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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Hawai’i: Native Labor in the Pacific World by Gregory Rosenthal
  • Kealani Cook
Beyond Hawai’i: Native Labor in the Pacific World. By Gregory Rosenthal (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018) 320 pp. $85.00 cloth $32.95 paper and e-book

At first glance, Rosenthal’s Beyond Hawai’i is a work of considerable promise. Using a mix of English and Hawaiian-language sources, Rosenthal provides a desperately needed examination of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) laborers in the nineteenth century. The text weaves together the histories of Kanaka laborers, the industries in which they worked, the natural environment that these industries exploited, and the broader transition of Kānaka into capitalist labor. Each chapter uses a single individual as a lens into a specific industry, beginning with the Hawaiian sandalwood trade in the 1820s and then moving into the Pacific worlds of whaling, shipping, gold, and guano before returning to Hawai i to examine sugar in the 1870s. The text relies, as much as possible, on first hand accounts by Kanaka laborers. Rosenthal deserves praise for amplifying their voices in his work.

Unfortunately, Beyond Hawai’i falls short as both Hawaiian and Pacific history, in part because Rosenthal seems to have little investment in either. As an outsider, Rosenthal argues that they have the kuleana (right and responsibility) “to bring outside concerns, methodologies, and research questions to bear upon local and indigenous stories, to offer new ways of seeing and to give voice to concerns that may or may not resonate with current stakeholders in the archipelago” (12). In some ways, this claim seems to be putting an indigenous gloss on a long-standing colonial vision of the Pacific as a space for outsiders to do as they wish with little concern for the interests of “stakeholders.”

This lack of investment may be why Rosenthal abandons some of the basic kuleana not just of Hawaiian and Pacific historians but of historians in general. Rosenthal seems little inclined, for instance, to account for historical and historiographical context. Hence, the chapter about Boki and the sandalwood trade fails to account for Boki’s political rival Ka’ahumanu and the role of the sandalwood trade and debt in their political maneuvering. The failure to address this context leads to a classic imperial conclusion, that Natives just like shiny Western things. Rosenthal argues that this inclination has something to do with mana, [End Page 290] spiritual power or status, but the text includes no examination of what mana meant in 1820s Hawai’i.

On occasion, Rosenthal also neglects to support historical claims or arguments properly. Rosenthal eschews any historically grounded analysis of the Master’s and Servant’s Act of 1850, a key moment in the labor history of Hawai’i, instead relying on broad declarations based on a crude application of Karl Marx. Rosenthal writes that after the Mahele—the land redistribution under King Kamehameha III—the kingdom “realized” that it needed to alienate the “landless” masses from their labor, passing the act to force a newly made Native proletariat into contract-driven servility. The only support for this statement can be found in a footnote citing relevant parts of Capital (45). Although a culturally and historically aware Marxian analysis is clearly relevant, Rosenthal’s use of Marx does justice to neither history nor theory.

Elsewhere Rosenthal claims that though well-known in 1840s Yerba Buena, Kānaka were not particularly “well liked.” The evidence comes solely from an occupying American soldier during the Mexican-American war who, in professing his racially charged disgust of all of Yerba Buena’s residents, reserved his strongest dislike for Kānaka (142–143). Although the claim was a single tangential aside, such poorly supported statements call into question the overall quality of the work.

In a more problematical example, Rosenthal concludes by arguing that the failure of Kānaka to maintain, or even desire, an ethnic monopoly on field labor on the sugar plantations led to the “dissolution of the Hawaiian working class” in the 1870s. Although this contention provides a convenient end date for the monograph, Rosenthal’s conclusion is historically suspect and unsupported beyond the bottom rungs of plantation labor...

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