Plantation Colonialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i: The Case of Chinese Sugar Planters

Abstract

This chapter defines the force of planter sovereignty in the circa 30-year period in which Hawai‘i witnessed the demographic, topographical, and political ramifications associated with the formation of a migrant labor-based plantation complex. Complementing recent research on indigenous sovereignty in the islands, it applies the analytical prisms of plantation polity and racialization to interrogate planter-ruling elite mediation in the contingent transition from a native- to migrant-dominated plantation labor force. Drawing on close engagement with the institutional, discursive, and operational archives of planters in Hawai‘i in the decades preceding US annexation, including Kingdom government records, an emergent Hawai‘i-based planter press, and planter correspondence, this chapter emphasizes how the plantation and planter networking figured in the contested and variegated state formation processes of late nineteenth-century Hawai‘i.