Sugar cane had come to Hawaii with the early Polynesians, but they never had refined the sugar. The Chinese were the first to produce sugar in Hawaii in 1802 and they set up small sugar mills. In 1835, William Hooper, a young Bostonian, established Hawaii's first sugar plantation of 980 acres on Kauai with Hawaiian laborers. Prior to the mid-1800s Hawaii was mainly feudalistic with the common people working for the royalty. This began to change as Hawaiians became whalers and the new plantation system was established.
Sugar cane needs lots of water for cultivation.
Thus, in 1856 when the Lihue cane fields were suffering from drought, an 11-mile irrigation ditch was dug to bring mountain water to the fields. This rescue procedure established the viability of using dryer land for cane production and massive production was on. For over 100 years, sugar cane production was the mainstay of the Hawaiian economy. Hawaii's Immigrants Hawaii's native population was decimated by the introduction of diseases from foreigners. Plantation owners began to look overseas for a labor supply, and began recruiting laborers from China, Japan and Portugal.