Surprise, Surprise?

In class tonight Rob made an interesting point when he spoke about Queen Liliuokalani’s observations of American land as it passed by her train. Rob mentioned that the Queen, while looking out of her train window pondered why America must exploit Hawaii’s small amount of far away land when they have so much left uncultivated at home? Rob pointed out that her perspective of the underutilization of American land was similar to that of American colonialist and expansionist thinking. The Queen remarks, “the vast extent of unoccupied land is so enormous. I thought what splendid sugar plantations might here be established, how easily and profitably rice might be grown, and in some other spots with what good returns coffee could be planted.”(P309) Clearly the queen is not some complete savage who has been using coconuts for currency and has no conceptual understanding of the world around her. Throughout the Queen’s memoir it’s evident she’s extraordinarily bright and outside of being a little sheltered in her royal upbringing, she has quite a clear understanding of politics and the trending ideologies of foreign lands. In this previous quote we see that she looks at a piece of uncultivated land and immediately thinks about what changes can be made to turn a profit. While the quote is coming from a place of sadness and is intended to highlight American rapaciousness, still it can be interpreted that she understood the principles of colonial thinking and wasn’t completely opposed to it. Which leads me to my question, do you think that the Queen was really surprised by the events as they unfolded toward Hawaiian annexation? With her premiere education she must have learned about the never satisfied and indefatigable attitude of the American people. In a little over a hundred years The United States had turned from a small colony owned by Great Britain to an emerging world power that had already displaced/killed millions of Native American’s in order to take over their land and had gone toe to toe with Mexico, Great Britain, and Spain amongst others on their way to extending the American Empire all the way to the Pacific edge of North America. So, when the Americans slowly started working their way into the political system of Hawaii, did somebody as Intelligent as the queen really have no way of predicting the possible outcome of America turning Hawaii into land for themselves? It’s easy for me to say in hindsight and from an outsider’s perspective, but I’m wondering if The Queen and her people were blindsided, or if they knew that American colonization was coming and faced the inevitability? (I copy and pasted this from word and for some reason I can't get it to break into paragraphs in this blog format, sorry for the big chunk of writing.)