Book Review: Lost Kingdom

Mar 31, 2012 09:06

One more history book: Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America's First Imperial Adventure, by Julia Flynn Siler

Yet more Gilded Age! Except this time, it’s on the balmy island kingdom of Hawaii! Soon to become the balmy island territory annexed by the United States after the Hawaiian monarchy is overthrown by American sugar planters.

You know what is most frustrating about this takeover? After the sugar planters overthrew the monarchy, the United States sent a commissioner to write a report about the incident - and the commissioner wrote that the sugar planters were a bunch of immoral profit-hungry maniacs, and the monarchy ought to be reinstated - and the US cheerfully ignored it, and took over the islands anyway!

It’s just like the Trail of Tears. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee, and Andrew Jackson said “Screw you, Supreme Court” and marched the Cherokee off their lands anyway. We know these things are wrong even at the time when we do them, yet we continue doing them! What’s wrong with us?

But - getting back to the book review. To begin on a peevish and petty note: good God this book needs a stern copy-edit. Aside from the egregious typos, the book does a serviceable job telling its story - how the United States came to take over Hawaii - but in doing so, it leaves hanging a lot of questions that I thought were actually more interesting.

For instance: what was Hawaiian culture like before the missionaries came? Why did the Hawaiian ali’i (noble, royal) families adopt the missionaries’ ways so wholeheartedly? The ali’i actually sent their children to a boarding school the missionaries set up - and they did this entirely voluntarily, the missionaries were in no position to compel anyone to do anything on Hawaii. Why? Siler doesn’t explain.

Siler also really wants to exonerate Hawaii’s penultimate monarch, David Kalakaua, of the charge that he was a bad monarch. On the one hand, I can see why: he was accused of being a bad monarch by the haole (foreign, white) press, which after his death played an important part in the ouster of the monarchy, so of course one wants to defend him.

But on the other hand, by Siler’s own account he kept doing things like, say, selling large amounts of land to foreign sugar planters, accepting bribes from said sugar planters, abandoning his duties to go on an around-the-world tour purely for his own entertainment, and spending the national treasury into a ridiculous amount of debt by building an extravagant palace.

Against all this, Siler holds up the fact that Kalakaua - drumroll, please! - revived the hula. Which is great! Good for him! Yay dancing traditions! But it doesn’t wipe out the fact that he put his country in hock to foreign investors, and thereby made a foreign takeover almost inevitable.

history, books, book review

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