Title: Hawaii’s Monarchy Overthrown With U.S. Support, 120 Years Ago - HISTORY
Headings: Hawaii’s Monarchy Overthrown With U.S. Support, 120 Years Ago
Hawaii’s Monarchy Overthrown With U.S. Support, 120 Years Ago
Sugar barons and businessmen overthrew Hawaii’s longstanding monarchy 120 years ago, setting the stage for U.S. annexation.

Content: Seafaring Polynesians discovered Hawaii perhaps as early as 200 A.D. by paddling double-hulled canoes across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean. When in 1778 British explorer James Cook became the first European known to arrive, several chiefs ruled over different parts of the archipelago. Yet by 1810, King Kamehameha I had united Hawaii’s eight main islands into a single kingdom with the help of firearms obtained from white traders. These early-arriving whites brought over Hawaii’s first venereal diseases and mosquitoes, along with smallpox, measles and other epidemics that reduced the native population by roughly 75 percent over the span of just a few decades. Hawaii furthermore struggled with repeated U.S., British and French attempts to exert their influence over it. British imperialists even carried out a brief takeover in 1843 before their superiors restored the kingdom’s sovereignty. Under King Kalakaua’s reign from 1874 to 1891, Hawaii ceded away the rights to Pearl Harbor and signed a free-trade agreement with the United States that greatly benefited the islands’ sugar planters, who came to control about four-fifths of all arable land. Yet the white business class remained unsatisfied. Under the threat of force, they pushed through a so-called Bayonet Constitution that turned the monarch into little more than a figurehead. The constitution also enfranchised more whites even as it diluted the voting power of native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants.