HIHawaii History

ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu had electric lighting in 1887, four years before the White House did. It is the only royal residence on American soil, and it stands there because Hawaii spent the nineteenth century as a recognised kingdom with treaties, consulates and its own postage, until a committee of thirteen men backed by sailors from a United States warship took the government in a single afternoon in January 1893.

Voyagers, ahupuaʻa and the kapu

The islands were settled by Polynesian navigators sailing double hulled canoes across roughly 2,000 miles of open Pacific, steering by star lines, swell direction and the flight of shorebirds. Radiocarbon work places the main settlement between about 1000 and 1200 CE. Land was cut into ahupuaʻa, wedges running from the mountain ridge down to the reef so that every community held forest, irrigated taro terraces and fishing ground. A system of kapu enforced by the aliʻi and the kahuna governed what could be eaten and touched, and by whom, while four rival chiefdoms on Hawaiʻi, Maui, Oʻahu and Kauaʻi fought over the channels between them.

Cook, Kamehameha, and one kingdom out of four

James Cook sighted Kauaʻi in January 1778 and named the group the Sandwich Islands after his patron. He was killed at Kealakekua Bay on 14 February 1779, and within a decade the islands were a provisioning stop for fur ships running between the Pacific Northwest and Canton. Kamehameha of Hawaiʻi island used the muskets and cannon those ships brought better than his rivals did, with two stranded British sailors, John Young and Isaac Davis, as gunners. He took Maui and then Oʻahu, driving the defenders off the cliff at Nuʻuanu in 1795, and in 1810 Kaumualiʻi of Kauaʻi submitted by agreement rather than battle.

Kamehameha died in 1819, and within months his widow Kaʻahumanu and his son Liholiho publicly broke the eating kapu and dismantled the old religious order. Congregational missionaries from Boston landed at Kailua-Kona the following year off the brig Thaddeus, into that vacuum. They gave Hawaiian a written alphabet, and by the 1850s literacy in the kingdom was among the highest reported anywhere.

The Māhele, sugar, and the overthrow of 1893

The Great Māhele of 1848 divided the land among the crown, the government and the chiefs, and the Kuleana Act of 1850 let commoners claim the plots they farmed, though most never filed. Foreigners were allowed to buy land the same year, and within two generations the arable acreage was largely in planters' hands. Sugar had begun at Kōloa on Kauaʻi in 1835 and needed field labour the depopulated islands could not supply, so planters recruited Chinese from 1852, Japanese from 1868 and heavily after 1885, Portuguese from 1878, Puerto Ricans from 1900, Koreans from 1903 and Filipinos from 1906. That recruitment is why no single ethnic group has held a majority in Hawaii since. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 admitted Hawaiian sugar duty free, and its 1887 renewal handed the United States exclusive use of Pearl Harbor.

That same year the armed Hawaiian League forced the Bayonet Constitution on King Kalākaua, imposing property qualifications that disenfranchised most Native Hawaiians and every Asian resident. When Queen Liliʻuokalani moved to promulgate a replacement in January 1893, a Committee of Safety declared her deposed on 17 January, with United States Minister John L. Stevens ordering sailors and marines ashore from the USS Boston. She yielded under protest to the United States rather than to the committee. Sanford Dole headed the provisional government and then the Republic of Hawaii from 1894, President Cleveland's investigator James Blount reported the overthrow unlawful, and in 1897 Native Hawaiians gathered more than 21,000 signatures against annexation on the Kūʻē petitions.

Annexation, martial law and the 442nd

Unable to find two thirds of the Senate for a treaty, Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution instead, the Newlands Resolution of July 1898, passed by simple majority during the war with Spain. The Organic Act of 1900 created the territory, whose politics ran through five interlocking agencies known as the Big Five: Castle and Cooke, Alexander and Baldwin and C. Brewer among them. On 7 December 1941 the governor signed away civilian rule within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and martial law ran until October 1944, longer than in any other American jurisdiction. Because residents of Japanese ancestry made up roughly a third of the population, mass removal was never attempted; somewhat over a thousand were detained, against 120,000 removed from the West Coast, and island men filled the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

1954, and the fiftieth star

The ILWU organised the docks and then the plantations across the ethnic lines the planters had relied on, shutting 33 plantations in the 1946 sugar strike. In the 1954 territorial election, Democrats led largely by nisei veterans studying on the GI Bill took both houses for the first time in more than half a century, ending the planter order and producing John Burns, Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga. Statehood bills had died in Congress repeatedly, in part because southern members did not want senators from a majority nonwhite territory voting on civil rights legislation. Hawaii's plebiscite on 27 June 1959 approved statehood by roughly seventeen to one and admission followed on 21 August 1959. The ballot offered only statehood or continued territorial status, with no option for independence, which remains a central grievance of the sovereignty movement.

Jets, the last cane harvest, and sovereignty

Jet service began the same year as statehood and cut the flight from California to under five hours, and tourism displaced agriculture as the economic base within two decades. Lānaʻi, once the largest pineapple operation in the world, stopped growing it in the early 1990s, and the last sugar plantation, Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar on Maui, cut its final crop in December 2016 after about 180 years. The 1978 constitutional convention created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and made Hawaiian an official language alongside English, the only state with two. In 1993, on the centenary of the overthrow, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Apology Resolution, Public Law 103-150, which states that the overthrow was carried out with the participation of United States agents and that Native Hawaiians never surrendered their claims to sovereignty through any plebiscite.

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