results in the virtual turning of the hydraulic hypothesis on its head.”127
I would qualify this by noting that, while there may be forms of irrigation without stratification in Polynesia, irrigation as intensification—that is to say, irrigation as a phenomenon of scale—is certainly implicated in stratification—though it may not be a sufficient cause. It is intensification’s quasi-industrialization of the landscape, of production, of the division of labor, not the method used, that creates stratification. It is the hierarchy, not the technology. In Polynesia, dryland cultivation at large scale is more regimented, temporally, spatially, and socially, than wet cultivation at large scale. But it is no more than a more extreme form of the same process.
In Hawai‘i, both irrigation and dryland farming reached their greatest elaboration and complexity in the Pacific. And, on the eve of contact, the Hawaiian archipelago was the single most complex, hierarchical society in the Pacific. To most scholars, it had already passed out of the status of chiefdom and into that of an “archaic state,” having moved beyond a power/class structure based on kinship and toward one of divine kingship.128
To recapitulate, recent Pacific archaeology has shown that human colonization of island environments is inflected toward certain patterns according to the size, resource base, climate, geology, and other physical characters of the colonized place, in dynamic interaction with the characters of the colonizing society: its economy, religion, technology, fertility, and so on. Certain combinations of these characters will push the process in certain directions—trajectories, like those seen in the chiefdom typologies of Sahlins and Goldman—that do not “determine” outcomes but help to explain, and perhaps to predict, historical outcomes—and certainly cannot be ignored in the ideological service of some notion of absolute historical contingency.129
Water, the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural in Hawai‘i, operates on a range of registers: metaphysical, social, and physical, but its effects are modulated according to the different scales and characters of the places and people involved. Just as wet and dry, wai and malo’o, are fundamental physical characters, so too do big and small structure the history of Hawai‘i at all levels. Bigness can be physical, as in types of resource “thickness”—such as high streamflow, fertile soils, broad valleys, or productive aquaculture—and it can be social, as in the high populations, surpluses, and stratified societies that resource thickness can sustain. It is a circular relation: social bigness thrives on physical bigness and makes more of it through intensified land use to obtain more surplus, thereby making more social bigness through stratification, and so on. The mechanism is at base environmental: given enough resources, bigness benefits from the environmental degradation inherent in human economic activity in fragile island environments in that it weakens the earlier, dispersed, diversified, presumably more egalitarian settlement pattern and strengthens centralized, simplified, intensified agriculture and the competitive involution that feeds on it. This in turn has its feedback mechanism in more cascading environmental degradation: deforestation, denudation, erosion, dessication, and extinction.
This sequence proceeds at varying rates and intensities, depending on the characters involved. In small environments characterized by resource “thinness”—aridity; poor soils; physical remoteness or isolation, such as in small, steep valleys; inaccessible uplands or stormy coastlines; or in the atolls that stall out in the first, simple form of chiefdom structure—it may not get started at all or, once started, may fizzle out. Physical smallness fights social bigness, as the history of Kala‘e on Molokai suggests. Small places, like Kala‘e, can become places of refuge for politically and economically weak segments of the population; these refugia, as biologists call such pockets, ironically preserve both cultural and natural diversity because of their marginality and vulnerability, not in spite of them. But, under the right conditions, social stratification and environmental degradation will tend to produce one another reciprocally, as the larger history of Polynesian Hawai‘i attests. This conclusion has important similarities to Worster’s thesis: bigness tends toward social stratification, coercion, and monopoly control of land and resources, though scholars may argue over the comparative coerciveness of the wet versus dry modes in precontact Hawai‘i. In either case, bigness constitutes itself, at least in part, on the destruction of the environmental basis of small community reproduction and by seizing control over the common resources that remain, such as streamflows, fishponds, fishing rights, and access to the kula uplands, and by instigating or coercing economic development by expansion into new areas with capital-intensive infrastructure and labor-intensive production. In Sahlins’s words, “all life begins with the chiefship”—and this is because the chiefship has, in seizing power, seized the resources that give life.
What I have been trying to do with these analyses is to sketch a moving picture, or series of pictures, of the physical Hawaiian universe on the eve of contact. I have tried to show some of the dynamic interaction of the environment and the social and how each was shaped in particular ways by it. With Kirch, I have tried to show that “by the end of prehistory the Pacific world was a constructed world, an ocean full of thoroughly modified, transformed, anthropogenic islands.”130
2
Traffick and Taboo
Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848
The postcontact period of 1778–1848 was one of radical change in Hawai‘i, at some times and in some places gradual, at other times and in other places turbulent. Molokai was not central to the largest historical events of the period, which occurred instead on the larger islands—especially O‘ahu, scene of the fiercest Hawaiian battles in the first half of the period, site of the majority of foreign shipping and commercial activity at the port town of Honolulu, and seat, after 1804, of the Hawaiian government. In contrast, Molokai would have seemed a tableau of stability. But even there, occasional violent battles shredded the social and physical fabric of native communities, and deeper, systemic changes were afoot that, at the end of the period, would lead to fundamental, even catastrophic, change: foreign people, weapons, organisms, trade goods, religion, and civic and legal institutions all came to Hawai‘i and engaged Hawaiian people, communities, institutions, and the natural systems they depended upon. This chapter will try to sketch both the larger panorama of change in Hawai‘i and the Pacific Basin in the contexts of world and regional history and the foreground details of historical change in Molokai between the end of Polynesian isolation in Hawai‘i and the Mahele, the revolution of land tenure that marked the coming of Western legal, economic, and political norms to the Sandwich Islands kingdom.
MOLOKAI AND THE FINAL ROUND OF HAWAIIAN WARFARE
In the centuries prior to contact with Europeans, the control of Molokai passed back and forth between a series of warring O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i chiefs. As the largest and most productive of the islands “in the middle,“ Molokai was a natural resort for provisioning, especially along its protected south shore with its many fishponds, groves, and kalo lands, and for enlisting Molokai ali‘i and their troops for campaigns elsewhere. It was also a target for retribution by successive conquerors for the inevitable alliances made by Molokai chiefs with the previous ruling mo‘i, or king. Not infrequently, occupiers ravaged the place, and Molokai remained a battleground and a pawn.
At the time of Captain Cook’s advent, in 1778, Molokai had been for some time under the O‘ahu king Peleioholani, and after his death in 1780, under his successor Kahahana.1 Here, Kahekili, king of Maui, came to visit Kahahana, as Kamakau relates: “The two chiefs met with many professions of affection, but Kahekili’s was feigned; he coveted O‘ahu and Molokai for their rich lands, many walled fish ponds, springs and water kalo patches. The island of O‘ahu was very fertile and Molokai scarcely less so, and Kahekili lay sleepless with covetous longing. He asked for Hālawa . . . and Kahahana gave it to him.”2
