Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaii

Chapter 2: Sugar’s Ecology

s H awai‘i’s experiment with sugar agriculture parallels the era of industrialization in Europe and North America. Hawai‘i enters the stage as sugar production goes global and when beet and cane sugars from both temperate and tropical climates compete for an international market. As refined sugar finds an increasing appetite within the industrializing world, it spreads its tentacles beyond the typical tropical islands and coastlines and into the sugar beet landscapes of European and North American farmlands. The result is a very competitive industry that quickly becomes a heavily capitalized and corporate-dominated business—especially in the United States. In this global economy, Hawai‘i’s planters had to adapt or fail. The third wave of ecological change, which is the focus of this book, is a one-hundred-year story of how a small-scale commercial sugar industry organized itself, rearranged the landscape, and coped with local political resistance. Hawai‘i’s early commercial sugar plantations entered a world undergoing rapid changes in technology and market expansion. Sugar consumption in Europe (especially Britain) and in North America was increasing exponentially, which encouraged development of new sugar economies such as Queensland, Fiji, and Hawai‘i in the Pacific. It also created sweeping changes in the island Caribbean, an older sugar economy based on small estates with slave labor. As world consumption surged, preference developed for more refined sugars. Muscovado sugar (a dark brown, unrefined sugar) was the common sweetener in the eighteenth century. A product of a simple milling process that left much of the molasses in the sugar, this crude sugar was in little demand by the late nineteenth century, replaced by the more refined product produced by large mills. The technological revolution in sugar milling benefited Hawai‘i. In the 1860s, the latest technologies gradually appeared on its new plantations. Steam T WO Sugar’s Ecology sugar’s ecology 37 power replaced animal-driven mills. Horizontal rollers, often arranged in sequences of three or more to crush the cane several times, replaced the smaller vertical rollers. Vacuum pans used atmospheric pressure to boil the juice much more quickly than in open boiling kettles. Centrifugals spun the crystal sugars to separate the molasses in just hours, replacing a stationary draining process that took weeks.1 All these innovations required heavy investment in a technologically advanced mill, thus limiting entry into the business. Soon the smaller planters (especially Chinese and Hawaiians) closed their plantations or sold out to haole2 capitalists. Throughout the sugar world, this was the common experience. Gradually, capital arrived from outside the plantation region and replaced local planters. In some cases, as in the Caribbean, the local planter classes had been in business for over a hundred years. From the Caribbean to Brazil to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the costs of erecting and equipping large sugar mills required funds that regional planters just did not have. The face of sugar production changed as capitalists from New York, San Francisco, London, and Amsterdam moved into Cuba, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Java to build mills on a scale never before seen, signaling the global industrialization of sugar production.3 Each region entered the new market environment at different times; individual circumstances dictated the timing of capitalization. Sometimes, market protection by colonial powers lengthened the survival of small plantations. Extension of slavery into the late nineteenth century, as in the case of Cuba, enabled new plantations to ramp up large-scale production with extremely low labor costs. However, by 1900 all sugar economies had to be globally competitive, and the more vulnerable producers left the scene. The exceptions were small producers in places like Mexico, who only supplied limited national markets. The Treaty of Reciprocity, signed in 1875,4 was the trigger for industrialization of Hawai‘i’s sugar production. The treaty admitted Hawai‘i’s sugar to the United States duty-free and immediately attracted sugar refiner Claus Spreckels from San Francisco to the islands. A rising German grocer-turnedcapitalist , Spreckels had built a sugar refinery in booming San Francisco after learning German refining processes. Always on the lookout for investments with his newly won capital, he headed to Honolulu as soon as word came that Hawaiian sugars would enter the United States duty-free. His investments dwarfed the other local Hawai‘i sugar interests. For the next twenty-five years, always unpredictable and rarely cooperative, he gave Hawai‘i’s missionary capitalists a run for their money. Starting with the Hawaiian Commercial and...