‘Land And Power’ Author George Cooper Dead At 75
The 1985 book, written with Gavan Daws, is a seminal work about Hawaii politics and government.
George Cooper, a co-author of one of the most influential books in modern Hawaii history, has died.
Family and friends said Cooper died Thursday in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He was 75.
Cooper wrote “: The Democratic Years” with Gavan Daws. First published in 1985, it examined how state and local office holders throughout Hawaii took personal financial interests into account in their actions as public officials — “a pervasive way of conducting private and public affairs,” as one publisher described the actions.
Cooper was born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, on Jan. 21, 1948. He was a graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii Manoa.
Cooper previously served as a lecturer at UH Manoa, a radio news announcer for KIVM on Kauai, a stringer for The Garden Island and a community organizer on Kauai.
Cooper left Hawaii in 1996 and later settled in Cambodia. He was a lawyer who worked for the World Bank, for the nonprofit Inclusive Development International and for the Cambodian nongovernmental organization Equitable Cambodia.
His work for the World Bank involved projects that assisted the Cambodian land ministry to issue collective titles to Indigenous peoples’ villages.
Reflecting on his work in a 2022 essay for Civil Beat, Cooper wrote, “My aim — which I never thought would be realized — was to raise by just one step up only the general conversation in Hawaii about land and power, to acknowledge there was a connection. It seems to have done that: To my amazement the term ‘land and power’ passed into the general vocabulary of Hawaii as a kind of condition that has been forever true in Hawaii, and in the years our book covered, who owned the land and held the power changed but the basic condition had not, and it seems it never will.”
