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SOVEREIGN SUGAR: Industry and Environment in Hawai'i. By Carol A. MacLennan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. x, 378 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3949-9.
Hawai'i's status as one of the world's premier tourist destinations requires little explanation given its extraordinarily picturesque landscapes, comfortable climate, and genuine "aloha spirit." How the islands shifted from a unified sovereign state governed by indigenous Hawaiian monarchs and ruling chiefs to become a strategic part of the United States is a rather complex and tragic story. That story has been told repeatedly from different perspectives, by historians and Hawaiian scholars. In her account of the ascent of the sugar planters in politics and economy in Hawai'i, Carol MacLennan digs deeply to produce an impressively intricate story of the subterfuge and web of connections that led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the rise of sugar capitalists who reshaped landscapes and land ownership and tenure, undermined community self sufficiency, and introduced new labor ethnicities into the islands after 1850. MacLennan focuses her research on the period of immense social change that began in the 1840s but does not ignore the social and political preconditions that may have facilitated epochal events. She states that her goal is to unravel "the relationships between the industrializing developments of the sugar industry and Hawai'i's human and natural landscapes" (7). Her account illuminates the process by which small scale production of sugar by Hawaiians with the help of Chinese immigrants was overtaken in the 1850s largely by American missionary residents and their Hawai'i-born...