Political Economies, Dispossession and Lost Commons: Land and property reforms in the Hawaiian Kingdom, Britain, Canada and Chile
This article looks at the history of
dispossession, privatization and loss of the commons in the Hawaiian Kingdom,
Britain, Canada and Chile in order to highlight the need to look beyond the
simple dichotomy of socialism vs. capitalism—terms which in modern times are
vaguely and variously defined—and look instead at present and past examples of
how nations attempted to develop political economies suited to their specific
contexts.[1]
“Every market is
structured and managed. Every economy is a planned economy. The question is: Who
is going to do it? Right now, instead of the government planning the economy,
you have Wall Street planning the economy, and that’s more centralized than
government planning. That’s what people don’t realize.”
president
of The Institute for the Study
of
Long-Term Economic Trends,
Professor
of Economics, University of Missouri,
The Keiser Report, 07:35~, January
1, 2020
|
In Gavan Daws’ history of Hawai’i, Shoal of Time, the author describes the process by which Native Hawaiians lost connection to their lands in the 19th century:
The
old konohiki system, under which a
chief appointed an agent or steward to manage his lands and collect his taxes,
was replaced by a system under which each owner determined for himself the best
use to which his land might be put, being free to cultivate, lease, or sell at
will… For the foreigners, certainly, it was the beginning of a new era; but for
the Hawaiian commoners it was the beginning of the end. In their first exercise
of free choice they chose to uproot themselves. They were liberated at last
from the burdensome tax payments to the chiefs that had kept them tied to the
land, and most of them found more interesting things to do than grow taro,
which required a long time and a lot of hard work. The idea of the kuleana, the small freehold lot
cultivated as an independent family farm, never took hold. In the old days the
taro patch and the family had flourished together; a single word, ohana, served to describe both a cluster
of taro roots and a family group. The Great Mahele,
the great division, cut the connection, because once the commoner was free to
buy land he was also free to sell it, and that was a freedom he understood. So
the great division became the great dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth
century white men owned four acres of land for every one owned by a native, and
this included chiefs’ lands. The commoners had had their moment, and it had
passed by. They were left with not much more than a terrible sense of
deprivation.[2]
The
description above makes a general point about the process of dispossession that
can occur when traditional tenants are given fee-simple title to their land, or
if land reform is done recklessly without a plan for developing a political
economy suited to local circumstances. However, Gavan Daws’ description of the Hawaiian
Kingdom has been criticized as being far too simplistic and anecdotal. Some new
land owners must have lost interest in farming and cashed out, but he provides
no data on how many others held onto and developed their private property, and or
how much revenue from land development was put to good use. Gavan Daws’
interpretation downplays the active part played by the Hawaiian Kingdom
government in preserving native rights to the land. The land reforms in Hawai’i
known as the Great Mahele were actually more sophisticated than a simple
privatization scheme as the term is understood in the 21st century. Native Hawaiians
and the Hawaiian Kingdom government were not passive victims in the process. By
the 1840s, the kingdom had transformed itself into a constitutional monarchy
and a fully independent state, and the government had many successes in
protecting the native population from colonization and subjugation. Keanu Sai,
an expert on the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, describes the reforms in more
detail, stressing that the Mahele was not a typical laissez-faire
privatization. Until the overthrow of the kingdom in 1893, the rights of native
tenants were maintained in lands that were set aside as crown land and
government land:
In the Hawaiian Kingdom, the type of
economy that existed was not American capitalism. In fact, it was a different
kind of capitalism called cooperative capitalism, and that was called No Ke Kalaiaina.
There was actually a book published in Lahaina in the 1840s called No Ke Kalaiaina,
Elements of Political Economy. We now have that. When you look at that,
you see that capitalism in this political economy is infused with values and
morality. It’s not the laissez-faire Adam Smith version of capitalism. Every
country has its own economy. Everybody thinks capitalism is America and it’s
all over the world.[3]
In
an earlier article, Keanu Sai elaborated on this topic:
A common misunderstanding is that the Great
Mahele endeavored to divide all the rights of the three classes [nobility,
government, native tenants] in the lands. The Great Mahele only divided
the vested rights of the Chiefly class from the Government class in the lands.
These divided rights over specific lands called ahupua’a and ili’aina,
and these remained subject to the rights of Native Tenants, who by application
to the Minister of the Interior, who managed government lands, or to a
particular Chief or Konohiki who managed lands that were separated from the
government, could acquire a fee-simple title to their house lot and cultivating
lands… Under Hawaiian law, all revenues derived from the lands of the Hawaiian
Islands; whether by the Government through taxation, rent or sale, or from the
Chiefs or Konohikis, through rent or sale, continue to have the vested
rights of native tenants. This is… why the Queen’s Hospital provided health
care without charge to native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century. Queen’s
Hospital acquired monies from the Government and from Queen Emma as a Chiefess
who acquired lands from Mahele grantees, and after her death through the
Queen Emma Trust. This is not to be confused with socialism, but rather
management of the vested rights of Native Tenants that remained and continue to
remain in all the lands of the Hawaiian Islands.[4]
In addition to this assessment made in
2019, there is a report on the Mahele written in 1872 by W.D. Alexander,
surveyor general for the kingdom, which makes no mention of a great catastrophe
of dispossession.[5] It is full of praise for
the wisdom of the monarchy and its concerns for the welfare of the commoners.
It appears that the narrative of the great dispossession took form after the
overthrow of the kingdom because it suited the needs of the new government to
portray the Hawaiian monarchy as tragically inept. There is evidence that
dispossession came not because of the Mahele but because of the Hawaiian
Kingdom becoming a US-occupied territory (via local insurrection in 1893, then
US annexation in 1898). In his graduate thesis on the Mahele, Donovan
Preza found that the greatest factor in the dispossession was the Land Act of
1895—after the overthrow of the kingdom—which seized the large tracts of crown
lands that were later purchased by non-Hawaiians. He found no evidence of a
significant number of land transfers before that time that would indicate the
former tenants (who became small land owners) had become a new class of
dispossessed citizens.[6]
In the citation above, Keanu Sai put the
words “continue to remain” in the present tense because, as he has demonstrated
in his other work, the Hawaiian Kingdom was never ceded in a treaty and should
be considered, under international law, as an occupied nation. When the US
occupation ends, on some day when the US decides to abide by the “rules-based
international order” that it imposes on others, the laws and land policies of
the Hawaiian Kingdom will still be in effect as they were at the time of the
insurrection in January 1893.[7]
If one follows Daws’ account of 19th century Hawai’i, one
might reflect with pity on what happened to the poor natives, those innocent
indigenous people who could not have known what kind of damage the modernity
would inflict on their ancient way of life. There is a tendency to think of a
clear dichotomy between the ways of the white man and the ways of the
dark-skinned hunter-gatherers whose culture was destined to be replaced by that
of the former. However, pre-contact Hawai’i was far from being the classic
hunter-gatherer culture described in anthropology textbooks. The land was so
fertile that it led to the growth of a feudal culture that would have been
perfectly understood by any European of the 15th century. This similarity may
be the reason that the rulers of the Hawaiian Kingdom were astute enough,
firstly, to keep foreign visitors from planting their flags and applying the Doctrine
of Discovery and, secondly, to assert their
sovereignty on the world stage. They were keen to learn about the outside world
from the American and British missionaries who came in the early 19th century,
and it is likely that they had learned how and why the French monarchs had lost
their heads to the guillotine during the French Revolution. They would have
understood that the French monarchy’s downfall came from its failure to reform
the feudal land system and their refusal to relinquish power under the new
constitution. Land reform was the central issue in preserving Hawaiian
sovereignty during the transition from feudalism to industrial-age capitalism.
The Mahele in Hawai’i might best be seen in contrast
to the horrible consequences of the termination of the English commons, known
as the Enclosures, which began in the 17th century and forced English commoners
off rural lands and into the factories of the industrial age, or onto ships
that took them to the New World—a move which turned them into accessories in
the dispossession of the native inhabitants there.[8]
Perhaps the Hawaiian monarchs drew lessons from this precedent as well. With
the Mahele the Hawaiian monarchy attempted to preserve land-use rights
of the commoners while also accommodating foreign concepts of land title that
were needed for modernizing and trading with foreign nations. In addition to
the comparison with the Enclosures, one could consider how, from 1857-1870,
Britain arranged the transfer of a vast territory called Rupert’s Land (all
lands that drained into Hudson’s Bay) to the newly formed Dominion of Canada in
order to make the lands available for non-indigenous settlement. The property rights,
land-use rights, and sovereignty of people already there were ignored because,
under the assumption of the Doctrine of Discovery, the British had never felt a
need to take them into consideration.[9]
20th Century dispossession
within the Colonizing Nations
It is an error to
think dispossession occurs only to “the other” or only in the distant past. Europeans
and North Americans must also pity their own ancestors for the loss of their
own indigenous heritage that occurred not so long ago during the Enclosures. In
fact, they must also pity themselves in the present age because attempts in the
20th century to regain the commons (known by demonized term “socialism”) have
also been reversed with devastating effects. Every generation people get sold
and bought again and relearn the same painful lesson. Anthropologist David
Harvey explained the modern dispossession in an interview held in 2018:
The
main argument about accumulation by dispossession rests on the idea that when
people run out of the capacity to make things or provide services, then they
set up a system which extracts wealth from other people, and that extraction
then becomes the center of their activities. And one of the ways in which that
extraction can occur is by creating new commodity markets where there were none
before. For example, when I was younger, higher education in Europe was
essentially a public good. Increasingly, it has become a private activity.
Health service is another. So many of these areas which you would consider not
to be commodities in the ordinary sense become commodities. Housing for the
lower income populations was often seen as a social obligation, but now
increasingly it has to be provided through the market... So you impose a market
logic on areas in which you really shouldn’t.
It’s
all about having entrepreneurialism in oneself, and then what happens is that
people start to speculate on what they can get out of somebody else. You have
some assets that I want and I lend you some money, and then I suddenly say, “I
want all my money back tomorrow.” You can’t pay it, and I say “OK, give me your
assets.” So I take away your land. I take away your house… a large percentage
of the British population was housed in social housing [before the 1980s]. In
some cities it was as high as 80 percent and she [Margaret Thatcher] basically
privatized it, and she turned it over to people, and said, “OK, you can become
the private owner of this if you want.” So you become a private owner. Now poor
people often get into difficulty. They get into debt. They can’t pay their
debts, and so somebody comes along and says, “Well, you’ve got a very nice
[former] social housing house there. Why don’t you trade it to me? So after a
bit, suddenly all of that social housing where poor people were living becomes
a sort of a living space for the very ultra-rich, and you get gentrification.
You get all those kinds of things driving out populations from neighborhoods,
and pushing up prices. So again, one of the ways in which you start to extract
value from people is by speculating in land values and speculating in housing,
and then people have to pay more and more for their housing, and more and more
for their health care, more and more for the education of the children, more
and more for the services that they get. So in the end, people are just paying
and paying and paying.
[There
is also] depletion of the global environmental commons: land, air, water and
proliferating habitat degradation that precludes anything but capital intensive
modes of agricultural production. These have likewise resulted from the
wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms.
When
I was a kid, water in Britain was provided as a public good, and then, of
course, it got privatized, and so the private companies come in and you start
to pay water charges and water pricing… They privatize transportation… right
now in Britain… the Labour Party says we’re going to take all of that back into
public ownership because this privatization is totally insane and has insane consequences,
and it’s not working. And I think the majority the population now agrees with
that. We’re always told the private sector is far more efficient than the state
sector, but actually a lot of evidence is the other way around.
Financialization
takes the debt economy and starts to import it. If wages start to be curbed,
then people need money, so they have credit cards… then the credit card
companies start to put charges on… Education should be a public service, not a
commodity, and it’s a commodity right now. And of course when people get
heavily indebted they become less and less politically active… When mortgage
housing was introduced [that meant] homeowners don’t go on strike, and so this
is a social control mechanism. They [government planners] were very well aware
of it. There was a great poster once which called the building societies [the
privatizing institutions] “the first defense against Bolshevism.” So this was
going to stop any kind of left-wing politics because people were going to say they
want to keep their houses…
This
was really done by deregulation to allow the financial system to become one of
the main centers of redistributive activity, through speculation, predation,
fraud and thievery, stock promotions, Ponzi schemes, structured asset
destruction, through inflation asset stripping, through mergers and
acquisitions, the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduced whole
populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage—to say
nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets, the raiding of pension
funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses, by credit and
stock manipulations. All of these became central features of the capitalist
financial system.
...think
for a moment about what Donald Trump has done since he came in... He’s allowed
drilling on the federal lands. He’s passed a tax bill which is giving all kinds
of goodies to the bondholders and the rich and the corporations. So the
deregulation and the privatization that has gone on under Trump has been
absolutely astonishing. You see right in front of you an economic program that
is a classic neoliberal program, and it’s happened over the last two years of
the Trump administration.[10]
One more example makes the point and
illustrates how the process of dispossession is cyclical. After citizens are
dispossessed of their common property, privatization then strips all value from
that property. Finally, the citizens, after paying the costs of this asset
stripping and the resulting social devastation, win back control of the commons
to some extent—only for the process to be repeated again. Noam Chomsky described
how the process unfolded in South America in the late 20th century and is being
repeated again now with the rise to power of the fascist president of Brazil,
Jair Bolsonaro:
Guedes
[Bolsonaro’s chief economic adviser] is an ultra-right-wing Chicago economist.
He spent time in Pinochet’s Chile. He’s been very frank and open in interviews
in the Brazilian press about his plans. It’s very simple: As he puts it,
privatize everything—infrastructure, anything you can think of. The reason, the
motive, is to pay off the debt which is owned by the predatory financial
institutions that have been robbing the country blind. This will give away the
resources of the country for the future… one part of it is Bolsonaro’s favorite
program of opening the Amazon to agribusiness. So, he’s exactly the kind of person
who succeeded in driving Chile’s economy to utter disaster within only a few
years.
It’s
rarely remembered that when the Chicago boys took over the Pinochet economy,
they had every conceivable advantage. There couldn’t be any dissent. The
torture chambers took care of that. They had the advice of the top stars of [University
of] Chicago economics, the right-wing economics system. They were clever enough
not to nationalize—not to privatize—one of the major bases of the Chilean
economy, the highly efficient, nationalized copper corporation, the biggest in
the world, Codelco... Within about five years, they had created such an
economic disaster that the state had to take over the economy. People, as a
joke, used to call it “the Chicago road to socialism.” They have left a residue
which is pretty bitter.[11]
This selection of quotations may convince
readers that the process of dispossession under capitalism unfolds in a common
fashion, unless a nation is very determined to maintain and defend a political
economy that it has designed for its own purposes. There is no reason for the
descendants of settlers in North America to look at the descendants of the
original inhabitants and feel secure, to feel that “what happened to them could
not happen to us.” It has happened and it is happening again. Anyone can be
relocated to a figurative or literal reservation at the margins of society.
This leads to an additional point about some
seemingly progressive political discourse being a distraction from the root of
the problem. The Canadian university student Lindsay Shepherd explained it well
when she spoke out against the misguided policy of “self-congratulatory”
Indigenous Land Acknowledgments that many Canadian institutions now require
before holding official events.[12]
She notes that they are recreating condescending “counter-productive
stereotypes which are a re-packaging of the noble savage stereotype.” The
acknowledgments involve no obligation on the part of the speaker or the
institution to stand up for a radical change in the economic system. They are
virtue signals and soothing balm for the conscience of the descendants of
settlers and little more. The acknowledgments also often pay tribute to
indigenous people as the “designated caretakers of the land,” a status which
implies all indigenous people feel, or must feel, this obligation and that other
races have no such responsibility. Indigenous people may have better insights
into the problem because their experience as victims of a slow genocide has
left them with no illusions about Western civilization (the descendants of
Europeans still have a bit of work to do in this regard), but this does not
mean that they have the power to save the world. Far from it. They are among
the most dis-empowered and are unlikely to succeed without help from the
majority of the population.
The economic and social devastation
described above continues unopposed partly because people have been trained to
think every social problem is rooted in identity politics and can be addressed
by such gestures as land acknowledgments. As Martin Luther King noted near the
end of his life, the struggle for racial equality had to shift to a broad
concern with fighting against poverty, war and the nuclear arms race.[13]
Real solutions involve recognizing our common humanity and common interest in
restoring the commons, or undertaking a Great Mahele in various settings
throughout the world. Without resorting to a simplistic dichotomy that pits
preconceived notions of capitalism against preconceived notions of socialism,
we could think like the Hawaiian monarchs did when they endeavored to create
the political economy that was the most just and appropriate for their
circumstances.
(last revised on January 22, 2020)
(last revised on January 22, 2020)
Notes
[1]
Political
economy: a branch of social science that studies the relationships between
individuals and society and between markets and the state, using a diverse set
of tools and methods drawn largely from economics, political science, and
sociology. The term political economy is derived from the Greek polis,
meaning “city” or “state,” and oikonomos, meaning “one who manages a
household or estate.” Political economy thus can be understood as the study of
how a country—the public’s household—is managed or governed, taking into
account both political and economic factors. (From Brittanica.com).
[2]
Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian
Islands (University of Hawai’i Press, 1968), p. 128. In spite of all the
research done on the Mahele, it seems like it has not been possible to
quantify how many of the tenant class sold their properties and subsequently
fell into poverty. It is likely that many did, but it is difficult to confirm
that the Mahele was the cause of the disastrous dispossession that came
in the 20th century. It is argued here that in spite of what its eventual
effects may have been, its intent and design was to be of benefit to all
citizens. It did not begin as a deliberate dispossession as was common in
settler governments’ dealings with indigenous people in North America.
[3]
“Dr. Keanu Sai Q and A with Maui County
Council 8-21-19“
(34:40~), Integrative Media Group, August 30, 2019.
[4]
Keanu Sai, “Under Hawaiian Law
Native Hawaiians Receive Health Care at No Charge,” Hawaiian
Kingdom Blog, April 25, 2016.
[5]
W.D.
Alexander (Superintendent of Government Survey), “A Brief History of
Land Titles in the Hawaiian Kingdom, Interior Department Appendix 1 to Surveyor
General’s Report,”
Honolulu PC Advertisers Co. Steam Print, 1882. Digitized by the
University of Michigan, July 3, 2019. Some excerpts from this document that
elaborate on the nature of the Mahele:
After
long and patient investigation it was finally settled that there were but three
classes of persons having vested rights in the land; 1st the King, 2nd the
chiefs, and 3rd the tenants. The Land Commission decided that if the King
should allow to the landlords one third, to the tenants one third, and retain
one-third himself, “he would injure no one unless himself.” (page 9)
His
Majesty... shall in accordance with the Constitution and Laws of the Land,
retain all his private lands, as his own individual property, subject only to
the rights of the Tenants, to have and to hold to Him, His heirs and successors
forever. (page 13)
On
the 7th of the following June, 1848, the Legislative Council passed the “Act
relating to the lands of His Majesty the King and of the Government,” … and
designates the several Crown Lands and Government Lands by name.
By
this great Act of Kamehameha III, he showed his deep sympathy with the wants of
his people, and set an illustrious example of liberality and public spirit. It
remained for his chiefs to follow his example.
The
second Division of lands took place during the summer of 1850, when most of the
chiefs ceded a third of their lands to the Government, in order to obtain
allodial title for the remainder.
The
whole transaction was a severe test of their patriotism, and reflects great
credit on that Hawaiian aristocracy which thus peacefully gave up a portion of
its hereditary rights and privileges for the good of the nation. (pages 16-17)
...
the Act of August 6th, 1850 confirmed and amended the rights of Tenants are
expressly reserved... protects the common people in the enjoyment of the right
to take wood, thatch, ki leaf etc. from the lands on which they live, for their
own private use, but not to sell for profit. They are so guaranteed the right
to water and the right of way, but not the right of pasturage on the land of
the Konohiki [the chiefs’ land agents]. These rights are embodied in
Section 1477 of the Civil Code.
The
same Act of August 6th, 1850, confirms the resolutions passed by the Privy
Council on the 21st of December, 1849, granting fee simple titles, free of all
commutation to all native tenants, for their cultivated lands and house lots,
except in the towns of Honolulu, Lahaina and Hilo. (page 17)
Author’s
note: The king was motivated to retain large private holdings for himself as an
individual—still “subject only to the rights of the tenants”—and not as
government land because he rightly feared that under the international norms of
the time a foreign conquest of Hawai’i could lead to the loss of government
property to the conqueror. In contrast, conquerors respected private property
and paid compensation if they seized it. This situation did not change until
the Kellogg–Briand Pact (General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an
Instrument of National Policy) of 1928 made armed conquest illegal under
international law.
[6]
Donovan
C. Preza, The Emperical Writes Back: Re-examining Hawaiian Dispossession
Resulting from the Māhele of 1848, MA Thesis, University of Hawai’i, 2010,
157-165.
[9]
Benjamin Doolittle U.E., “Great
Britain’s Claims of Ownership Of Native Peoples Lands,” Fourtybee.com,
January 10, 2020.
[10]
Chris
Hedges, “On Contact: Interview with David
Harvey—Part 2,” Russia Today,
November 17, 2018. The interview is a discussion of David Harvey’s book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford
University Press, 2007). Parts of this citation are excerpts from the book read
aloud during the interview.
[11]
“After
Visiting Brazil’s Lula in Prison, Noam Chomsky Warns Against ‘Disaster’ Under
Jair Bolsonaro,” Democracy Now,
November 22, 2018.
[13]
Vincent Intondi, “W.
E. B. Du Bois to Malcolm X: The Untold History of the Movement to Ban the Bomb,”
Zinn Education Project, July 30,
2015.
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