From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawaiʻi's Premier Crop

C. Allan Jones, Robert V. Osgood 288 pp. From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill focuses on the technological and scientific advances that allowed Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry to become a world leader and Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company (HC&S) to survive into the twenty-first century. The authors, both agricultural scientists, offer a detailed history of the industry and its contributions, balanced with discussion of the enormous societal and environmental changes due to its aggressive search for labor, land, and water. Sugarcane cultivation in Hawaiʻi began with the arrival of Polynesian settlers, expanded into a commercial crop in the mid-1800s, and became a significant economic and political force by the end of the nineteenth century. Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry entered the twentieth century heralding major improvements in sugarcane varieties, irrigation systems, fertilizer use, biological pest control, and the use of steam power for field and factory operations. By the 1920s, th