"The rise of the sugar industry came at the same time as a drastic and apparently irreversible fall in the size of the native population of Hawaii. Various introduced diseases, small pox and leprosy, brought the number of native Hawaiians down from an estimated 300,000 at the time Cook visited the Islands to less than 45,000 a century later... the decline meant that the sugar plantations of the islands were likely to chronically short of labor to work in the cane fields... the search for industrious and docile "coolies" went on all over the Pacific (in the hope of finding islanders racially similar to Hawaiians and satisfactory as laborers), and in most countries of Asia. Plantation labor, as the government and the planters soon found out, had to be replenished constantly. Its overflow into the towns, and the establishment of immigrant communities there, marked the beginning of the distinctive urban multi-racial society of modern Hawaii."
From the Book: The Illustrated Atlas of Hawaii
By: Gavan Daws and Illustrated by: Joseph Feher