Possessing the Pacific: Early Hawaiian Land Ownership System (Article Sample)

Possessing the Pacific
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Introduction
This academic journal looks into how during the later stages of the 19th century European and American settlers, traversed the pacific realm and reorganized the indigenous land ownership systems in order to make them similar to the European property rights systems. Though the colonial governments aimed at enhancing the modernization of the indigenous population what they really ended up doing was dispossessing them of their lands thus making it easier for those of European descent to purchase these properties (The Pacific World, 393). It may however come as a surprise that the very first land ownership schemes took place in Hawaii and though they had a strong Anglo-American influence they were actually carried out by the Hawaiians themselves.
Early Hawaiian Land Ownership System
In the early Hawaiian culture, land was allocated by the chiefs and it was offered in exchange of labour. This system worked well for the most parts though it did have some major flaws key among then being the fact that it could be exploited by angry chiefs to dispossess commoners of their land (The Pacific World, 395). Records show that early white settlers to Hawaii were treated in the same way as the indigenous chiefs and this was evident in the fact that the king offered them land grants in the same way as he would have done to his chiefs. White settlers nonetheless found it very difficult to settle in their numbers, because unlike other regions where they had concurred Hawaii did not have a political structure that was fragmented between the tribes. This organized system made it possible for the Hawaiian government to establish a land commission that basically revolutionised land ownership from an oral tenure scheme to that which could be verified by written tittles. This provoked a level of inequitable land division in Hawaii never witnessed before whereby the chiefs got up to 1.6 million acres of land and the king got nearly 1 million acres all to himself, the other vast majority of the population were made to make due with a meagre 29,000 acres (The Pacific World, 401). This new land ownership regulations meant that land could no longer be revoked by the king and the obligations that the commoners had to their chiefs were no more. Land could also be sold to any willing buyer whether commoner or foreigner and this opened a loophole to Hawaii’s colonization.
The American Fashion
It is common belief that had Hawaii retained its indeginous land tenure ship system then the United States would not have taken note of the mammoth estates that characterised the region therefore it would have avoided colonization. By permitting foreigners to acquire land Hawaiians made it possible for a class of wealthy Americans...