Commodity Kings

When Big Sugar bore the arms of empire and why we may, too.

We Americans love democracy. Our government has long paid more than lip service to the ideas of Locke and Lincoln. As the world’s foremost republic, we have been — we are — unwilling to acknowledge any imperial kinship with the Empire we divorced. America, nonetheless, shares more than language and a history with Britain. She shares the same lover: big business, who could not get enough of this affair. Companies went overseas to bring home the spoils of conquest. When convenient, they rewrote constitutions. When necessary, they toppled nations. Their fat wallets purchased candied prizes, colonies, for their sovereigns. If the directors of the East India Company could take India for the Crown, then Hawaii’s sugar barons would seize the islands on behalf of Manifest Destiny.

There was, though, an important distinction in the way these commodity kings handled their business. Only in the clash between the houses of Dole and Kalākaua did profit show its betting hand.

The native people of Hawaii caught a whiff early on. “They came here to do good, and they did very well indeed,” so the saying went, of American missionaries who arrived in droves during the early 1800s. Hawaii was rich with potential converts (the Queen was one successful case), and its earth was even richer with the potential for profit. Sugarcane grew vigorously in its volcanic soils and fair weather. Plantations sprouted up all over the islands. Although already a household staple the world over, America clamored for ever more sugar, and missionaries-turned-planters were happy to oblige its sweet tooth. From 1846 to 1874, Hawaii’s sugar exports climbed 80-fold. 300,000 pounds grew to 24 million. With agreements like the Reciprocity Treaty of 1874, which removed taxes on Hawaiian sugar imported to the U.S., Big Sugar flourished.

The commodity, however, soon came under attack in the United States. Hawaii’s success had seeded resentment among domestic producers, who called for protection against Hawaiian dominance. Their chance came with the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which raised tariffs for many industries and lowered them for some. The act leveled the field by removing tariffs on all foreign sugar and stripped Hawaii of its privileged status. Island planters suddenly faced competition from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Prices collapsed, as did profits. Depression thundered on the horizon. Big Sugar, despite its American heritage, was powerless against the winds of misfortune, and it desperately searched for shelter. Its barons charted but one path forward. Only annexation could restore profits.

Fearing a consolidation of royal authority that could further threaten their interest, the sugar elite wrote a new constitution and forced King Kalākaua to sign it at bayonet point. His sister and successor, Queen Lili’uokalani, was not blind to her fate. In an attempt to arrest the zeitgeist and the concentration of power amongst the industrialists, she tried to enact a new constitution, one that would limit voting to naturalized citizens and restore the Hawaiian crown’s emergency powers. 

But Sanford Dole — best friend of the barons, member of pro-annexation secret societies, and of the family behind Dole Food fame — would not have any of it. He figured the same tactic his predecessors pulled against Kalākaua would work against Lili’uokalani; only, this time, it would be used to create a new pro-annexation government. Forming the Committee of Safety, Dole and his allies went to a confidant in the State Department for help. 

U.S. Minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, tuned well to their intent, needed no convincing. “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe,” Stevens wrote to his boss (Secretary of State John W. Foster), “and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” Under the pretext of safeguarding Americans, the Minister parked the USS Boston in Honolulu Harbor and sent 300 marines ashore to back the plantations’ bid for power. On the grey morning of January 17, 1893 — a stormy day in a month plagued by floods — Big Sugar’s agents shook down their second monarch. Lili’uokalani, facing the threat of a violent coup, surrendered.

She did not lose all hope though. Anti-imperialist and one-time President Grover Cleveland had returned that same year to the White House. Compelled by conscience and the findings of his special investigator’s report, the President publicly dismissed any notion that America was cut from the same cloth as the empires of old Europe. Sanford Dole, he thundered, was to dissolve the provisional government. His compatriots would reinstate Lili’uokalani as Queen, and they would return Hawaii to its people. Cleveland decried to Congress, “the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by United States forces.”

America — ever conscious of its founding principles — wobbled then against the instincts of empire. Cleveland was not the country’s only anti-imperialist. They came from all walks of life, including steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (who tried to buy the Philippines' independence) and writer Mark Twain (“Give her the soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass”). With such prominent supporters, they and the Union resisted, for a time, that fervor that grips every great nation in its ascent to hegemony. But only for a time.

With Big Sugar’s profits on the line, planters agitated to continue the match. Staring into the jaws of defeat teethed with Washington’s decrees, Sanford B. Dole decided he would not let any government dictate to him his interests. In open defiance of the White House, he declared that the President of the United States had no right to intervene in Hawaii’s domestic affairs. To buy time, Dole reformed the provisional government into the more permanent Republic of Hawaii, with Big Sugar cronies in every high office. If annexation would not happen under this administration, the businessmen knew all they had to do was simply wait for the next. In his letter to the White House’s envoy, Dole said the collective thought out loud: “We do not feel inclined to regard [President Cleveland’s order] as the last word of the American Government upon this subject.”

And indeed it was not. Though President McKinley’s (of McKinley Act of 1890 infamy) 1897 annexation treaty fell short by seven votes in the Senate — due in no small part to a petition protesting annexation signed by 21,000 of the 39,000 native and mixed-blood Hawaiians on the islands — the outbreak of hostilities with the Spanish Empire the following year sealed Hawaii’s destiny. A strategic logistics base in the middle of the world’s largest ocean was a military asset America could no longer resist.

Still, even at war’s end, the issue was controversial enough for McKinley to judge that annexation would not survive a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Unlike in Texas, where a majority of voters backed annexation, Hawaii’s citizens appeared resolutely opposed. Congress thereby approved, through a simple majority, the absorption of Hawaii into the United States — to the sugar industry’s relief. Dole was appointed governor of the new territory. And as territorial status sufficed to relieve the plantations from any tariffs in perpetuity, the question of statehood would remain unanswered for another 60 years.

So it was in the summer of 1898 that the house of Dole finally toppled the house of Kalākaua. To Hawaii’s shores came troops and warships from a less foreign land.

Therein reveals the nature of profit. Its narrow pursuit, as some of our cases show, results in casualties. Something more insidious happened in Hawaii. Profit operated in the shadows. It was never fully exposed, enforcing its own interest while cloaked in other pretensions. It stacked the deck against hopeless, naive idealism and made a bet. In manipulating parts of a divided American government, sweet profit pushed its whole into acting against its founding philosophy. But through the businessmen’s decisions in each act of Hawaii’s play, profit became more potent an animating force than the idea of government of and for the people.

Sugar is no longer made in Hawaii. Its plantations have been cleared. Its sugar kings are dead and gone. A century has passed since Sanford Dole last walked the earth. In retracing his steps on the beaches, we may think Big Sugar’s clash with the Hawaiian monarchy a thing of antiquity to be left behind in dusty newsprint or the empty stacks under Baker. So we do not reflect, nor do we prepare. In the not-so-distant future, then, other hands will come to fully guide our own. Time knows this. The 21st century’s dealings will rhyme with those from the first through the 20th. 

In thus looking back, one might wonder: if, after a certain scale of no return, nations are destined for empire and companies profits, why resist? There is no other answer than if we can, we must. The tension between our principles and the compromises demanded by practice is the crux of human struggle. It is one no leader should ever turn away from.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy and physics at New York University, graduating with honors in 2020. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Falls Church, Virginia and previously in deep tech ventures.