the settlement and colonization of a remote island archipelago works. In one thousand years, the Hawaiian Islands were settled, in the simplest accounting, twice: once by Polynesians and again after discovery by the outside world in 1778. Really, they were settled many times, over and over again: landfall was made in Hawai‘i by Polynesians many times and by people from nearly everywhere on Earth countless times, bringing with them animals, plants, parasites, pathogens, tools, techniques, ideas, and religions. In both, or all, cases, depending on one’s arithmetic, this amounted to plugging into the world and setting off each time what are effectively the processes of globalization. Thus, our socioenvironmental history is also the history of an environment and society under near-constant stress from outside settlement, colonization, extraction, and the attendant processes of change.
A key finding of this study is that clear patterns of interactions between people and their environment are visible across Hawaiian history, from the appearance of Polynesians to our own era. Discerning these patterns begins with looking at water. Because water is so unevenly distributed, access to water resources is key to life: irrigated agriculture was at the base of Polynesian Hawai‘i’s economy, religion, and competitive social order. The control of water is everything: from its control flow the control of land, labor, and therefore, power. Under an intensely competitive social order, the control of water in Hawai‘i tends toward—because it strives for—monopoly control of water and thus the rest, as well as a continuous intensification of production for surplus to support that monopoly control and people and resources. Forms of monopoly control of water are clearly and repeatedly visible in both the Polynesian period and in the postcontact period, where water remains at the center of the economic and therefore political and social life of both the nineteenth-century Hawaiian kingdom and the twentieth-century American territory and state.
It is also clear from the historical record that monopoly control of water and land resources exacerbates and drives the feedback loop of environmental degradation; the destruction of common resources; and the decline of small, subsistence-based communities, further reinforcing intensification and the control of monopolists. This helps to explain the rapid social change and very high degrees of agricultural development in both the Polynesian and postcontact periods and helps to explain the rapid and severe environmental degradation seen in both periods.
This apparent repetition is striking. I refer to it as a historical isomorphism: the similarity of form or structure between two things or organisms with different ancestry, arrived at through convergence. This word is important. It does not mean that the same thing happened twice, or that history repeated itself in Hawai‘i, but that something similar happened (at least) twice, to different people, at different times—but in the same place. In evolutionary biology this is known as convergent evolution, where unrelated organisms assume similar forms while adapting to similar or the same environmental constraints. Seeing this isomorphism in Molokai indicates that deep structures unique to the place pushed apparently very different human societies at very different times toward assuming similar forms. The challenge is to explicate, first, what those deep structures of place are and how they work and, second, how the nature of the societies—their cultures—are worked on by them and work on them in turn.
What is revealed? Not, as might be expected, or feared, environmental determinism, where physical geography determines human social outcomes. Instead, the history of Molokai shows a dynamic interaction between different types of environment and different types of social orders, which is not random but shows distinct patterns across long spans of time and is thus suggestive of a strong role of environment in social outcomes—and an equally strong role of social structures and values in determining the fate of the environment. Discerning these patterns and how they work is important because in both cases, most of the time, both the environment and a plurality of the members of society came out the worse in the deal, becoming significantly impoverished over time and falling under the control of narrow, monopolizing elites defined largely by heredity. We see that countervailing patterns exist, at the same time, of environmental and social structures that resist control and impoverishment, and yet they are limited, by the same factors that enable the opposite outcome in most cases, across Hawaiian history.
A challenge for this study is to make the history of one small island relevant to the larger world. The history of Molokai must be embedded in the history of the milieu (Hawai‘i); in the region (the Pacific); in America, of which it becomes a part; and in the world; hopefully, by learning about the processes that have shaped Molokai, we will learn something about the larger world. Hopefully, it can also be a case study that casts light on and encourages the study of similar places: small, out-of-the-way, marginal, minor places. In 1975, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called for the study of “minor literature” in its own right, as necessary as the study of the great books and without which the great books cannot make sense.4 This study is informed by the desire to write the history of a minor place because the world is made up of them, and their history shapes the fates of big, major places far more than historians have been willing to allow. It is not a microhistory because it does not assume that Molokai is a microcosm but rather that it is a distinct place with a history linked at all levels with contexts greater and smaller, from the largest stories of human history—migration, discovery, and globalizations—to the intimate histories of families. This study looks at Molokai, but always in context, never in isolation. These contexts range from Hawai‘i to North America to China to Europe. They are considered not simply to illuminate events on Molokai but also to examine how events on Molokai have affected them; all are parts of a continuum, and all share a space-time.
There are many general histories of Hawai‘i; most are primarily concerned with the progress of political events. There are many more studies of Hawaiian natural history, since it is one of the great laboratories of evolution on the planet, rivaling the Galápagos in the amount of literature developed. Very few authors have looked at its environmental history—and then not in sufficient relation to the economic and the social. Historiography tends to portray Hawaiian history as primarily a political process—just one more instance of a small, weak Aboriginal grouping succumbing to the irresistible pressures of European and American imperialism. Demographic, economic, and eventual political collapses are seen as inevitable given the progress of world history. The role of the environment is not considered adequately. Yet Hawaiian history is to a great extent a saga of physical and biological changes, of radical transformations in its landscapes and inhabitants, beginning with processes set in motion by the first Polynesian colonizers. From 1778 onward, it becomes a story of the steady retreat of native Hawaiian people and nature. Politically centered history, riveted by the confrontation between Hawaiian rulers and foreign usurpers, has done a poor job of addressing or understanding these changes. Given that Hawai‘i remained a sovereign monarchy until 1893, it was a unique situation in the island Pacific: not colonial—though perhaps paracolonia—and thus a product as much of internal dynamics as of external ones.5 Land and water are at the center of these internal dynamics and so should be put at the center of Hawaiian history.
While the major twentieth-century authors recognize, to varying degrees, the role of environmental stresses, such as deforestation, erosion, desertification, disease, and the myriad effects of species invasion and extinction, little is understood by historians about the mechanisms and extent of these.6 Among professional historians, Ralph Kuykendall and Gavan Daws did the best jobs of acknowledging the role of environment and disease, but they ascribed few motivations and isolated few consequences. Answers to questions as fundamental as what caused the Hawaiians’ demographic decline were based on shaky estimates or guesses drawn from early accounts. Others, such as Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, elide nature altogether, dismissing it by positing an eternal “harmony” between Hawaiians and their ‘aina (land), before turning all attention on the cultural chasm that separated the understandings and experience of Hawaiians and haoles (foreigners). This elision ignores copious evidence that the Hawaiians, while certainly living in greater “harmony” with nature than do we in our modern, industrial society, were quantifiably ruinous to aspects of the low-elevation environment of the islands, including forests and birds.
Part of the problem is that historians
