The rise of the sugar industry in the Islands and its importance in altering Hawai'i dates to long before sugar ever became a cash crop in the Pacific.
Influences that arrived with Capt. James Cook in 1778 escalated, making a profound impact in Hawai'i after the death of Kamehameha the Great in 1819.
One fundamental change occurred in 1850 during what was known as the Great Mahele — the division of feudal lands — which opened the way for private land ownership.
With Western contact came missionaries, entrepreneurs and commercial whaling fleets. Contact also introduced diseases that would all but destroy the native population and ultimately require importing plantation workers from China, Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, Korea and the Philippines.
Whaling had introduced a market economy to Hawai'i for the first time, and with commerce came the prospect of wealth for those who learned to cater to ships, and the merchantmen, dreamers and adventurers that came with them.
From the 1820s through the 1850s, whaling drove Hawai'i, but the American Civil War in the early 1860s marked the end of the Pacific fleet.
With whaling in swift decline, Islanders who depended on the industry faced financial ruin. Frantic landowners made an all-out attempt to cultivate sugarcane, which had grown wild in the fields since the time of Capt. Cook.
Because the Civil War had wiped out Southern sugar in America, an opportunity arose in Hawai'i's soil. But Hawai'i's low-grade sugar could be a tough proposition, and fortunes were won and lost.
Complicating the picture was that Hawai'i could barely compete with established sugar growers elsewhere.
What was needed to secure Island sugar was a reciprocity treaty with the United States that would allow duty-free Hawaiian sugar into the country. While more than one Hawaiian king had tried and failed to win the deal, King David Kalakaua succeeded in 1875 — thus signaling the true beginnings of industrial sugar in the Islands and ushering Hawai'i onto the world's agricultural stage.
