A Pacific Industry

The Hawaiian pineapple industry emerged in the late nineteenth century as part of an attempt to diversify the Hawaiian economy from dependence on sugar cane as its only staple industry. Here, economic historian Richard A. Hawkins presents a definitive history of an industry from its modest beginnings to its emergence as a major contributor to the American industrial narrative. He traces the rise and fall of the corporate giants who dominated the global canning world for much of the twentieth century. Drawing from a host of familiar economic models and an unparalleled body of research, Hawkins analyses the entrepreneurial development and twentieth-century migration of the pineapple canning industry in Hawaii. The result is not only a comprehensive history, but also a unique story of American innovation and ingenuity amid the rising tides of globalization.

The essays selected for this volume show how the Pacific rapidly became part of an industrializing world. By the 1930s--when the uneven effects of industrialization would have much to do with plunging the Pacific into war--one can already glimpse in outline the structural bases for many of the region's contemporary characteristics. All this is set in context in the introduction by Kenneth Pomeranz.

In GATT negotiations over the past several years the United States, a founding member of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, has been pushing hard for a global liberalization of trade in services. This development would have special significance for the Pacific because of the intensifying competition between the United States and Japan for market shares. A comprehensive analysis of the service sector's role in that dynamic region is offered in this timely volume. Leading experts explore how service enterprises have affected trade in goods and transnational manufacturing, forming a regional pattern of interdependence. The authors assess each service sector from a regional perspective and offer detailed individual country studies as well. The concluding chapters provide a broad overview of corporate strategies, discuss questions of regional cooperation, and identify opportunities for new regional service enterprises.

To effect just outcomes the justice system requires that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges be committed—above all—to doing justice. Those whose allegiance is to winning, regardless of evidence, do the opposite of justice: they corrupt the system. This is the jaw-dropping story of one such corruption and its surprise ending. On Labor Day 2007, a forest fire broke out in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada and eventually burned about 65,000 acres. Investigators from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the United States Forest Service took a mere two days to conclude that the liable party was the successful forest-products company Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), founded as a tiny sawmill nearly sixty years earlier by Red Emmerson. The investigative report on the fire declared that SPI’s independent logging contractor had started the conflagration by driving a bulldozer over a rock, creating a spark that flew into a pile of brush. No fire had ever been proven to start that way, but based on the report the U.S. Department of Justice and California’s attorney general filed nearly identical suits against Emmerson’s company. The amount sought was nearly a billion dollars, enough to bankrupt or severely damage it. Emmerson, of course, fought back. Week by week, month by month, year by year, his lawyers discovered that the investigators had falsified evidence, lied under oath, fabricated science, invented a narrative, and intentionally ignored a mountain of exculpatory evidence. They never pursued a known arsonist who was in the area that day, nor a young man who repeatedly volunteered alibis contradicted by facts. Though the government lawyers had not known at the start that the investigation was tainted, they nonetheless refused to drop the suits as the discovery process continued and dozens of revelations made clear that any verdict against Emmerson’s company would be unjust. Scorched Worth is a riveting tale that dramatizes how fragile and arbitrary justice can be when those empowered to act in the name of the people are more loyal to the bureaucracies that employ them than to the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s also the story of a man who refused to let the government take from him what he’d spent a lifetime earning.

The Pacific salmon fishery and the canning industry it supports have recently lost their status as the one of the most valuable fisheries in the world. In this study of early modern business, Dianne Newell discusses the beginning of the North American salmon canning industry, working from archives left by one of the leaders in the field, Henry Doyle.