All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Great Mahele, the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and United States Annexation

1848–1898 · Oceania

Territory Seized

Territory

16,635 km²

The Hawaiian archipelago, about 16,635 km2, was annexed by the United States by joint resolution in July 1898 after the deposition of the monarchy in 1893; approximately 1.8 million acres of Crown and government land passed to the United States without compensation to the Hawaiian Kingdom or its people.

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What happened

The Great Mahele of 1848 converted Hawaiian communal land tenure into private title, dividing land between the king, the chiefs and the government; the Kuleana Act of 1850 allowed commoners to claim the plots they cultivated, but only about 28,600 acres were awarded to them, and subsequent legislation permitted foreigners to buy land outright. Within a generation the sugar industry controlled most productive land. In January 1893 a committee of American and European residents, supported by the landing of United States Marines from the USS Boston, deposed Queen Liliuokalani; President Cleveland's investigator James Blount concluded the overthrow had been unlawful and that US forces had been decisive, but no restoration followed. The Republic of Hawaii was annexed by the United States in July 1898 by joint resolution rather than treaty. In 1993 Congress adopted Public Law 103-150, in which the United States apologised to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow and acknowledged that they had never directly relinquished their claims to their national lands. Hawaii was absent from the atlas.

Parties

Land division under settler pressure transferred most Hawaiian land out of commoner hands; American residents backed by United States Marines deposed Queen Liliuokalani and the United States annexed the islands

Disputed

The legality of the 1898 annexation, effected by joint resolution rather than by treaty, and whether the Hawaiian Kingdom's sovereignty was ever lawfully extinguished — positions held by Hawaiian sovereignty organisations and contested by the United States, which accepts wrongdoing in the 1893 overthrow but not the invalidity of annexation.

The denominator

Kingdom censuses counted 84,165 people in 1850 and 71,019 in 1853, almost all Native Hawaiian, giving roughly 88,000 at the 1848 land division; the pre-contact population is estimated at anywhere from 300,000 to 800,000. By annexation in 1898 Native Hawaiians were a minority in their own islands, and commoners had received less than one per cent of the land under the Mahele.

Where the baseline comes from

Great Maheleopen-edited
Native Hawaiiansopen-edited

On the death toll

The overthrow itself was accomplished without significant bloodshed; one policeman was wounded. The catastrophic decline of the Native Hawaiian population across the nineteenth century was caused by introduced epidemic disease rather than by state killing.

Documented forms of violence

DenationalizationCultural Destruction

The 1993 Apology Resolution records the suppression of the Hawaiian language in schools from 1896 and the transfer of Hawaiian national lands without consent or compensation.

Formal findings

United States Congress (1993) — Public Law 103-150 (1993) apologising to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on 17 January 1893 with the participation of US agents and armed forces, and acknowledging that Native Hawaiians never directly relinquished claims to their inherent sovereignty or their national lands — source

Countries touched, on present-day borders

United States of America

Sources

Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — Wikipediaopen-edited
Great Mahele — Wikipediaopen-edited
Apology Resolution (Public Law 103-150) — Wikipediaopen-edited
Public Law 103-150, 107 Stat. 1510 (1993) — US Government Publishing Officeofficial