From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawai‘i’s Premier Crop by C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood (review)

From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill is a thorough interdisciplinary analysis of the agricultural technology used to cultivate sugarcane in the Hawaiian Islands, starting with the plant’s earliest cultivation by Polynesian settlers circa ad 500 and ending with the last remaining sugar company on the island of Maui in 2014. C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood balance a detailed discussion of the technological advancements of the sugar industry with the broader social, political, and economic contexts that underpin the rise and fall of the industry in Hawai‘i. As agricultural scientists who worked for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, Jones and Osgood offer expert analysis of the industry’s technology and methods over time, discussing sugarcane varieties, irrigation infrastructure, plantation labor systems, fertilizers, and means of pest control. They argue that economic pressures forced the industry to reduce labor costs and implement technologies that increased production efficiency, resulting in the Hawaiian sugar industry’s rise as the most mechanized in the world. Further, they trace the decline of the industry over the past forty years, arguing that advanced technology, in the form of drip irrigation and new disease resistant varieties, allowed the last remaining sugar mill to survive into the twenty-first century.

Jones and Osgood begin in chapter 1 by describing the indigenous agricultural infrastructure in conjunction with Hawaiian political organization prior to the arrival of Westerners in the eighteenth century. With the emergence of the first commercial sugar company in the late 1830s, the California gold rush, the US Civil War, and the decline of the whaling industry incentivized expansion of large-scale sugarcane cultivation. Due to the passing of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1876, the Hawaiian sugar industry boomed, increasing production twenty-fold between 1876 and 1896. During this time, sugar companies in Hawai‘i led the industry with ditch-irrigation technology, steam-powered machinery, and new fertilizers. Nearing the turn of the nineteenth century, powerful political interests, including prominent sugar industry leaders, staged a coup in 1893 to stabilize the sugar industry’s political and economic situation, overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and setting the stage for annexation later in 1898.

As chapters 3 and 4 describe, the industry continued to grow rapidly during the period before the Great Depression and despite the Depression era’s low sugar prices due to improvements in irrigation infrastructure, hybrid varieties of sugarcane, and mechanized field and factory operations that reduced the need for labor. In light of major labor unrest and strikes by Japanese and Filipino workers, the industry continued to implement technology that increased production efficiencies, relying less on field and factory hands. The same reliance on workforce-reducing technological advancements by the industry continued through the World War II era. The book ends by tracing the decline of the industry, starting in 1970, due to unstable domestic and international sugar prices. Unable to reduce production costs to meet the low market prices, and struggling to diversify crop productions, all but one commercial sugar company closed between 1970 and 2011. In 2014, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (hc&s) faced legal challenges headed by water rights and environmental activists.

A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary niche historicizing scientific progression in the agricultural industry in Hawai‘i, this book offers a highly detailed documentation and synthesis of technological history, both organizing and characterizing the progression of technology across multiple eras. Jones and Osgood demonstrate a masterful conversion of the archive of scientific company records into cohesive historical narrative. The primary strength and value of their work lies in the application of their scientific expertise to describe how agricultural technology evolved.

Secondarily, Jones and Osgood historicize the role of...