place, Hawai‘i—itself at the center of the world’s largest ocean and so a critical junction of Pacific and world history during the past two and a half globalizing centuries, as well as an active frontier of American expansion. Like a doormat, it has been at the center of a lot of action, and like a doormat, it has been really beaten up. And you can see the scuff marks pretty clearly; the island is just lying there open to view, essentially untouched by the modern development that has buried so many of the traces of history on the larger islands beneath hotels, subdivisions, and parking lots. But it is important not to focus exclusively on the island’s negative markers. It is also a place of remarkable endurance, resistance, and cultural resilience. Molokai people gained their reputation for sorcery through a millennium of resistance to powerful outside forces. They were celebrated for fierce independence from the demands of higher-status outsiders in a society rigidly ordered by caste and for an ethos that we might think of in modern terms as nature-centered and communitarian. Since the coming of the rest of the world to the Hawaiian Islands over the last two and a half centuries, Molokai almost alone has maintained many of the values and ways of the old Hawaiians, from the ‘ohana extended family, rooted in the soil of a small valley, to traditional forms of farming and fishing that help sustain a community-based lifestyle that has mostly vanished elsewhere. This is true in large part because the island has been, on the whole, a place of economic stagnation and persistent business and administrative failures. In ancient and modern Hawai‘i equally, Molokai was and is thought of as a land of regret for its failures and of longing for what it has preserved.
Molokai as a case study has many advantages from a historian’s point of view. It has a well-developed archaeological record, well spread over the island’s breadth, including a trove of groundbreaking work on one of the earliest and longest continuously inhabited Polynesian settlements, at Hālawa Valley. Historical traces are very visible on the island because there has been very little modern agricultural or urban development compared with the other Hawaiian islands. Because it has been marginal to the political and economic development of Hawai‘i in the postcontact period, there has been a retardation of historical effects: what may have happened on O‘ahu in the early nineteenth century might have happened on Molokai in the late nineteenth or even early twentieth, making such events easier for historical methods to see.
As a place near but peripheral to the center, O‘ahu, Molokai is a better theater in which to view environmental and economic history than political, diplomatic, or military history or the social history of the elites in Hawai‘i. Because of this—and the fact that these last subjects have been extensively worked over by other historians—this study takes as its focus the nexus between environment and society. It looks at how the land and ecosystems have changed over time with human intervention and at how social structures; land tenure; market conditions; definitions of common resources; and technologies such as irrigation, aquaculture, and new crops, including genetically modified organisms in the twenty-first century, have changed over time and have in turn affected the land. It looks for patterns, relationships, sequences of causation, cascade effects, and scale effects—especially spatial ones—in order to understand how these factors have worked on and with one another and how they have shaped the history of communities in Molokai.
Molokai’s exceptionalism has much to do with scale—but not in a straightforward or one-dimensional way. It is comparatively small and so is at a comparative disadvantage in population and resources to other islands. But scale does not work in a simple way: in many ways, the island is large. There are the obvious physical ways: it has the tallest sea cliffs in the world, up to three thousand feet, the longest fringing reef in the Hawaiian Islands, and once had the largest fishpond aquaculture complex in the Polynesian Pacific. And there are other, less obvious ways that have to do with the local, perceived relationships between people and things, which we will explore in this study. Molokai has a bit of everything, such as a representative mix of climates and terrains, as has been noted. It has a thoroughly mixed population, with the largest per capita percentage of native Hawaiians in the state cohabiting with transplanted Europeans and mainland Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and many others. Economically, it has supported at one time or another all of the components of Hawai‘i’s history: fishing, irrigated farming, dryland farming, fishpond aquaculture, ranching, sugar, coffee, pineapple, diversified fruit and vegetables, light manufacturing, and tourism. It has had irrigation both on a small scale, supporting traditional Hawaiian farms, and on a large scale, watering thousands of acres of industrial plantations. It has had (and continues to have) both a subsistence economy of small farms and homesteads and a huge, outside-capitalized export agribusiness sector employing cheap immigrant labor. Both have been materially aided by significant state and federal interventions, and both have coexisted on one island—though each mostly has had to itself one very different half of it.
The distribution of these features has largely been imposed by environmental variation: wet versus dry, level versus steep, rocky versus fertile. The environment is critical to everything in Molokai, both as constraint and as opportunity: some places are “thick” with natural resources, making them potentially prosperous and so coveted by outsiders; some are resource “thin” and so impoverished and ignored. Water, in abundance or scarcity, has from the beginning of settlement there fundamentally structured human social and economic possibilities and thus how people have restructured the natural environment to suit their aims. Hawai‘i is shaped by a fundamental wet/dry dichotomy, due to the permanent trade winds that produce rainfall on the windward sides of each island and arid rain shadows on the leeward sides. Some of the wettest places on Earth are just a few miles as the crow flies from extremely dry places; this situation is common on all of the large islands, and even on the smallest, precipitation, or the lack of it, is a basic environmental fact. Unavoidably, in Hawai‘i, water is the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural worlds, of the landscape and the social body that lives on it, and of their intersections. Water orders and differentiates production, reproduction, politics, and religion as well as their disorders in the forms of drought, erosion, warfare, and conquest—and in between these extremes, the thread of Hawaiian history unspools.
This is a long-range study, of a very long durée, from the antecedents of the arrival of Polynesians in Molokai around the year AD 1000 to our own era. A big part of what is observed is how 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