Ke Aupuni Hawai‘i. The Constitutions of the Kingdom of Hawaii

The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (Ke Aupuni Hawaiʻi), was a sovereign state located in the Hawaiian Islands. The country was formed in 1795, when the warrior chief Kamehameha the Great, of the independent island of Hawaiʻi, conquered the islands of Oʻahu, Maui, Molokai and Lānaʻi and unified them under one government. In 1810, the whole Hawaiian archipelago became unified when Kauaʻi and Niʻihau joined the Hawaiian Kingdom voluntarily. Two major dynastic families ruled the kingdom: the House of Kamehameha and the House of Kalākaua.The kingdom won recognition from the major European powers and the United States became its chief trading partner. In 1887 King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution in a coup by the Honolulu Rifles, an anti-monarchist militia. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was overthrown in 1893, largely at the hands of the Committee of Safety. Hawaiʻi was briefly an independent republic until the U.S. annexed it through the Newlands Resolution on July 4, 1898, which created the Territory of Hawaiʻi.Historian Boris Yousef presents in this essay the five constitutions of the Kingdom of Hawaii, from that of 1840 to the one, which never entered into force, of 1893.