The Overthrow, Annexation and Statehood at the Table

The political history of Hawaiʻi from the unification of the islands under Kamehameha I in 1810 to statehood in 1959 runs through the sugar plantations of Oʻahu, Maui, Kauaʻi and Hawaiʻi island, and through Honolulu, where the monarchy, the legislature and the later territorial government sat. The table of the islands in the twentieth century was shaped by the plantation labour that the kingdom and then the territory depended on, and by the loss of sovereignty that came between them.

The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was a sovereign monarchy that, by the later nineteenth century, was dependent on sugar, and sugar was dependent on imported labour. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 tied the kingdom's sugar to the American market, and the Board of Immigration sought workers from China, Japan, Portugal, and later Korea, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Each group brought its own kitchen into the camps, and the foods of the plantation, rice, shoyu, salted fish, pickles and preserved meat, were shared across the fences of the camp houses. The political order broke in stages. In 1887 King Kalākaua was coerced into signing the constitution known as the Bayonet Constitution, which moved power from the crown to the legislature and cabinet and to the foreign planters and merchants who dominated them. Kalākaua died in 1891, and his sister Liliʻuokalani took the throne as the kingdom's last monarch. In 1893 the overthrow of the kingdom began, and the queen was later placed under house arrest. The United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898 by joint resolution, and in 1900 the Organic Act made it a Territory. The territorial decades were the years in which the local table settled into the forms the islands now call their own. The plate lunch, with its rice, macaroni salad and a hot main, grew out of the plantation and dockside lunch pail, and the bento, the manapua, the Portuguese sweet bread and the saimin of the camps and the towns belonged to the same life. Imported and canned goods, among them the canned luncheon meat that later became Spam musubi, entered everyday cooking in this period of American sovereignty and American shipping. Statehood in 1959 made Hawaiʻi the fiftieth state. By then the table was already a composite of Native Hawaiian foods, kalo, poi, kālua pig and laulau, with the dishes of every plantation people. The politics left their mark in what was served as local and in what had been set aside: the Hawaiian language and the Hawaiian table were pressed to the margins in the territorial decades and returned to attention in the later twentieth century.

The table of these decades was rice at the centre, with shoyu, salted and dried fish, pickled vegetables, Portuguese sausage and stewed meats beside it, eaten from the lunch pail in the field and shared across the camp. At the feast, kālua pig, laulau, poi and lomi salmon marked Hawaiian hospitality, while the plate lunch of rice, macaroni salad and a hot main became the working meal that every community recognised.