Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The Hawaiians of Kealakekua Bay may have gotten the best of Captain James Cook, but when it comes to the colonial exchange it has been downhill for the island archipelago ever since. Europeans settled the islands, eventually overthrowing the government of Queen Lili’uokalani and aligning politically with the United States. The impetus for the coup was a political initiative proposed by the Queen threatening business interests throughout the islands, many of which involved fruit plantations predicated upon exploitative labor models. Even aspects of colonialism that derived from righteous imperative resulted in economic exploitation, case in point Samuel Castle and Amos Cooke, two missionaries who abandoned their ministry in favor of starting sugar plantations, later merging with Dole to become the biggest producers of pineapple in the world. As the indigenous joke goes: “these men came to do good, and they did well.” This paper explores how the fruit industry helped re-map the late 19th century global economy of trade. The tropicalization of American foreign policy, in particular, contributed to the Spanish-American War and resulted in U.S.-backed coups in Guatemala and Hawaii. The combination of big business and politics with the latter had a unique flavor due to its religious underpinnings and in the massive and widespread ecological devastation, including numerous bird extinctions, that resulted from agricultural terra-forming. The Pineapple Empire that was 19th century Hawaii is thus a unique historical laboratory for examining the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, religion, and ecological loss.