy of this population was a paltry 35 years.

With the drastic reduction in the population of the Hawaiians and the introduction of the agricultural way of life and economy that was based on labor in farms, there was a consequent serious labor shortage as compared to the need for the labor in the sprouting and flourishing sugarcane and pineapple plantations. This shortage prompted the Hawaiian government to support the importation and recruitment of laborers from other places across the globe. It is estimated that more than 250,000 foreign people found their way to Hawaii from various countries like China, Philippines, Japan, Korea and Portugal. The massive migration into Hawaii saw the significant decline in the population of the pure Hawaiians and by the 1900s they constituted a small portion of the now multi-ethnic Hawaii. Currently, it is estimated that the pure Hawaiians are as few as 5,000 as compared to the part Hawaiians who are estimated at 230,000, making Hawaiians strangers in their own land, and Hawaii one of the most diverse multi-ethnic society (Alternative Hawaii, 2011).