The Great Mahele of 1848...
How to Make a Land Aquistion in 1848 without being a Native Hawaiian
In response to the request of the rising power of the foreign born missionaries to own land, the government proposed the Great Mahele of 1848. This proposal was a great division of land (as seen in the adjacent map), mostly between the king, the chiefs, and the government; with a small fraction going to the common people. This was a far stretch from the pre-tahitian Hawaiian concept of land equity.
The great rouse of the Mahele was that putting title to the land would encourage the growth of a farming and thus middle class, however, this was not possible as the common people were only given one percent of the total land. This was occurring while foreigners (missionaries and their descendants) were being allowed to buy up large tracks of land sometimes at pennies on the dollar.
The great significance of the Mahele was that the majority of native Hawaiian people would become landless after 1850. This had two implications: one, its tore at the cultural heart strings of the nation who believed in “Aloha ‘Aina” or “Love of the Land”; second was without a claim to the land, the native Hawaiians would be pushed to the fringes of a new cash crop centered economy.