| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959–2000. By Mansel G. Blackford. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. xiii, 277 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1086-3.)

Mansel G. Blackford is a leading business historian who brings a sophisticated historiographical understanding to this study of tourist development on Maui. Based on impeccable research, Blackford's book demonstrates how changing economic demands, cultural conflicts, environmental impacts, and political struggles have all, in an interconnected way, affected the tourist industry on Maui. This case study is a model for other historians researching not just the tourist industry but also the choices made by communities struggling with economic development. Finally, Fragile Paradise demonstrates the vitality of contemporary business history, a field too often undervalued by the academic history profession. 1

Tourism is the number one industry on Maui and has been for thirty years. Tourism, Blackford shows, was developed by elites on Maui in response to a changing economic climate on the island. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century Maui was dependent on the plantation crops of sugar cane and pineapples. In the years after World War II, those agricultural staples became less and less competitive in the world market, causing widespread unemployment and depopulation on Maui. By the late 1950s, business and political leaders on Maui, in conjunction with elites at the territorial and then the state level, responded to the creeping economic crisis by turning to tourism as a solution. . . .

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