HAWAI'I.

£10,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An archive of Hawaiian manuscript and typescript documents. A substantial group of Hawaiian manuscripts involving figures active in the political and commercial life of the islands, including Abraham Fornander, Sanford B. Dole, Heinrich Hackfeld, Alfred S. Hartwell, W. R. Castle, W. H. Rice, A. S. Wilcox, Paul Isenberg, and Lorrin A. Thurston. The documents relate to land tenure, governance, and commercial activity in the Hawaiian Islands.The archive spans from the 1850s to the early 20th century and comprises leases, mortgages, conveyances, contracts, survey maps, tax records, and official correspondence, recording the formalisation of land ownership and the legal mechanisms through which land, labour, and capital were administered during a period of profound political change.The collection traces the growth of plantation agriculture and commercial enterprise, particularly sugar production involving the agency of the "Big Five", through an extensive body of leases, freight contracts, mortgage assignments, stockholder minutes, wage agreements, and tax records. Prominent plantations, mercantile firms, and shipping interests recur throughout, alongside surveyors' maps and measured plots of land in Honolulu, Waikiki, Kaua'i, Maui, and Hawai'i Island, charting the consolidation of land for agricultural use and the integration of the islands into regional and global trade networks.Interwoven with the economic documentation is a dense record of legal and administrative practice, fe

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