Book Review: Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure by Julia Flynn Siler
Disclaimer: I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway in the expectation that I would write a review of it.
This is not the happy story of how altruistic Americans freed the Hawaiian people from tyranny. (I’m sure there is such a book, somewhere.) It is, however, a well-researched look at the life and times of Lili’u, the last queen of Hawai’i.
Hawai’i’s time as an independent kingdom was relatively short, with no one thinking to unite the islands before the coming of Westerners and the almost inevitable whittling away of sovereignty once the great powers of the Nineteenth Century took interest.
One can see that it wasn’t just greedy white men’s ambition that brought about the theft of power from the native Hawaiians, but a string of bad luck–if the royal family of Hawai’i had flourished, they might have been better able to stand up to economic and social pressures. If Lili’u’s husband had been more compatible with her, and not died at a crucial moment, she might have gotten better advice. And if a war hadn’t started at just the wrong moment, Hawai’i might not have seemed so important to annex.
And the sugar kings that did so much to weaken and then overthrow the government of Hawai’i? Their power was broken within a generation when other sources of cane sugar were found.
I’d recommend this book to history buffs, those wanting to know more about Hawaii, and school kids looking for something slightly different to do a book report on.
