Folk housing in the middle of the pacific: Architectural lime, creolized ideologies, and expressions of power in nineteenth-century Hawaii

Abstract

Captain Cook's third expedition to the Pacific reached Hawaii in 1778. Western diseases soon thereafter reduced an indigenous population of at least several hundred thousand (if not 1,000,000) to fewer than 50,000 by 1878 (Stannard, 1989), while foreign plantation workers and other immigrants arrived by the tens of thousands. Successive capitalist ventures in the nineteenth century, including the fur trade, sandalwood trade, whaling, the California gold rush, ranching, and cash-crop plantations altered a self-sufficient Hawaiian economy. Beginning in 1820, Protestant missionaries, followed by other missionary groups, heavily influenced Hawaiian ideologies. By the twentieth century, Hawaii had been transformed from an indigenous sovereign nation (recognized by several Western powers) to a colonized US territory, taken in a coup d'état by resident US businessmen and US marines in 1893. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009.