Hawaii: Subjugation of the Paradise Kingdom

Introduction

Hawaii. It’s the closest thing you’ll find to Paradise on Earth, a tropical archipelago whose incredible beaches, lush rainforests, and active volcanoes have captured the world’s imagination. It is a booming tourist destination, an intersection of luxury and exuberant culture. It’s the perfect honeymoon spot, the perfect getaway, the perfect snowbird destination or retirement home. In all the world, there’s nowhere else quite like it.

Except…well, that’s one hell of a whitewashing, and it omits both a history, and a present-day situation marked by foreign expansionism, cultural genocide, and the continued exploitation of the islands by not only the tourist industry, but the United States as a whole. In this exploration of the dark, and often brutal history of the Hawaiian islands, we’ll cover the devastating effects of European arrival, the many decades of colonialization, the overthrow of a legitimate Hawaiian ruling government, and the many ramifications of Hawaii’s history that still impact it today.

Ancient Hawaii and European Arrival

The first people to reach Hawaii arrived by boat, probably somewhere between the year 300 CE, and the year 1000 CE. It’s a broad timeline, but necessarily so; like the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands, Hawaii’s early settlers kept oral histories and traditions, rather than written ones. As one would expect, this creates some blank spots within the historical record, especially when considering how many generations would have passed by the time Europeans arrived to the island.

Most likely, the first arrivals came from the Marquesas Islands, two thousand miles south of the archipelago. When they arrived, they found a set of islands devoid of predators and disease, and, by all indications of archaeological study, no prior residents.

The society these first islanders built, as well as later arrivals from Tahiti, was both constrained by, and enhanced by the unique conditions of Hawaii. A lack of metal, clay, and large animals made for a very different sort of cultural progression than was seen in many other parts of the world, but Hawaii nonetheless developed into a highly advanced society given their resources. From technological advancements like massive seafaring canoes and land-and-water management systems, to scientific ones like a sophisticated calendar system and highly developed navigational techniques, Hawaii’s civilization was dictated by its resources and its needs.

So, too, was its culture, an elaborate and deeply religious caste system in which chieftains and their bloodlines ruled various islands in a complexly interrelated system, often including inter-island wars and marriage-based political alliances. The islands and their feudal culture were totally self-sufficient, with no known contact with the outside world at that time. There’s some evidence that Spain may have run trade routes in the area for several centuries, but Spain never made a territorial claim to Hawaii, probably to protect the secret locations of said trade routes.

That all changed in 1778, when the British explorer and naval officer Captain James Cook arrived to the islands on the ships Discovery and Resolution. Cook and his crew had been in the process of mapping the Pacific, but had encountered Hawaii by chance. In this first encounter, Cook made a fairly major impression on the people of Hawaii, and in more ways than one.

His crew’s early skirmishes with Hawaiian warriors—including one Hawaiian’s death—and their use of fireworks as a show of force, led the locals to believe that the new arrivals were sent or allied with the deity Lonomakua, known as a keeper of fire. This assessment led the elders on the island Cook had arrived on, to conclude that Cook and his crew should be appeased and befriended via trade.

Cook left the islands not long after arrival, but returned later the same year, and again in 1779. By then, Cook was well-known to the people of Hawaii, and had related many of his experiences to people in Europe who would later document, and publish information on the archipelago and how to get there. But by 1779, Hawaiian priests and elders had formed their best understanding of how Cook fit in with their religion, and various local chiefs had worked Cook into their own political machinations.

In his third visit to the islands, Cook was initially well-received, with his presence being honored and celebrated for the month that he and his crew were present. But after his departure, Cook’s ships were damaged in a storm which forced them to return, an action which violated the Hawaiians’ understanding of his comings and goings, as well as the meaning behind them. Tension grew as Cook’s crew tried to repair their ships, until the theft of the Discovery’s small support boat led Cook to attempt to take the king of the Hawaiian Big Island, Kalei’opu’u, as his hostage until the boat was returned.

The situation devolved quickly, and was only made worse by news that elsewhere on the islands, Cook’s men had shot and killed another local chieftain. Cook and four of his men were killed, along with one Hawaiian warrior. His successor was able to restore order and achieve a graceful exit from the situation, but the damage was done.

After his death, further tales of Cook’s escapades were published in Europe, and this led to further visits from Europeans and Americans, including explorers, traders, and whalers. With their continued presence, the islands were exposed to the wider world in a second way, one that we now know was a hallmark of first-contact experiences between Europeans and peoples of the New World. Diseases like influenza and smallpox ravaged the Hawaiian islands in short order, causing a massive decline in the local population.

Within two years of Cook’s arrival, some one-in-seventeen native Hawaiians had already died, and by the twenty-year mark, nearly half of the islands’ population had perished. The native Hawaiian population declined to just 16% of its pre-arrival numbers, by the year 1840.

In the following years, European arrival had a major effect not just on Hawaiian mortality rates, but Hawaiian society and government. The Europeans’ weapons were a game-changer for Hawaii’s centuries of inter-island warfare, and one young warrior in particular, the Big Island king’s nephew Kamehameha, used the situation better than anyone else on the islands. Kamehameha oversaw an acquisitions process that transferred European armaments into his uncle’s hands, and led a conquest of each of the Big Island’s tribes, thus gathering the manpower to wage war across the archipelago. During this time, Kamehameha rose to the mantle of King himself, becoming King Kamehameha the First.

Once Kamehameha consolidated power on the Big Island, he used his thousands of warriors and his European advisers to build the largest army Hawaii had ever seen, at that time. The island of Maui fell in short order, and both Kamehameha and the rival king of Oahu, who controlled the rest of the island chain, leveraged European artillery for their final confrontation. For Kamehameha, this had come at severe cost; he had promised the Big Island to Great Britain in exchange for help and recognition on the rest of the archipelago.

But infighting among his rivals helped to ensure that Kamehameha’s decision would not be in vain, and with fire and steel on his side, Kamehameha took Oahu in 1795. Before long, the rest of the islands fell under Kamehameha’s control. Less than thirty-five years after the arrival of the Europeans, Hawaii and the lives of Hawaiians had been inexorably changed.

The Kingdom of Hawaii

Kamehameha unified the islands under the Kingdom of Hawaii, which would rule the islands for the following eighty-five years. But this regime was far less an affirmation of Hawaiian autonomy, than it was an overseer to decades of sweeping and often-unpredictable change. By this time, Captain George Vancouver and his crew had introduced livestock to the islands, which quickly bred out of control and destroyed the well-established ecosystem there. Given its location in the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii also quickly became a waystation for traders and whalers, and within a decade of the Kingdom of Hawaii being established, the first Christian missionaries arrived to the islands from New England.

This coincided with a number of cultural changes within the Hawaiian system, instituted by the Queen Regent Ka’ahumanu after the death of Kamehameha I. Ka’ahumanu was instrumental in pushing out the Kapu system, an elaborate system of Hawaiian rules, codes of conduct, and social norms. In their place, she welcomed Protestant Christianity and encouraged Hawaiians to be baptized, using a new legal model structured on the Ten Commandments and other Christian values to replace the Kapu system.

Ka’ahumanu also banned the practice of hula dancing, and established diplomatic relations with the United States. This range of social and political reforms significantly boosted the efforts of Christian missionaries and greatly expanded American influence on the islands’ trade, but also brought the islands and their people much more firmly under foreign control, and overwrote massive portions of Hawaiian culture.

This change led to white settlers being able to exert significant influence over Hawaii, both in terms of the assets they leveraged by trade, and their position as religious authorities on the practice of Christianity. They used that influence in a number of ways, but the most significant during this time was to convince King Kamehameha III, the ruler at the time, to adopt both a constitution that was to their liking, and the Great Mahele, an act of land division that reshaped Hawaii completely. The concept of private land ownership did not exist in the Hawaiian islands prior to this, and a Bill of Rights of the Hawaiian Islands had guaranteed less than a decade previously that Hawaii’s lands would not be taken from its people.

But in 1848, the Great Mahele divided the lands of the archipelago between the King and 245 prominent Hawaiians. This meant that land was now owned, titled, and most importantly, it could be bought—and who had the wealth, power, and influence to claim the most valuable land? That would be the white settlers, who made it quite clear that they cared less about Kamehameha III’s authority over the system, and more about their ability to use it to their advantage.

Hawaii’s people would receive less than 1% of the land in reality, despite being promised 33%.

Over the mid-19th century, the United States began to form more of a controlling stake over foreign influence within Hawaii, beating out British and French claims by virtue of somewhat better relations and an obvious geographical advantage. This culminated in the signing of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 between the Kingdom of Hawaii and the US, which gave Hawaii duty-free and complete access to the US sugar market and other subsets of the economy. This helped to bring down the price of sugar in the US, after it had risen dramatically during the American Civil War.

In exchange, the US received special economic privileges in Hawaii, as well as exclusive rights to Pearl Harbor, which were included in an amendment to the agreement a decade later. In retrospect, the treaty was an extremely effective way to turn Hawaii into one massive sugar plantation—and we do mean just one, with San Francisco sugar refiner Claus Spreckels claiming a monopoly by 1882. But plantation production also saw a much wider diversification of Hawaii’s foreign population, with significant numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Filipino immigrants arriving in these years.

The King at the time, Kalakaua, had been an advocate for the Reciprocity Treaty, seeing it as a way to expand Hawaii’s coffers while maintaining a degree of autonomy in the face of a foreign market takeover. But Kalakaua’s other acts during this time got him into trouble with the Hawaiian elite, including his efforts to return Hawaiian culture and customs to the people, and the large amounts of spending from his administration, including on a modern palace and a trip to circumnavigate the globe. In response, the elites—for the most part, wealthy Americans and Europeans—forced the signature of what’s now known as the Bayonet Constitution, a highly restrictive agreement that Kalakaua signed at bayonet-point. With his signature, the Hawaiian monarchy conceded most of its power to a legislature operating in the interest of the settler class, while also establishing a voting system linked to property ownership—again, controlled by those same settlers.

The Bayonet Constitution started a countdown till death for the monarchy, a death that King Kalakaua himself would not witness. In 1891, his heir and sister, Queen Liliuokalani became the first reigning queen of Hawaii. Unlike her brother, Liliuokalani did not consent to her role as a facilitator to Hawaii’s economic occupation, and publicly opposed the terms of the Reciprocity Treaty.

Kalakaua’s reintroduction of Hawaiian cultural practice had deeply pissed off its Christian settlers and missionary class, but that had at least been an acceptable imposition. Liliuokalani, however, was taking far more drastic measures, which would mark her as a threat to Hawaii’s real ruling order.

Overthrow, Annexation, and Aftermath

On January 14, 1893, Queen Liliuokalani drafted a constitution that was meant to counter and undo the effects of the Bayonet Constitution, which was strongly opposed by most surviving Hawaiian natives. At this time, the American McKinley Act had just nullified Hawaii’s advantage in the US sugar trade by removing import duties from Hawaii’s competitor nations, adding pressure on the sugar elites of Hawaii to maintain and expand production. Liliuokalani’s constitution would have made this effort functionally impossible, and in response, a small group of Europeans and Americans formed the Committee of Safety, a conspiracy to overthrow Liliuokalani and seek annexation to the US. The coup’s leaders included Lorrin Thurston, a newspaper publisher, and Henry Cooper, an American lawyer.

Two days after Liliuokalani’s constitution was drafted, the Marshal of the Kingdom of Hawaii got word of the coup, but his requests to prevent it by force were denied by the Queen’s cabinet over fears of escalating tensions with the US. After a failed attempt at negotiation with the conspirators, the Marshal mustered a force of some five hundred men to defend the queen, causing the conspirators to swell their own ranks. On January 17, amidst a standoff outside the royal palace, Henry Cooper announced the deposition of the queen, the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a provisional government.

Still fearing the development of a larger conflict, Queen Liliuokalani’s defenders did not retaliate forcefully to Cooper’s proclamation. The USS Boston, a naval cruiser from the United States, had sent troops ashore on the 16th to keep the peace, and their presence forced Liliuokalani and her government to accept the queen’s placement under house arrest at the royal palace. The queen directed her forces to surrender. In her own words, summarized in a later autobiography: “Since the troops of the United States had been landed to support the revolutionists, by order of the American minister, it would be impossible for us to make any resistance.”

This reality posed a major problem for the United States, including President Grover Cleveland, who denounced the USS Boston’s participation in the coup as an act of war that the United States had now unwillingly committed. Cleveland recognized that the people of Hawaii had no desire for an armed force of US troops imposing foreign will on their soil, and publicly admitted that the actions of the Marines and sailors in Hawaii were wrongful in their nature. As such, the United States did not immediately annex Hawaii, despite the wishes of Thurston and his gang of conspirators. Instead, their provisional government went into effect, under the command of new President Sanford Dole.

The new government, known as the Republic of Hawaii, was a public and shameless oligarchy, emboldened by the presence of a settlers’ militia known as the Honolulu Rifles. The queen, who survived her deposition, issued a scathing statement to protest her overthrow even as she acknowledged that she would yield. Liliuokalani’s intent was instead to address the US government directly, something that Grover Cleveland’s administration was happy to facilitate.

A government investigation found that “United States diplomatic and military representatives had abused their authority, and were responsible for the change in government”. The Americans who had aided in the overthrow were punished, and Cleveland himself made verbal commitments to restore the status quo that had existed prior to the coup, including the monarchy itself. However, as you can probably guess, President Dole and the Republic of Hawaii refused Cleveland’s demands to reinstate the queen outright.

A counter-report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where most members were pro-annexation of Hawaii, disputed the first report’s claims, and gave the Republic of Hawaii enough of a buffer in Washington that President Cleveland couldn’t take action.

In 1895, a group of pro-monarchy conspirators led by several Liliuokalani loyalists made one last attempt to reinstate the Queen. In a short counter-revolution, some five hundred poorly armed recruits waged three skirmishes against Republic of Hawaii troops, and despite minimal loss of life on both sides, the revolutionaries were routed, captured, or driven to desertion. Many of the participants would face severe consequences later, and when a weapons cache was found and directly blamed on Liliuokalani, she was arrested on charges of treason. To prevent further violence, Liliuokalani renounced all claim to the throne, and after signing a formal statement of abdication, she was able to secure the pardons of many of her supporters.

Liliuokalani continued to oppose annexation for the next few years, but after the end of the Cleveland administration, resistance dried up in Washington. Cleveland’s successor, President William McKinley, was much more amenable to the idea of American expansionism, and under his leadership, the US Congress passed the Newlands Resolution. In 1898, the Republic of Hawaii was annexed as a US territory, at a public ceremony at the royal palace.

Hardly any native Hawaiians chose to attend the event, and those few who did, did so in protest on behalf of the forty thousand native Hawaiians whose families had been lucky enough to survive the last century of occupation. Across the islands, Hawaiian natives protested annexation till the end, as did the former Hawaiian royal family. Sanford Dale, former President of the Republic of Hawaii, was made the territory’s first governor.

The sovereign nation of Hawaii ceased to exist, never to be seen again.

In the century to follow, Hawaii would be maintained as a plantation territory, with significant impositions on civil liberties during World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, itself a target within Hawaii. The territory achieved US statehood in 1959, and though a sovereignty movement has gained limited recognition during this time, it has not come anywhere close to reaffirming Hawaiian sovereignty outright. Today, tourism is Hawaii’s major industry, although a brief environmental rebound during the slow tourist years of 2020 and 2021 clearly demonstrated how tourism has wreaked havoc on the Hawaiian ecosystem.

Today, Hawaii still lives with the ramifications of its difficult history. Native Hawaiians have had far more trouble than continental Native Americans in gaining rights and autonomy, especially where land rights are concerned. The effects of the Great Mahele still exist till this day, with the US government and a small handful of families controlling massive amounts of land compared to the local population, and the US military maintains a strong presence there.

Locals and the Hawaiian government continue to plead with tourists to slow down the rates of their visits, with many native Hawaiians advocating official protections against tourist exploitation of Hawaii’s fragile landscape. Animals like rats and mongoose, introduced by European settlers, continue to distort Hawaii’s ecology, and as of now, debate still rages over the use of Hawaiian ancestral lands for anything from the Thirty-Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, to condos, hotels, and other developments.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that the Hawaiian islands today are a far cry from what they were prior to the arrival of Captain James Cook, but it’s far more important to stress not just how different the islands are, but why and how that change took place. The archipelago is by no means unique; history has seen thousands of sovereign lands and peoples colonized by foreigners, ravaged by disease, and eventually brought under the yoke of a more powerful neighbor. This, unfortunately, has been just as much a part of human history as anything else, and most states around the world continue to reckon with the implications, either as a formerly colonizing nation or as a formerly colonized one.

But in the case of Hawaii, it bears special attention to the systematic process of manipulation carried out by foreign influences: first by using their advanced weapons to dictate Hawaiian consolidation, then forcing more and more exploitative treaties to control the land, and finally, to overthrow a sovereign state by leveraging the force of the United States, even though the United States at the time did not support annexation. In the twenty-first century, no discussion of Hawaii can be complete without recognition of that process, and frankly, no visit to Hawaii should take place without, at a bare minimum, understanding what took place there. We can’t say with any level of certainty what will happen for Hawaii in the future, for its land, or its attempts to reassert the rights of its people. But at the very least, we can hope that its future looks a hell of a lot better than the two-and-a-half centuries past.

Key Takeaways

• Hawaii’s history includes foreign expansionism, cultural genocide, and exploitation by the United States.
• European arrival brought diseases that decimated the native Hawaiian population.
• The Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown by American and European settlers in 1893.
• The Great Mahele of 1848 divided Hawaiian lands, benefiting foreign settlers.
• Hawaii’s annexation by the U.S. in 1898 marked the end of its sovereignty.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the first people arrive in Hawaii?

The first people to reach Hawaii arrived by boat, probably somewhere between the year 300 CE, and the year 1000 CE.

Who was the first European to arrive in Hawaii?

The British explorer and naval officer Captain James Cook was the first European to arrive in Hawaii in 1778.

What impact did European arrival have on the Hawaiian population?

Diseases like influenza and smallpox ravaged the Hawaiian islands, causing a massive decline in the local population. Within two years of Cook’s arrival, some one-in-seventeen native Hawaiians had already died, and by the twenty-year mark, nearly half of the islands’ population had perished.

Who unified the Hawaiian Islands under the Kingdom of Hawaii?

Kamehameha, the Big Island king’s nephew, unified the Hawaiian Islands under the Kingdom of Hawaii.

What was the Great Mahele?

The Great Mahele was an act of land division that reshaped Hawaii completely. It divided the lands of the archipelago between the King and 245 prominent Hawaiians, allowing for private land ownership and the ability to buy and sell land.

What was the Bayonet Constitution?

The Bayonet Constitution was a highly restrictive agreement signed by King Kalakaua at bayonet-point. It conceded most of the Hawaiian monarchy’s power to a legislature operating in the interest of the settler class and established a voting system linked to property ownership.

Who overthrew Queen Liliuokalani?

A small group of Europeans and Americans formed the Committee of Safety, which overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. The coup’s leaders included Lorrin Thurston, a newspaper publisher, and Henry Cooper, an American lawyer.

When did Hawaii become a U.S. territory?

Hawaii was annexed as a U.S. territory in 1898 under the Newlands Resolution.

What is the current major industry in Hawaii?

Today, tourism is Hawaii’s major industry.

What are some of the ongoing issues in Hawaii related to its history?

Native Hawaiians have had far more trouble than continental Native Americans in gaining rights and autonomy, especially where land rights are concerned. The effects of the Great Mahele still exist, with the US government and a small handful of families controlling massive amounts of land compared to the local population. Locals and the Hawaiian government continue to plead with tourists to slow down the rates of their visits, with many native Hawaiians advocating official protections against tourist exploitation of Hawaii’s fragile landscape.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Hawaii: Subjugation of the Paradise Kingdom
• https://www.tripster.com/travelguide/top-5-reasons-to-visit-hawaii/
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• https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/06/native-hawaiian-population/#:~:text=By%20Swanson’s%20estimates%2C%201%2Din,1840%2C%20it%20declined%2084%25
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• https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/688.html
• https://files.hawaii.gov/dcca/reb/real_ed/re_ed/ce_prelic/land_in_hawaii.pdf
• https://www.britannica.com/event/Reciprocity-Treaty-of-1875
• https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/bayonet-constitution
• https://www.gohawaii.com/hawaiian-culture/history
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hawaii-history-and-heritage-4164590/
• https://www.hawaiiankingdom.org/political-history.shtml
• https://www.iolanipalace.org/history/queens-imprisonment/
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Liliuokalani
• https://www.britannica.com/place/Hawaii-state/History
• https://beatofhawaii.com/who-owns-hawaii-island-by-island/
• https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/learn-the-rich-history-of-hawaii/21599/#
• https://scalawagmagazine.org/2022/09/white-lotus-colonialism-hawaii/
• https://abcnews.go.com/US/hawaiian-locals-beg-tourists-stay-home-citing-covid/story?id=79617531
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068535
• https://www.olaproperties.com/blog/lets-talk-story/the-story-of-the-mongoose-in-hawaii/
• https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1114314076/hawaii-mauna-kea-telescope-space-observatory
• Hero image source by Photographer: Mosbatho / openverse, by.

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