Foreigners and the Economy
Impact foreigners had on Hawaii Island
The history of the discovery and consequent changes caused by the outside world dates back to the third voyage that Captain James Cook made to the Pacific with an attempt to explore more on the Northwest passage in 1778. This is when he first sighted the Islands and was well received by the locals of the islands, indeed they considered him a messenger of a god and gave him decent hospitality during his stay there. As a show of gratitude, Cook left the Hawaiians two English pigs, three goats and seeds for melons, onions and pumpkins. He then named some of the islands after his patron and this interaction can be considered the beginning of external influence on the economy of Hawaii since these gifts led to the introduction of animal husbandry and land tilling for growing the various plants Cook left them (Info Grafik Inc., 2015).
In 1795, the young chief Kamehameha I managed to conquer the islands of Hawaii and created a unified kingdom. The system that he used to rule the kingdom was the kapu system which later proved to be extremely difficult with the arrival of foreigners and this monarchy that lasted to 1893 when it was changed to a constitutional monarchy. King Kamehameha II marked an official end to the Kapu system in 1819, the sacred temples were destroyed and the gods...
Having abolished the Kapu, the Hawaii locals were left with a cultural void hence they became receptive to the protestant Christianity that was introduced by the American missionaries. The Hawaiians had purely an oral tradition which was different from the written tradition of the missionaries, this meant that if the missionaries needed to convert them faster, they had to develop alphabet for the Hawaiian language. They also started translating the Holy Bible into the local language and printed other supplementary information for the Hawaiians to read. Within a short period of 20 years, the missionaries managed to establish a school system that had the qualities of the Western society as well as the protestant religion.
In the context of the native Hawaiians, there was nothing like individual ownership of land but a communal ownership system, this was rudely disrupted by the foreigners who came into the islands and within a few decades after their arrival, thousands of land had been allocated to the foreigners and even the crown land that was owned by the King and his successors were not spared and would be either sold or leased out to the foreigners as a means of payment of the debt owed through the foreign goods supplied. One significant political event that occurred and was connected to the land issue was when in 1893 the Hawaiian monarchy was…
