No western ship chanced upon Hawaii until Captain Cook arrived at Kauai in January 1778. He was amazed to find a civilization sharing a culture - and language - with the peoples of the South Pacific. The Hawaiians, too, were amazed, having long since lost contact with the outside world. Cook himself was killed in Hawaii in 1779, but he had started an irreversible process of change. The first Polynesians had brought the plants and animals necessary to create a self-sufficient way of life. Westerners took things further, and in reshaping the islands to suit their economic and agricultural needs decimated most of the indigenous flora and fauna - as well as the Hawaiians themselves. Cook's men estimated that there were a million islanders; the popu lation today is roughly the same, but a mere eight thousand pure-blood Hawaiians are left.

   As well as bringing venereal and other diseases, Cook's voyage opened the fur trade between the Pacific Northwest and China. Passing ships traded arms to the Hawaiians, and within a few years, Kamehameha became the first king to unite all the islands. The sudden advent of capitalism was devastating. When the fur traders realized that Hawaiian sandalwood fetched enormous prices in China, the mass of the population abandoned taro-farming and fishing.

   With the dislocation of traditional ways, Hawaiian religion fell apart. After the death of Kamehameha in 1819, the female regent Kaahumanu set out to break the kapu ( taboo ) system that held society together. Her public defiance of the injunctions forbidding women to eat alongside men, or to eat bananas or pork, threw the islands into moral anarchy - just as the first Puritan missionaries arrived from New England in 1820. Their wholehearted capitalism and harsh strictures on the easygoing Hawaiian lifestyle might have been calculated to compound the chaos. White advisers and ministers soon dominated the government, and the children of the missionaries became Hawaii's wealthiest and most powerful class.

   Although the Civil War severely disrupted whaling , which once the forests were denuded had supplanted sandalwood as the island's main source of revenue, it triggered a Hawaiian sugar boom, to replace Southern sugar in the markets of the north. From then on, the machinations of the sugar industry to get favorable prices on the mainland moved Hawaii inexorably towards annexation by the US. In 1887 an all-white group of "concerned businessmen" forced King David Kalakaua to surrender power to an assembly elected by property owners (of any nationality) rather than citizens. When, after his death, his sister Liliuokalani announced her desire to proclaim a new constitution, the businessmen called in the US warship Boston and declared a provisional government. US President Cleveland (a Democrat) responded that "Hawaii was taken possession of by the United States forces without the consent or wish of the government of the islands ? (It) was wholly without justification ? not merely a wrong but a disgrace." The provisional government found defenders in the Republican US Congress, however, and declared itself a republic on July 4, 1894.

   On August 12, 1898, Hawaii was formally annexed as a territory of the United States. At this point there was no question of Hawaii becoming a state; the whites were outnumbered ten to one, and had no desire to afford the natives the protection of US labor laws, let alone to give them the vote. Consequently, Hawaii was for the first half of the twentieth century the virtual fiefdom of the Big Five , conglomerations started by the missionary families and rooted in their massive landholdings. By controlling agriculture, they also dominated transportation, banks, utilities, insurance - and government. The inevitable integration of Hawaii into the American mainstream was hastened by its crucial role in the war against Japan, and the expansion of tourism thereafter. The islands finally became the fiftieth of the United States in 1959, after a plebiscite showed a seventeen-to-one majority in favor. The only group to oppose statehood were the few remaining native Hawaiians.

   Support has been growing over the last couple of decades for the concept of Hawaiian sovereignty , on the basis that those of Hawaiian descent should gain at least the rights already held by Native American nations on the mainland. In 1993, the US Congress and President Clinton issued a formal apology to native Hawaiians "on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii"; debate rages as to what form restitution might take, with some campaigners arguing for a complete restoration of independence

 Modern Hawaii