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As in North America, a fair number of those advocating the racial uplift of the indigenous Hawaiian population found themselves materially rewarded as they came to dominate the economic life of the islands. During the nineteenth century, land was divided and passed into haole hands.³⁷ With the physical decimation of the native population, tens of thousands of laborers were imported from the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific. Commodity agriculture—especially sugar—proved increasingly important, and the descendants of a number of missionaries came to control its trade. In time, the haole elite sought political power to match its dominance of the export-oriented economy. This meant undermining the sovereignty of the native kingdom. When Queen Lili‘uokalani attempted in 1893 to restore the authority of the Hawaiian monarchy following the 1887 imposition of a constitution favored by powerful haole interests, her government, after the U.S. minister in the islands sent in a contingent of American troops, grudgingly “yield[ed] to the superior force of the United States of America” and the haole leaders that the American minister, John L. Stevens, was supporting. Lili‘uokalani did so, she wrote at the time, “under . . . protest” and “until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”³⁸