"What followed was a slow-motion stripping of tradition, land, political power and health from the native Hawaiians over the next 70 or so years, which Siler details intricately: the shaming of traditional dress and dance, the gobbling up of property belonging to land-rich but cash-poor locals by American and British sugar planters, the 'Bayonet Constitution,' forced on King Kalakaua by, among others, a missionary grandson, which turned the monarch into a figurehead, gave voting rights to property-owning whites and took them away from many native Hawaiians. And of course, there was the toll of foreign-borne smallpox and measles, which reduced the native Hawaiian population by a horrific 75 percent between Cook’s arrival and 1853."
Malia Boyd in The New York Times reviews Julia Flynn Siler's Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure.
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