Before Captain Cook showed up, Hawaiians had a six day work month and no real concept of “Jobs.” If you were hungry you tended your garden or went fishing. You didn’t need to stock up for the winter because there isn’t one and even if you did run out of food you’d just turn to the guy next to you and say,

“Hey brah, got some food?”

and they’d be like, “Sure thing brah. Can I have sex with your wife?”

and the first guy would be like, “oh, bro, since you are a higher social class than me that’s not a problem at all.”

Then the other guy would be like, “Cool bro. I hope you don’t mind that if I get her pregnant I’ll probably kill the baby because siring a lower-class child would lower my mana, and then I won’t be able to upvote.”

Then the first guy would be all, “Oh for sure brah. This might be a tropical paradise with very progressive ideas about sexuality but let’s not forget we’re also a pretty backward tribal culture who base most of our laws on our religion, which basically makes gods out of our chiefs. The most common punishment for breaking our sacred laws is death, which is handed out with no due process brah and includes insane arbitrary offenses such as women not being allowed to eat 60 out of the 70 types of bananas here or having your shadow fall on the chief’s hut.”

Anyway, you were required to put in about six days of work for the king every month and throw him some food, but other than that you just did whatever the fuck you wanted. Things changed when the Europeans showed up. In addition to great beaches and hot island girls who would happily give you a hand job for scraps of metal, Hawaii had an abundance of sandalwood, which Europeans would sell to Chinese traders who highly valued sandalwood as incense, medicine, ornaments, and lice repellant.

King Kamehameha I, traded sandalwood for guns, metals, and ships, which he used to unify the islands under his rule, which is a nice way of saying he killed all his rivals and crowned himself king. Then he went crazy buying ships and so much opulent shit from the Europeans that he had to start borrowing against future sandalwood harvests. Once his debts started coming due he ordered all his subjects to scour the islands for every scrap of sandalwood they could find so instead of going fishing and banging the neighbors everyone was slaving away hauling wood all day under threat of execution, up to the point where crops weren’t getting planted and people started dying of famine. The king started pumping the breaks on his craziness and made some new laws limiting sandalwood harvesting to make it sustainable and so his people could get back to not starving to death.

When Kamehameha died his son Liholiho, aka Kamehameha II, took over and went back to spending money like a Saudi prince. That didn’t last long because he caught a cold on a visit to London and died. Finally, the islanders said, “Fuck this shit!” and started ripping up all the sandalwood trees, killing the sandalwood trade so their kids wouldn’t have to endure the same bullshit they went through.

Kamehameha III, did the best he could to try to balance the old way of doing things with their new place on the global stage. He instigated The Great Mahele, which basically introduced land ownership to Hawaiians. The king got a third of the land, the chiefs got a third, and commoners got the other third. Unfortunately, the people didn’t understand the concept of land ownership so most of them never applied for their plot of land. The idea was to make sure Hawaii belonged to Hawaiians but it mostly just created a feudal system where the rich got richer and the poor got fucked.

Kamehameha then signed the 1840 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which said Hawaii was ruled by the king but governed by branches of the government similar to how England operated. The idea was to allow the people to have a voice, but it mostly just gave foreigners an opportunity to insert themselves into government, like William Little Lee, who drafted the Alien Land Ownership Act of 1850, which allowed foreigners to purchase land.

At this point diseases and famine had reduced the native population from 300,000 to 60,000, leaving the island wide open for exploitation. Enterprising assholes wasted no time creating vast sugar plantations, which Hawaii’s tropical climate was well suited for. Hawaiians didn’t really “get” the idea of working for money so after a few days in the sugar fields (Which is fucking brutal) they striked and wandered off to go fishing and pick fruit. Undeterred, European and American businessmen shipped in a few hundred thousand immigrants from Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines. Plantation owners ruled over their workers with brutality and impunity and elected themselves to government positions until they basically ruled the islands.

In 1887 plantation owners like Sanford Dole were getting tired of the king getting in their way of doing honest business, but for some reason the King wasn’t too hot on the idea of handing over his country. So, all the rich old men formed the Reform Party of the Kingdom of Hawaii and asked the King to sign a new constitution, stripping himself of pretty much all functional power, said anyone could vote (even if they weren’t native) but the only people who could vote (native or foreign) could only do it if they could read and were rich. It also allowed the United States Navy to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor. It basically said, “FUCK YOU.” The king was more than happy to sign the new constitution which would be known as “The Bayonet Constitution," because he had a fucking gun pointed at his head.

In 1874 Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha ascended the throne to become Queen of Hawaii after her brother died of disease while in San Francisco begging the Americans to get out of his ass. She wasn’t a big fan of the Bayonet constitution so she came up with a new constitution and her and people loyal to the throne set up shop in the palace. Worried plantation barons created “The Committee of Safety” and asked 1000 white dudes and 120 heavily armed marines to surround the palace to make sure their money and power stayed safe. They arrested the Queen, forced her to step down, and Dole named himself president of Hawaii.

Queen Liliʻuokalani asked U.S. President Grover Cleveland to not recognize the new Republic of Hawaii or annex it to the United States. Cleveland looked at all the facts and determined, “Yup, that was fucked up. We’ll recognize you as still being queen.” The plantations laughed and went back to whipping their slaves. Then the queen told Cleveland she wanted to arrest all the plantation owners for treason and execute them so Cleveland said, “Yeah, I’m staying out of this. Good luck, bitch.” The queen said, “Fine. I’ll do it myself” and started a revolution. Dole and friends slapped that shit down after about five minutes and arrested Queen Liliʻuokalani and her fellow conspirators for treason.

In 1898 now president William McKinley annexed Hawaii to the United States to secure its strategic position in the Pacific during the Spanish-American War. In 1900, the U.S. said, “Ah, fuck it. We’ll quit pretending we don’t just own these goddamn islands now” and declared it a U.S. territory, which basically means we get all the benefits of you being a state, but you aren’t one so we don’t owe you shit in return. McKinley then appointed Samuel Dole as the first governor of Hawaii.

The Dole Fruit Company and the other plantation owners continued to enslave, exploit, and generally act like fucking comic book villains for decades. The fruit and sugar companies took a big hit after slavery was abolished in America, and those pesky human rights got really annoying after Hawaii was granted full statehood in 1959. Having made billions raping and pillaging Hawaii for nearly a hundred years the robber barons decided to give the islands back to the people. Just kidding. They closed up all their shops and relocated to third world countries where they could continue their reign of terror and abandoned Hawaii with no industry or economy. Thankfully Hawaii still had its beaches so it reinvented its self as a premier tourist destination, resulting in a whole new batch of rich old people snatching up all the good land left behind by the last batch of rich old men.