Kingdom of Hawaiʻi

The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, in Hawaiian Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina, is a constituent monarchy of the United Kingdom of America comprising the eight Hawaiian islands and about 1.6 million people. It entered the Realm in 1898 by the Treaty of Honolulu, an instrument of eleven articles which preserved the Hawaiian Crown, the Hawaiian legislature, the Hawaiian courts, the Hawaiian language and the Hawaiian land, and which contains no mechanism by which it may be amended.

The Kingdom has a monarch of its own, no federal officer represents the Crown there, and its sovereign is a fount of honour. About a third of its land is held in trust by that sovereign and produces a large part of the Kingdom’s public revenue. Its head of government is the Kuhina Nui, appointed by the King and confirmed by the lower chamber. Its constitutional questions are decided by its own Supreme Court, from which appeal lies to the Realm’s highest court on Charter grounds alone.

The Kingdom returns three members to the Realm’s House of Commons and is listed among the forty-nine polities for representation, taxation and administration. For every constitutional purpose it is a kingdom, and the two styles are kept apart with some care.

Name

The Kingdom’s Hawaiian name, Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina, means the Hawaiian archipelago rather than the Hawaiian state, and it was the nineteenth-century Kingdom’s own usage before the Treaty and has remained so since. It names the eight islands and not the institution that governs them, which is a distinction Hawaiians draw deliberately and which the Realm has never quite adopted. Official Hawaiian-language instruments use it; official English-language instruments say Kingdom of Hawaiʻi; both texts are authoritative and the Hawaiian one is signed first.

The sovereign’s style is Kamehameha VII, by the Grace of God King of the Hawaiian Islands, recited in Hawaiian before it is recited in English. The style refers to the islands, consistently with the Kingdom’s own name for itself, and not to a territory or a people.

The ʻokina and the kahakō are used throughout the Kingdom’s public life and are not required by law anywhere. The ʻAhaʻōlelo has twice declined to legislate on the point, on the view that a language protected by statute and neglected in practice is worse off than one people choose to write properly, and the judgement has been vindicated: Hawaiian orthography is more consistent in Hawaiʻi than most statutory orthographies are anywhere. A mainland newspaper dropping the marks is a small and reliable irritation, and nothing is done about it.

History

Before the Kingdom

The islands were settled from the southern Pacific in a long sequence of voyages, and by the time of European contact in 1778 they supported a population of several hundred thousand under four principal chiefdoms, on a land system of ahupuaʻa running from mountain to sea and a religious and legal order of kapu that governed fishing, planting, rank and access.

Unification and the early Kingdom

Kamehameha I unified the archipelago by conquest between 1795 and 1810, with European guns and European advisers deciding several of the battles, and Kauaʻi submitting by negotiation rather than by defeat. The Kingdom treats the unification as its founding act without qualification. Kamehameha Day on 11 June is a national holiday, his statue stands before the courts in Honolulu, and the schools teach the wars as the making of a nation. The islands that were subdued remember having been subdued, and say so at kūpuna level, but no serious Hawaiian politics is built on it.

The flag was adopted in about 1816, carrying a union flag in the canton at a time when no American realm had any claim on the islands whatever. Hawaiians insist, and insist often, that the canton commemorates a friendship the Kingdom chose rather than a sovereignty it received.

Contact brought catastrophe on the usual scale. Introduced disease reduced the Hawaiian population by something over eighty per cent within seventy years, and the demographic collapse is the single largest fact of the nineteenth century, larger than the missionaries, larger than the sugar and larger than the constitutions.

The missionaries, the Māhele and the constitutions

Congregational missionaries arrived in 1820 and within a generation had produced a written Hawaiian, a printing press, a literacy rate higher than most of Europe’s, and a Hawaiian-language newspaper tradition that has never since been interrupted. They also produced a landowning class of their own descendants, and the Kingdom has been arguing about both halves of that legacy ever since.

The Māhele of 1848 divided the land into Crown, government and chiefly portions and provided for commoners to claim kuleana parcels. It did what such divisions usually do: within a generation a great deal of the best land had passed to foreigners and to a small number of chiefly estates. What distinguishes Hawaiʻi is what happened next. Across the second half of the century the Crown and the legislature together clawed a substantial acreage back into Crown trust, by escheat, by purchase, by refusing confirmations and by the simple expedient of letting rather than selling. The reversal was never completed and was bitterly contested at every stage, and it is the reason the Crown is now the largest landowner in the Kingdom. The kuleana parcels, protected in the same process, survive in large numbers and carry rights of access, water and gathering across land that somebody else now owns.

The constitutions of 1840, 1852 and 1864 made the Kingdom a constitutional monarchy of a recognisably modern kind, with a cabinet, a bicameral legislature and a guarantee of conscience that has meant no church has ever been established in Hawaiʻi.

1843

In 1843 a French squadron seized the islands and held them for five months before the seizure was disavowed and the Kingdom restored, under pressure applied jointly by Britain and by the United Kingdom of America. Kamehameha III marked the restoration with the sentence that became the Kingdom’s motto: Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono, the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, Restoration Day, is kept on 31 July.

The lesson the Kingdom drew was not the one the motto suggests. What 1843 taught was that Hawaiian independence was a thing other people’s navies decided, and that the Kingdom’s survival depended on which foreign power happened to be inconvenienced by its extinction. Everything the Kingdom did in the following half-century, including the Treaty of 1898, proceeds from that understanding.

1887 and 1893

In 1887 an armed settler militia compelled Kalākaua to sign the constitution known ever since as the Bayonet, which stripped the Crown of its powers and imposed a property qualification that disenfranchised most Hawaiians while enfranchising resident foreigners. It is the lowest point in the Kingdom’s constitutional history and it stood for seven years.

In January 1893 a committee of planters and merchants moved to depose Liliʻuokalani outright. The plot depended entirely on a landing party from a warship in the harbour, and the landing party never came. The decision was taken at the highest level of the Realm and the reasoning has been published since: the Crown in right of America would not be the instrument by which a lawful monarchy was pulled down by its own settlers, and a Kingdom overthrown with American help would be an American embarrassment in every chancellery in Europe. Without the marines the committee had two hundred men and no authority. The Queen kept her throne.

The plotters were tried for treason, convicted, and pardoned within three years by the Queen herself, on the argument that a Kingdom which hanged its merchants would have no merchants. They were never politically trusted again, and the political class that had run the islands for forty years was finished as a political class in eighteen months.

The constitution of 1894

Liliʻuokalani promulgated a new constitution in 1894 which repealed the Bayonet entirely. It restored the Crown’s prerogative in full, abolished the property qualification, widened the franchise to Hawaiian men without regard to property, and kept a cabinet answerable to the legislature. It was a Hawaiian settlement rather than a planter one, and it is the foundation of everything that has happened since. The Kingdom’s constitutional line runs from 1894 without a break.

The Treaty of Honolulu, 1898

The Kingdom acceded to the Realm in 1898 because it could not defend itself and had concluded that it would shortly have to.

The judgement was about Japan. Japanese power in the western Pacific had grown very fast through the 1890s; the Kingdom had a standing force of a few hundred men and no navy at all; and 1843 had established, to Hawaiian satisfaction, that an undefended kingdom in that ocean survives at the pleasure of whichever fleet arrives first. The Kingdom’s ministers concluded that Hawaiʻi would be inside somebody’s empire within twenty years and that the only question open to it was whose, and on what terms.

The terms are the Treaty of Honolulu, signed at ʻIolani Palace by the Queen and by the Realm’s commissioners, in Hawaiian and in English. It is eleven articles long. It preserves the Hawaiian Crown as a Crown distinct from the Realm’s; the Hawaiian legislature; the Hawaiian courts; the Hawaiian language; and the land, including the Crown trust. It gives the Realm defence and foreign affairs, and the use of Hawaiian land for defence. Its final article provides that nothing in it may be repealed, amended or suspended by either party.

Hawaiians call it the Treaty, and the word is the whole argument: a treaty is an instrument between sovereigns. The Realm’s own drafters wrote “the Treaty of Honolulu” into the schedules and have never found a way to write anything else.

The abdication and the restoration

Liliʻuokalani abdicated in 1900. Her reasons were given publicly and have never been disputed: a Kingdom entering a new constitutional order needed a sovereign untainted by the bargain that brought it there, and she had signed the bargain.

What followed was not a simple succession. The Council of Aliʻi, sitting through the months that followed, restored the House of Kamehameha to a throne it had not held since 1872. The grounds offered were genealogical and the reasons were political, and everybody involved knew the difference. The Kalākaua line was entangled with 1887 and with 1898 in a way that made it unable to carry the new era, and restoring the founder’s house restarted the constitutional clock.

The Council also renumbered. It held that the numbering of the House of Kamehameha had lapsed with the dynasty in 1872, and resumed it from the last king of the direct male line, which by its finding was Kamehameha III. The restored sovereign of 1900 was accordingly proclaimed Kamehameha IV. Genealogists have objected continuously since 1900, on the ground that the numbers IV and V were already occupied, and the Kingdom’s answer is that they have now been occupied twice. The usage has settled the question by outlasting the objection.

The Kingdom inside the Realm

Kamehameha IV reigned from 1900 to 1938. The early years of his reign completed the constitutional settlement: the franchise was extended to women in 1902, among the earliest anywhere, on the argument that a Kingdom which had lately been ruled by a queen could hardly maintain that women had no political capacity. Hawaiian women organised the campaign and Liliʻuokalani, in retirement at Washington Place, said one sentence in favour of it which is generally credited with ending the debate.

The interwar decades were the planters’ last prosperous ones. Sugar and pineapple ran at scale, the Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese and Korean communities brought in to work them stopped being immigrant communities and became Hawaiian ones, and the Realm’s forces arrived in strength under the Treaty’s defence article. The Crown was quiet, and the heir, the future Kamehameha V, spent twenty years learning to be a constitutional monarch in a country to which the Realm was paying very little attention.

1941 and the war

Kamehameha V had been on the throne for three years when the anchorage at Honolulu was attacked in December 1941.

He was at ʻIolani Palace that morning and he refused to leave it. He refused again that afternoon, and on each of the several occasions over the following week when it was put to him that the sovereign should be moved inland. He remained in the city for the duration. It is the single most important fact in the modern Kingdom’s image of itself, and it is the foundation on which the restored dynasty’s legitimacy actually rests.

The Realm proposed the mass internment of the Kingdom’s Japanese population, as it had done elsewhere. The King and the ʻAhaʻōlelo refused, on the ground that these were the Kingdom’s subjects and that the Crown does not intern its subjects by category. A few hundred individuals were detained on individual warrants, and the rest of a community of well over a hundred thousand went to work. The Kingdom regards this as the proudest thing it has ever done. The Realm has never formally acknowledged it.

The King spent the following four years fighting the Realm’s generals over martial law, over the suspension of the Hawaiian courts, over requisition, and over internment again whenever it was raised, and he won more of those fights than he lost. Standing fast became his entire political method and the method has outlived him: it is what a Hawaiian sovereign is understood to be for.

The Kamehameha Regiment, recruited across all eight islands with a company traditionally found by each, served in Europe and the Pacific and came home the most decorated formation of its size in the Realm’s army.

1945 and after

In 1945 the Realm moved the Pacific fleet’s main base from Honolulu to San Diego. The stated reasons were logistical and were true. Honolulu became a forward anchorage, a repair yard and the Realm’s principal naval memorial.

The Kingdom has never resolved how it feels about this, and the failure to resolve it is structural rather than temporary. Honolulu took the attack, kept its subjects out of the camps, and then watched the fleet leave. Gratitude for the memorial and grievance at the departure are held simultaneously by the same people, which is why the Kingdom’s attitude to the Realm can be neither simply loyal nor simply resentful, and why any account that makes it one or the other is wrong.

The whole defence estate, including the range on Kahoʻolawe, was granted in 1946 on a single lease of ninety-nine years running to 2045, on terms that looked generous then and now return the trust a fraction of what the land is worth. The undervaluation is the Kingdom’s standing grievance and the expiry date is the most important number in Hawaiian public life.

The plantations declined through the 1960s and were effectively finished by the 1990s, killed by global competition. The great strikes of the late 1940s had already broken the planters’ political power and made Labour the natural party of the islands; what the collapse left behind was a hundred thousand acres, a population that had been assembled to work land that no longer needed working, and an economy that turned to visitors because there was nothing else to turn to. Sugar made the Kingdom rich, the immigration made it plural, the strikes made it democratic and the collapse made it dependent, and the four movements are one story.

The renaissance

Kamehameha VI acceded in 1962 and reigned for fifty-two years, and his reign contains the whole of the Hawaiian renaissance.

It began with a canoe. In 1976 a double-hulled voyaging canoe sailed from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti without instruments, navigated by Kaleo Hoʻokano from a body of knowledge that had very nearly been lost, and returned. What that voyage did was not primarily cultural. It reconnected the Kingdom to the rest of Polynesia, and it turned a country that had spent eighty years facing east towards the Realm into one that also faces west. Hoʻokano taught two generations of navigators, was buried with a state funeral in 2019, and is the nearest thing the modern Kingdom has to a secular saint.

The language followed, then the hālau, then the reconstruction of religious practice, then the constitutional convention of 1978. The convention abolished the old House of Nobles, chiefly and appointed, and replaced it with the elected island chamber, the Hale o nā Mokupuni. It confined the Council of Aliʻi to succession and to the Crown trust, which was the price of keeping it at all. Trading an aristocratic upper house for a territorial one is the cleverest thing the renaissance did and the least remarked upon.

The King put the Crown behind all of it: he sailed on the canoe, he spoke Hawaiian in the legislature as a matter of routine rather than of ceremony, and he opened ʻIolani to the public. He is the most loved sovereign in the Kingdom’s modern history and he was a hard act to follow.

The Waters Case

In 1994 the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi held, in the case universally known as the Waters Case, that the land clause of Article IV of the Treaty extends to water, and that the great plantation irrigation ditches had been diverting streams in breach of it for a century. The judgment returned the water to the streams and returned the Kingdom’s water law to a public-trust footing from which it has not moved since.

It is the most consequential act of interpretation in the Kingdom’s history, and it is the model for everything since. Where an instrument cannot be amended, the only way it can be made to answer a question it never contemplated is for a court to read it again.

The present reign

Kamehameha VI and his Queen had no son. In 2004 they took a boy of a year old by hānai from a cousin’s family, in an adoption of entirely ordinary Hawaiian character and entirely ordinary Hawaiian legitimacy, and the Council of Aliʻi confirmed him without difficulty. Mainland commentary at the time did not understand what had happened and mainland commentary has not improved.

In 2014 the King’s aircraft was lost between the islands in bad weather, killing him and two of his household. His son acceded at eleven years old as Kamehameha VII.

The Council of Aliʻi governed as a collective regency for seven years. There was no single regent, by deliberate design, precisely so that no one family could capture the boy. It made the regency slow, cautious and consensual, and it worked. The King came of age in 2021 at eighteen, the majority the Kingdom’s law fixes for a sovereign, and he has reigned personally since.

The Lahaina fire of 2023 took about a hundred lives and most of the Kingdom’s old royal capital. The inquiry found that the water which might have fought it had been argued over for a century and was not where it was needed, which is the Waters Case’s unfinished business arriving as a catastrophe. The water rights were settled by statute in 2025 and about half the town is rebuilt, under a residency condition that has kept most of the land in Maui hands.

In 2027 a remark of the King’s, quoted at second hand by his estranged sister and never substantiated or denied, was published in Honolulu. Its substance was that the Kingdom had never once been asked what it wanted about the fleet’s return. His approval rose twenty points in a month.

Geography

The Kingdom consists of eight islands at the northern apex of the Polynesian triangle, some two thousand miles from the nearest continental land and about five thousand miles from the Realm’s capital. Its land area is about 28,000 square kilometres. The ocean it administers is about two and a half million.

The islands are the exposed peaks of a volcanic chain built by a stationary mantle plume over which the Pacific plate has been travelling north-west for seventy million years, so that the archipelago is an age sequence: Kauaʻi at the north-west end is about five million years old and deeply eroded, Hawaiʻi island at the south-east end is under a million and still growing. Kīlauea has been in near-continuous eruption for most of the last half-century, has taken towns, and is the reason Hawaiian planning law treats lava hazard zones as a category of land tenure rather than as a species of insurance risk.

Every island is a windward side and a leeward side, and the difference between them is total. The north-eastern slopes take the trade winds and the rain, in places more than ten metres of it a year; the south-western slopes are dry, and in the last two decades increasingly dry. The Kingdom’s towns, its water, its agriculture, its fires and a good deal of its politics follow that line.

The archipelago carries a very high proportion of species found nowhere else and has lost a very high proportion of them. The forest birds of the high islands are the Kingdom’s clearest conservation failure and the fencing, predator control and translocation programmes of the last thirty years are its clearest conservation success.

The north-western islands, uninhabited and stretching fifteen hundred kilometres beyond Kauaʻi, are a marine reserve jointly managed by the Kingdom and the Realm, closed to fishing and to almost everyone.

The land of the Realm’s national parks in the islands, Haleakalā on Maui and Hawaiʻi Volcanoes on Hawaiʻi island, was ceded to the Realm by the Kingdom under the Treaty, and the parks are the Realm’s.

Climate and the three emergencies

The Kingdom’s climate politics is not principally about sea level, although the sea is rising and the low coasts will be lost. Sea level is the slow problem and the Kingdom has fifty years to think about it. The urgent problems are three, and they arrive on a human timescale.

The first is the reef. Bleaching events have come in 2015, 2019 and 2024, each worse than the last, and the reefs that protect the shorelines, feed the near-shore fishery and carry a large part of the visitor economy are in measurable decline. The Kingdom has restricted sunscreen, banned several kinds of near-shore anchoring and funded the largest coral restoration programme in the Pacific, and none of it touches the cause.

The second is water. Oʻahu draws its aquifer down faster than it recharges, and the leeward slopes of Maui and Hawaiʻi island are drying measurably decade on decade. The Waters Case and the statute that followed Lahaina have given the Kingdom the best water law in the Realm and no more water than it had before.

The third is fire. The abandoned plantation land grew into non-native grasses that cure to tinder in the dry season, and the archipelago has burned badly three times in fifteen years, most catastrophically at Lahaina. The Kingdom is very good at the emergency and much weaker at the prevention, which is the standing criticism of its environmental administration and is fair.

The Treaty of Honolulu

The Treaty is eleven articles long and it is not a long document. Its brevity is the reason it has survived, and its brevity is also the Kingdom’s central problem.

Article I recites the accession. Article II keeps the Hawaiian Crown distinct from the Realm’s and vests it in the Hawaiian sovereign alone; every other feature of the Kingdom’s constitutional position is downstream of it, including the absence of a federal officer, the Kingdom’s own fount of honour, and the fact that the King of Hawaiʻi is the Crown in right of Hawaiʻi and has nobody to represent him. Article III preserves the legislature. Article IV deals with land and with the Crown trust, and is the article that most modern litigation is really about. Articles V and VI preserve the courts and the language. Article VII gives defence and foreign affairs to the Realm, together with the use of Hawaiian land for defence, and is the one article on which the Kingdom gave ground. Articles VIII to X deal with subjecthood, revenue and honours. Article XI provides that nothing in the Treaty may be repealed, amended or suspended by either party.

No amendment has ever been made, because no amendment can be. No attempt has ever been made either, by either parliament at any time since 1898, and Hawaiian constitutional lawyers point to the absence of any attempt as the strongest available evidence of how settled the thing is. A polity may abandon its Crown by a referendum of its own and an Act of Parliament, and on paper the Kingdom may do the same, but whether those two steps could overcome Article XI, which forbids repeal by either party, has never been tested and is unsettled.

This leaves the Kingdom governed still by eleven articles drafted for a small agricultural monarchy of a hundred and fifty thousand people. The strain shows most clearly in what the Treaty never contemplated: it did not contemplate a trust worth billions, an economy of ten million visitors a year, a two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone, a health service, an environmental law, or a submarine cable. The revenue article in particular reads like a document from another world, because it is one.

The consequence is that the only moving part in the Kingdom’s constitution is interpretation. A court reads eleven nineteenth-century articles again and finds that they answer a question about water, or about a landing site, or about who may buy a house. That is what the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi has done since 1898 and it is the whole mechanism by which the Kingdom has remained governable. The division of labour is exact: reading the Treaty inside Hawaiian law, as in the Waters Case, belongs to the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi, while a dispute between the Kingdom and the Realm arising under the Treaty goes to the Royal American Supreme Court in its original jurisdiction.

Constitutional system

The King

The sovereign is Kamehameha VII, born Keawe Kalanikapu in 2003, taken by hānai in 2004, acceded in 2014 and of age since 2021.

He is in the ordinary run of business a constitutional monarch of the usual kind: he gives assent to the ʻAhaʻōlelo’s bills on the Kuhina Nui’s advice, the Kuhina Nui governs, and he does not speak on contested questions. The honours of the Kingdom are the exception, being in his personal gift. He is in one respect unlike any other head of state in the Realm, because he is trustee of the Crown lands, which are about a third of the Kingdom. That is not a ceremonial trusteeship. His signature is required on the disposition of trust land, and in a small archipelago where land is the scarce factor in every economic question, his signature on a lease is worth more than most legislation.

He retains a genuine appointment power over the Kuhina Nui, which is discussed below, and the reserve powers common to the Realm’s heads of state. He is answerable to the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi in his capacity as trustee, which was established by litigation in the 2000s and is the single largest legal constraint on a Hawaiian monarch.

His accession followed the Hawaiian form. The Council of Aliʻi proclaimed him within hours of his father’s death. The investiture at ʻIolani came months later: the chiefly genealogies chanted in full, the feather cloak and helmet, a service in the cathedral afterwards. No crown is placed on a Hawaiian sovereign’s head. The European crowns Kalākaua ordered in 1883 exist, are displayed, and have not been used since. A Hawaiian sovereign swears an oath before the ʻAhaʻōlelo to maintain the Constitution of the Kingdom, which is a condition on exercising the office and confers nothing, the office having passed at the death; he swears no oath of allegiance to the American Crown.

He was schooled in the islands, took a degree on the mainland and served a short attachment with the Royal American Navy, which is the standard formation for a constituent royal and shows in the ease with which he moves between the two worlds. He is the first Hawaiian sovereign of the social media age, relaxed in public, occasionally more relaxed than the Council would prefer, and genuinely popular with people under forty in a way no Hawaiian monarch has been. He surfs, which does him no harm at all.

His household is small, Hawaiian and mostly young: a private secretary in her thirties, a chief steward, a chaplain and a handful of others, almost all appointed since 2021. He cleared out the officials the regency had left him, and the Council noticed. The Crown is funded by a civil list voted by the ʻAhaʻōlelo together with a contribution from the Realm for duties he performs at the Realm’s request, an arrangement which gives New Westminster a small handle on the Hawaiian Crown and which the Kingdom dislikes on principle and has never troubled to change.

He is unmarried, and the country talks about very little else. There is no confirmed heir. The succession rule is that the sovereign names an heir who is then confirmed by the Council of Aliʻi, and the Council has confirmed nobody since 2014. Two collateral claims exist and are pressed by people rather than by claimants. The King’s elder sister, the late King’s daughter by blood, removed herself from the question by leaving the Kingdom altogether some years ago; the estrangement is private, universally known and never explained.

The constitutional edge to the marriage question is not the obvious one. Nobody doubts the King’s own title. What is doubted is whether a hānai child of his would inherit, which is a question the Council has never had to answer and does not wish to. The King is attached to a Hawaiian woman of no chiefly descent at all, which the Council would have to swallow and the country would not mind in the least.

The Kuhina Nui

The head of government is the Kuhina Nui, an office of the old Kingdom retained with its old shape: the sovereign chooses and the Hale o nā Makaʻāinana confirms. It is not the parliamentary premiership of the other polities, in which the head of state appoints whoever already commands the chamber. The King has a real choice, constrained by the need to find somebody the chamber will confirm, and every Kuhina Nui is therefore in some part the King’s creature.

The incumbent is Leialaʻohe Kapule KC, appointed in 2021 in the King’s first substantial exercise of the prerogative after his majority. She had spent fifteen years at the bar suing the Crown trust and was not the largest party’s candidate, and the appointment surprised everybody including her. She has governed since with the trust rather than against it, which her former clients have not forgiven.

The Kuhina Nui appoints a cabinet from the chamber, is answerable to it, and may be removed by it. She holds the portfolios of the trust relationship and of Realm relations herself, which is conventional. Her government holds forty-two of the seventy-six seats, won at the general election of 2027.

The relationship between this King and this Kuhina Nui is an alliance nobody predicted. He appointed her, she has defended him in the chamber when defending him was constitutionally daring, and the two of them have more in common in their instincts about the trust, the law and the long view than either has with the chamber. The Council of Aliʻi watches the closeness with real unease, on the correct ground that a Crown and a Cabinet in agreement leave very little for anybody else to do.

The ʻAhaʻōlelo o ke Aupuni

The legislature is bicameral and sits at Honolulu, in Hawaiian and in English without translation as a matter of course.

The Hale o nā Makaʻāinana, the house of the commoners, has seventy-six members elected from single-member districts by first past the post on the Realm’s model. It is the confidence chamber. The electoral system is not well suited to the country: it over-rewards Labour in the Honolulu seats and the Conservatives on the outer islands, buries the Greens outside their strongholds, and satisfies nobody, and it survives because changing it would require a government with a majority to give up part of the majority the system gave it.

The Hale o nā Mokupuni, the house of the islands, has thirty seats apportioned by island: Oʻahu six, Hawaiʻi five, Maui five, Kauaʻi four, Molokaʻi three, Lānaʻi three, Niʻihau two and Kahoʻolawe two. The weighting is severe and deliberate. Oʻahu holds about seventy per cent of the population and a fifth of the chamber, which the outer islands describe as the whole point and Oʻahu describes as its standing grievance. The chamber cannot bring down a government and can delay, amend and in practice kill anything touching land, water or planning, which is most of what the Kingdom argues about.

Kahoʻolawe’s two seats are left empty. The island has no residents because the Navy has been using it as a range since 1941. The 1978 convention gave it a delegation anyway and the chamber has never filled the seats, and two chairs stand vacant at every sitting for as long as the range operates. It is the most effective piece of political theatre in the Kingdom and it has outlasted eleven governments.

Debate is conducted in whichever language a member prefers. A member who cannot follow Hawaiian is at a disadvantage that nobody is required to remedy.

The Council of Aliʻi

The Council of Aliʻi consists of the heads of the forty recognised chiefly families. It confirms the succession and supervises the Crown trust, and it has no legislative function whatever. The confinement was imposed by the 1978 convention and was the price of the Council surviving the abolition of the House of Nobles.

In form it is the forty family heads. In practice it is a standing office in Honolulu run by a permanent secretary who has served four chairs and knows more about the trust than anybody alive, and the Council’s real weight is his weight. It met as a collective regency from 2014 to 2021 and governed the Crown’s affairs creditably for seven years, and the habits of that period have not entirely dispersed.

The Kingdom in the federation

There is no Governor, no Lieutenant-Governor and no Crown representative of any description in the Kingdom. The King of Hawaiʻi is the Crown in right of Hawaiʻi and there is nobody for anybody to represent. The Realm’s business is transacted through a Resident Commissioner, who is a civil servant of the Realm’s government, holds no part in the Kingdom’s constitution, sits in no Hawaiian institution and attends the Hawaiian court by invitation.

The Kingdom returns three members to the House of Commons, elected on the Realm’s ordinary franchise. Three is the floor every polity is guaranteed, and a little more than population alone would give. The Realm treats the delegation as a small and distant one. Hawaiians treat it as an embassy, split their tickets between the Hawaiian and the Realm ballots at a rate found nowhere else in the Realm, and vote at Realm elections for whoever will protect the Kingdom rather than for whoever they voted for at home.

The Kingdom keeps a permanent presence in New Westminster, but not a governmental one. It is a royal office, part of the King’s household, on the fine and deliberate distinction that the Crown may be represented where a polity may not. The arrangement has held for a century and nobody has tested it.

When the Realm’s sovereign visits Honolulu, he takes the lower seat at ʻIolani. The practice is not written anywhere, costs the Realm nothing and means a great deal in the Kingdom.

Islands and local government

The Kingdom is governed below the national level by eight island councils and by nothing beneath them. The councils have wide powers over planning, water, roads, refuse and schools. Molokaʻi’s council of nine runs an island of seven thousand people and Oʻahu’s runs a city of a million, under the same statute, which produces predictable results.

Oʻahu holds the capital, the port, the airport, the university, the defence estate and about seventy per cent of the population. Honolulu is a capital, a commercial harbour and a resort at once: a government quarter around ʻIolani, the working docks and the naval installations to the west, Waikīkī to the east, and a dense tower-built residential city between them that nobody planned and everybody lives in.

Hawaiʻi island is twice the land of everywhere else put together and holds a fraction of the people. Hilo on the wet side is the Kingdom’s second city and its cultural capital; Kona on the dry side is the resort coast; between them lie ranch country, forest, lava and the mountain. It is the island where the Kingdom’s growth is now happening, as Oʻahu prices people out.

Maui is the island that burned. It carries the second-largest visitor economy, the hardest housing market and the driest leeward slopes, and the rebuilding of Lahaina is the Kingdom’s largest public undertaking and its bitterest argument.

Kauaʻi has made restraint into policy: the strictest building limits in the Kingdom, the lowest visitor numbers by deliberate choice, the strongest conservation law, and a settled decision not to become Maui. It is the Greens’ safest ground anywhere.

Molokaʻi has no resorts and no traffic lights, seven thousand people, the highest proportion of Hawaiian ancestry and Hawaiian speakers of any island, and a political culture of refusal that is two generations old. The Kingdom treats it as a conscience and funds it as an afterthought.

Lānaʻi was a single-crop island and then a single-owner one. It was taken back into the Crown trust in the 2000s and is being deliberately redeveloped as a test of what the Kingdom can do where it controls everything: housing first, water first, resort last. It is watched closely and it is not yet proved.

Niʻihau is trust land, closed, and Hawaiian-speaking to a degree found nowhere else. The argument now is whether closure has preserved the island or trapped it. Its residents are themselves divided and the Council will not touch it.

Kahoʻolawe has no residents, two empty seats and an unexploded ordnance problem that will outlast everybody now living.

Law and the courts

The Kingdom has its own courts, its own bar and its own law, and appeal from the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi lies to the Realm’s highest court on Charter questions alone. The narrowness of that appeal is entrenched by the Treaty and policed with some ferocity. A dispute between the Kingdom and the Realm arising under the Treaty itself does not come up by appeal at all: it is brought at first instance in the Royal American Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, while the reading of the Treaty inside Hawaiian law remains with the Kingdom’s own Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has seven justices, appointed by the King on the Kuhina Nui’s advice, removable only by address of both chambers, and all required to be qualified in Hawaiian law and in the Hawaiian language. The Realm has no part in the appointments at any stage, which is Article II doing its work.

Because the Treaty cannot be amended, the Court’s interpretive power is the Kingdom’s only constitutional flexibility, and the Court is therefore more powerful than any other court in the Realm. The generation that decided the Waters Case understood this and used it. That generation has now retired. The present bench reads the Treaty narrowly, declines to extend Article IV, and has twice in three years refused to hear cases its predecessors would have taken, to the fury of the land organisations and the considerable relief of the government.

The consequence is that the only moving part has stopped moving, and the pressure has gone into the ʻAhaʻōlelo, which cannot cope with it. A legislature that spent a century letting a court do its constitutional work now has to legislate in the Treaty’s silences itself, and it is visibly out of practice. The housing bills of the last two sessions are the evidence: three attempts, two withdrawn, one passed and immediately challenged.

The criminal law is substantially the Realm’s. What is Hawaiian is everything around sentencing: family conferencing as a matter of routine, hālau and churches accepted as sureties, and a bench that knows the islands and the families in a way no mainland court could. The Kingdom’s own police force is sworn to the King, trained in the Kingdom and required to be competent in Hawaiian; the Royal American Constabulary has no jurisdiction in the islands without the Kingdom’s consent, which it asks for and generally receives.

Land law is where the Kingdom is genuinely distinctive. The surviving kuleana freeholds carry rights of access, water and gathering across land that has long since passed into other hands, and they are enforceable, and every developer in the Kingdom has to deal with them. Ancestral remains stop work wherever they are found, and the law has never been weakened.

There is no descent-based legal category in Hawaiian law. The Kingdom refused one, deliberately, on the ground that the subjects of a Hawaiian kingdom are Hawaiian: rights attach to residence and to the land itself, never to blood. The decision was settled between the wars after two decades of litigation and legislation, and it is the most unusual thing about the Kingdom’s public law. Hawaiians argue bitterly about whether it was generosity or surrender.

Subjecthood follows from the Treaty and follows in one direction only. Article VIII made Hawaiian subjects subjects of the Realm and said nothing whatever about the reverse, with the consequence that any subject of the Realm may settle in the Kingdom at will and acquire the Hawaiian franchise by residence. That silence is the largest practical gap in the Treaty and it is the reason every Hawaiian government since the 1970s has legislated about land rather than about arrival: land law is the only lever the Kingdom actually holds.

Mauna Kea

The summit of Mauna Kea is trust land, is the best site for optical astronomy in the northern hemisphere, and is sacred. The three facts have been in collision since the first observatory was built in the 1960s, and the Kingdom settled the collision in the 1990s in a way that has held.

The settlement capped the number of instruments permitted on the mountain, constituted a board with a Hawaiian majority holding an absolute power to refuse any new construction, required the decommissioning and removal of the oldest telescopes on a schedule, and directed a share of the observatory rents to the trust’s language and education programmes. The astronomers thought it intolerable at the time and three consortia threatened to leave. None did.

It is now the arrangement the Kingdom cites whenever anything else is in dispute, because it did three things at once that are usually held to be incompatible: it kept a world-class scientific facility, it gave Hawaiians a real and exercisable veto rather than a consultative role, and it has produced no occupation, no blockade and no litigation in thirty years. The land organisations regard it as proof that the Kingdom can do this properly when it chooses to, and they raise it most often when arguing that the Kingdom is not choosing to somewhere else.

The Crown lands

About a third of the Kingdom’s land is held by the Crown in trust. No other polity Crown holds so large a share of its own territory, and the trust is the reason the Hawaiian Crown is a working institution rather than a ceremonial one.

The trust was assembled in two stages. The first was the long partial reversal of the Māhele across the second half of the nineteenth century. The second was the restoration settlement of 1900, which merged Pauahi’s bequest, the great landed charitable estate left for the education of Hawaiian children, into the Crown trust. The merger is why the Crown holds what it holds, and it is why the trust’s schools are the best in the islands and are free.

The estate is administered by the Papa Waiwai, a professional board of eight appointed by the King with the Council’s concurrence, which runs the land day to day: agricultural tenancies, commercial leases, the resort ground rents, the cable landing sites, the observatory lease on Mauna Kea and the defence estate. The King is trustee in law, signs what matters, and is answerable to the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi for the discharge of the trust.

The income goes to the Kingdom’s general revenue, not to a defined beneficiary class. This follows from the absence of any descent category and it is the trust’s most contested feature: a bequest made for Hawaiian children now funds a health board, a school system and a ferry. It is also why Hawaiian taxes are low, and why the argument about who the trust is for has never once been settled.

A sovereign fund built from lease income since the 1970s now stands large enough to carry the Kingdom’s public spending through a bad decade. Prudence in the management of the trust is the one part of Hawaiian public administration nobody argues about.

The trust’s central difficulty is that it is both the Kingdom’s landlord and the Kingdom’s exchequer. It holds a great deal of developable land in a country that has run out of land, and releasing it would relieve the housing crisis and reduce the revenue that pays for the state. No trustee has found a way through this, and the present one is being blamed for it in a manner no Hawaiian sovereign has been blamed for anything in living memory.

Economy

The Kingdom’s economy is visitors and the trust, with a service economy attached.

About ten million visitors a year come to a country of 1.6 million people, roughly seven per resident, and the growth has flattened for the first time in forty years as the cost of crossing the ocean has risen. There is no cap on visitor numbers and no substantial visitor levy, which distinguishes the Kingdom from every comparable island economy and requires explaining. The explanation is the trust: Crown revenue covered the budget, so no Hawaiian government ever had to pick a fight with the largest employer in the country, and the low-tax settlement that resulted is a rentier’s luxury which has deprived the Kingdom of precisely the policy instruments it now needs. The Greens have made the levy their central demand and have not yet won the argument.

Crown trust income from ground rents, agricultural tenancies, the defence estate and the cable landings is over a third of Hawaiian public spending.

Defence spending by the Realm is the second-largest employer after the visitor economy and is about to become considerably larger.

Submarine cables are the Kingdom’s quiet new money. Every trans-Pacific cable comes ashore in the islands, the data centres followed the cables, and the trust owns the landing sites and lets them. It is the fastest-growing part of the economy and almost nobody outside the Kingdom knows it exists.

Agriculture has been rebuilt deliberately since the 1990s around a statutory food-security programme: domestic production targets, trust land let cheaply to growers who meet them, restored loko iʻa fishponds, taro in the reflooded loʻi, coffee on the Kona slopes, cattle on the Hawaiʻi island ranches and a substantial seed-crop industry on Kauaʻi and Molokaʻi that the Greens dislike. Imports have fallen from about ninety per cent of food to about sixty. It has been slow and expensive and it is one of the Kingdom’s real achievements.

Research is a genuine sector: the observatories on Mauna Kea, the ocean institutes, the volcano institute and the language institute, all founded or refounded in the renaissance and all reporting to the Kingdom rather than to the Realm.

Taxes are levied by both governments. The Realm taxes as it does everywhere and the Kingdom adds a modest surcharge on income and land. Hawaiian public finance looks healthy and is structurally fragile, because the trust is doing work that a tax base would ordinarily do.

The cost of living is the highest in the Realm. Wages are compressed and land is not, and the sharpest inequality in the Kingdom is geographic rather than social: two Hawaiians on the same salary live entirely different lives depending on which island they are on.

Transport and infrastructure

Everything between the islands goes by air or by sea and there is no third option. Kalākaua International at Honolulu is the Kingdom’s gateway and its busiest building, with a state-backed Hawaiian carrier flying the Pacific routes the Realm’s airlines will not fly, which is a national institution and loses money with great regularity. Seven smaller fields serve the other islands, and the inter-island network carries more flights per head of population than anywhere in the Realm. Light aircraft and small charter operators remain a part of ordinary island life in a way outsiders find surprising, and inter-island flight carries an edge in Hawaiʻi that nothing in the Realm’s own experience explains.

A publicly owned inter-island ferry was restored in the 2010s after decades of absence. It is slow and cheap and it has been a genuine equaliser for the small islands. The airlines fought it and lost.

Freight comes by barge from Honolulu, which means the outer islands pay Honolulu prices plus freight for everything.

Power is renewable and interconnected, or very nearly. A statutory target of complete renewable supply by 2030 will be roughly met, on solar, wind, geothermal from Hawaiʻi island and storage, over a seabed cable network laid island to island through the 2020s. It is one of the few things every party agrees went well.

Water law is the oldest and best in the Realm and its administration is genuinely competent, which follows directly from the Waters Case and from the statutory settlement that followed the Lahaina fire. Not everything in the Kingdom is a crisis.

Health is the Realm’s National Health Service, funded federally and administered by a Hawaiian board answerable to the ʻAhaʻōlelo. It works well on Oʻahu and thinly everywhere else, and the small-island air ambulance is the service by which every Hawaiian judges the whole of it.

Demographics

The Kingdom’s population is about 1.6 million and growing slowly.

Native Hawaiian descent is the largest single ancestry at around a third, with Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean and mainland-American populations making up the remainder, and a rate of mixed ancestry approaching half the whole. Because the law recognises no descent category, these are census answers rather than legal facts, and Hawaiians are considerably less precise about them than the Realm’s statisticians would like.

There is no Hawaiian majority and there has not been one for a century, which is a fact the Kingdom’s institutions conceal: a country with a Hawaiian Crown, a Hawaiian legislature, a Hawaiian public language and a Hawaiian civil service feels more Hawaiian than its census does.

A serious outflow to the mainland in the 1990s and 2000s has been stemmed rather than reversed. It was stemmed by the residence rules, by the restriction on non-resident purchase, and by a deliberate programme of return operated through the trust. The diaspora remains large, several hundred thousand, concentrated in California and the Pacific Northwest, running hālau and canoe clubs and language classes, devoted, vocal, and entirely without a vote in the Kingdom. The franchise question is raised about once a decade and is refused each time.

The Kingdom cannot control who arrives. Freedom of movement within the Realm is a Charter right that the Treaty does not touch, so any subject of the Realm may move to the islands at will. Two generations of Hawaiian politicians promised to do something about this and the constitutional answer was the same every time, and the honest parties now campaign on housing rather than on arrival.

Language and education

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and English are both official and both are used. The legislature debates in Hawaiian as a matter of course, the courts sit in it, the statute book is published in it, and roughly a third of the Kingdom speaks it well.

That position is recent and it was not inevitable. The Treaty protected the language absolutely and provided not a penny to teach it, and the plantation economy and a century of English-medium schooling very nearly finished it anyway. The renaissance rescued it, and the instrument was the school. Every school in the Kingdom now teaches in both languages, and a parallel immersion stream, teaching entirely in Hawaiian, takes about a third of all pupils. The stream is oversubscribed on every island and short of teachers on every island, and that shortage is the Kingdom’s most persistent public-service failure. It has been named in every education budget for thirty years.

There is a literature in both languages and the Hawaiian one is older. The Hawaiian-language newspaper tradition runs unbroken from the 1830s, never interrupted because the Kingdom was never interrupted, and the resulting archive is the largest body of indigenous-language print in the world. It is fully digitised, fully searchable, and is the reason Hawaiian historiography can argue from Hawaiian sources rather than about them.

Schooling is otherwise unremarkable and well funded, on the ordinary Realm pattern of free universal provision to eighteen, with the Crown trust’s own schools free at the point of use and academically the best in the islands. Their admission is open, because it has to be: the trust’s endowment came from a bequest made for the education of Hawaiian children, and in a Kingdom which recognises no descent category a school cannot select on descent. The way the trust discharges Pauahi’s intention without a blood rule, by siting its schools where Hawaiian children live and by carrying the boarding costs of children from the small islands, is either an elegant solution or an evasion, and the argument has run since the merger of 1900.

The Royal University of Hawaiʻi teaches in both languages across campuses on four islands and is strong in the disciplines the archipelago hands it: oceanography, volcanology, astronomy, tropical agriculture, Pacific history and the Hawaiian language itself. Alongside it sit separately funded national institutes for the ocean, the volcano and the language, all founded or refounded in the renaissance, all reporting to the Kingdom rather than to the Realm, and all of them among the better arguments that the Kingdom’s institutions are real.

Society and culture

Religion

The Kingdom is broadly Christian with a Hawaiian substrate, and no church is established. The 1852 guarantee of conscience was taken seriously and has held. There are two cathedrals in Honolulu, Anglican and Catholic, both royal in their associations and neither established; the King attends both and belongs formally to neither. Congregationalists are the most numerous denomination, and the Latter-day Saint and Buddhist populations brought by the plantation migrations are large and long-settled.

Hawaiian religious practice survives openly alongside all of this. What the renaissance produced was not a revived congregation but a reconstructed priesthood: trained orders with a course of study and a recognised standing, so that the practitioner who blesses a building or a canoe or a landing is qualified in a formal sense. It was controversial among Christians when it was done and it has become entirely ordinary. Most Hawaiians who take part in both see nothing requiring reconciliation, and the Crown participates in both without embarrassment.

Hula and music

Hula was never banned in Hawaiʻi and never had to be rescued. The missionary century did it damage and the Crown protected it, and the line of transmission through the hālau has not been broken. Royal patronage is real rather than nostalgic, the competitive season is followed nationally, and the discipline is taught and examined with the seriousness a conservatory gives to anything else.

Hawaiian music went round the world and came back misunderstood. The steel guitar, a Hawaiian invention, became a signifier of the tropical and the trivial in half the world’s popular music, and Hawaiian musicians have spent a century reclaiming an instrument everybody else thinks is a joke. Beneath the export there is a continuous art-song tradition in Hawaiian dating from Kalākaua’s time, with new composition every year and a Crown that composes: Kamehameha VI wrote two of the standards. Māhealani Lindsey, now in her eighties, took Liliʻuokalani’s repertoire back into the concert hall and has written in Hawaiian for fifty years, and is the Hawaiian the rest of the Realm is most likely to have heard of.

Sport

Heʻe nalu, surfing, is the national sport and was an aliʻi discipline before it was anything else. It never stopped being one. The world’s professional circuit is the Kingdom’s circuit, the North Shore winter is the season, and the Kingdom governs the world federations for surfing and for outrigger paddling and competes as itself in those codes. In everything else Hawaiians compete for the Realm, and mind considerably less than outsiders expect.

The Realm’s own game took root through the schools, and the Kingdom exports players to mainland football out of all proportion to its size, which is a source of pride and of a persistent unease about what the islands send away.

The press

The Kingdom has two daily newspapers, one in English and one in Hawaiian, and they serve two audiences rather than one audience twice. The English paper is the larger by a long way, carries the commercial and sporting life of the islands, and is read by everybody. The Hawaiian paper is small, very old, descends directly from the nineteenth-century press, and is the paper of record for anything constitutional: a Supreme Court judgment, a Council of Aliʻi proceeding or a trust disposition is reported there first and at length, and the English paper follows the next day having translated it.

The Kingdom funds its own public broadcaster, which carries the ʻAhaʻōlelo live in both languages and produces the Kingdom’s television in Hawaiian. The Realm’s broadcaster is present, is watched, and is secondary. Outer-island coverage is thinner than anybody defends.

The calendar

The Hawaiian year comes first and the Realm’s is fitted around it. Kamehameha Day on 11 June, Liliʻuokalani Day in September, Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea on 31 July, Unification Day, the anniversary of Kamehameha I’s unification of the islands in 1810, and the opening of Makahiki are the fixed points; Charter Day and the Realm’s days are observed afterwards.

Makahiki, the old four-month season of peace, tribute and games, has been restored as a genuine public institution rather than a commemoration. The legislature rises for it, the courts sit short, and competition in the traditional games is national. No other polity of the Realm requires the federal government to accommodate a four-month seasonal calendar, and the federal government does.

The anniversary of the attack in December is kept as a Realm occasion held in a Hawaiian city: the Realm’s memorial, the Realm’s ceremony, the Realm’s dead, and a Hawaiian city that provides the setting and is thanked for it. Hawaiians attend, and the awkwardness is never quite absent.

Food, and the ordinary difficulties

Kalo is at the centre of the Hawaiian table and is protected in law and in water rights, and everything the plantations brought is arranged around it: rice, saimin, malasadas, kimchi, the lūʻau. The plate is the Kingdom’s demographic history served hot.

The Kingdom has ordinary problems of a kind its constitutional distinction does nothing to relieve. Several thousand people live outside on Oʻahu, disproportionately Hawaiian, in the richest-looking polity of the Realm. Encampments, housing-first and enforcement have each been tried in turn and the beaches and the parks are where the argument is conducted. The commute from the west side of Oʻahu runs to an hour and a half each way, two incomes make one rent, and three generations live in houses built for one. The ordinary Hawaiian grievance is not constitutional at all.

Māhū, the Hawaiian third-gender tradition, was genuinely broken by the missionary century and was deliberately recovered from the 1970s by the same generation that recovered the language and the canoes. The recovery is recent enough that its leaders are still alive, and māhū standing in the hālau and in teaching is now a settled fact of Hawaiian life.

There is still a chiefly class, of about forty recognised families whose descent is recorded and acknowledged. It carries no legal privilege beyond membership of the Council of Aliʻi. What it carries instead is social weight, marriage networks, land and board seats, which in a country of 1.6 million people is a great deal. A handful of these families also hold peerages of the Realm granted in the twentieth century, an arrangement that sits badly with a chiefly order which predates the Realm and does not propose to be ranked beneath it.

Defence and the Realm

Defence is the Realm’s under Article VII, and the Kingdom has no forces of its own beyond the ceremonial. What it has instead are Hawaiian formations in the Realm’s services: the Kamehameha Regiment of the Royal American Army, recruited across all eight islands with a company traditionally found by each and named for the founder rather than for any community, which is deliberate; a fast-jet squadron of the Royal American Air Force whose crews are drawn heavily from Hawaiian families and whose aircraft are the loudest political object in the Kingdom; and the Royal Guard at ʻIolani. All three are stationed on Oʻahu. Service is a Hawaiian tradition and a Hawaiian grievance at the same time, and the two have never been separable.

The Realm’s own establishment in the islands is the Honolulu anchorage and repair yards, an air station, an army garrison on Oʻahu and the range on Kahoʻolawe, all held under the single lease of 1946 which expires in 2045.

It is growing again for the first time since the war. The Realm’s last defence review provided for a permanent forward squadron at Honolulu, a substantially expanded repair yard and a submarine facility, on the reasoning that the Pacific balance has changed and that a fleet concentrated at San Diego is a fleet concentrated at one target. First steel was cut in 2026 and the first hulls are due in 2030.

The Kingdom is divided about this in a way that does not follow party lines at all. There is no clean split between a pro-defence party and an anti-defence one, because the same families who want the work remember 1941, and the argument runs through households rather than between them. The ports are for it, the outer islands carry the training areas and the overflights, and nobody has an easy position.

The decision has come to the Crown because it cannot go anywhere else. The 1946 lease does not cover the new works, and what the Realm has asked for is not a supplementary grant but a new instrument altogether, taking the defence estate out of the Crown trust and holding it on a different footing. Hawaiian lawyers regard that as an attempt to achieve by conveyance what Article XI forbids by amendment, and they may be right. A challenge on that ground, being a dispute between the Kingdom and the Realm under the Treaty, would be heard not in Honolulu but in the Royal American Supreme Court.

The King is trustee and the trustee must sign. He is known privately to be against it and is constitutionally unable to say so. He has neither signed nor refused since 2026.

Kahoʻolawe

Kahoʻolawe is the smallest of the eight main islands and it has not been inhabited since 1941. It was taken for a range under the Treaty’s defence article at the outbreak of the war, on the understanding that it would be returned, and it has been bombed and shelled continuously since 1941. It is the only island in the archipelago with no fresh water, which made it easy to take and has made it nearly impossible to argue for returning.

The land organisations have campaigned for its return since the 1970s, when the first landings were made by activists who were prosecuted for them. What they obtained was not the island but the seats: the constitutional convention of 1978 gave Kahoʻolawe a delegation of two in the island chamber, on the argument that an island under bombardment is still one of the eight. The chamber has never filled them. Two chairs stand empty at every sitting, are carried through the streets of Honolulu at Unification Day, and have outlasted eleven governments and two sovereigns. They constitute the most effective political object in the Kingdom, precisely because they cost nothing and cannot be answered.

The island’s lease runs with the rest of the defence estate to 2045 and the Realm wishes it confirmed in the new instrument. Anyone who signs that signs away the chairs, and everybody involved understands this, which is a considerable part of why nothing has been signed.

Foreign relations

Foreign affairs belong to the Realm and the Kingdom conducts a good deal of them anyway, in a space the Treaty never contemplated and the Realm has learned to tolerate.

Japan is the largest of these relationships and the most carefully handled. It is the Kingdom’s principal source of visitors and investment, the Japanese-Hawaiian community is the bridge, and the war is managed with great delicacy on both sides. Cultural agreements, sister-city protocols, university exchanges and royal visits amount in practice to a Hawaiian foreign policy, and everybody understands that this is what they are.

The Kingdom of the Philippines, sovereign and in personal union with the Realm since 1946, is family rather than diplomacy. The plantation migration never stopped, Filipino-Hawaiians are among the Kingdom’s largest communities, and the two kingdoms share a language of administration and a very great many families. Manila and Honolulu talk directly and constantly, and the Realm’s foreign ministry is informed afterwards.

Polynesia comes first in the Kingdom’s own reckoning, and it comes through the canoes. The voyaging federation that grew out of the 1976 voyage now links Hawaiʻi to Aotearoa, Tahiti, Rapa Nui, Samoa and Tonga in an institution that is cultural in its form and diplomatic in its effect. The Realm has never quite decided what to do about it and has settled on saying nothing.

Within the Realm, the polity Hawaiʻi actually deals with is California: the flights, the diaspora, the universities, the money and most of the arrivals. Hawaiian public life discusses California a great deal more than it discusses New Westminster.

Political tensions

The three parties. The Realm’s parties organise in the Kingdom under Hawaiian names, run Hawaiian campaigns and contest Hawaiian elections. The names are Hawaiian words with no accepted English rendering and nobody translates them, which is the point: a Hawaiian voter is choosing between Hawaiian ideas, and a correspondent from the mainland has to explain three words before explaining anything else. Labour and the Conservatives alternate; Alliance 90 and the Green Realm is a serious force in Hawaiʻi as it is nowhere else in the Realm, because land, water and reef are the whole argument here. The arrangement is convenient for the three Commons seats and corrosive to Hawaiian politics, and everybody says so and nobody changes it.

Housing is three fights at once and no government can take on more than one. The first is non-resident purchase, restricted since the 2000s but only over the trust’s former holdings and agricultural land, not the resort coasts, which is why the restriction stemmed the outflow without steadying the market. Extending it is the Greens’ principal demand. The second is the trust’s withheld acreage. The third is short-term letting, which has taken tens of thousands of homes out of the residential stock and which every island council has tried and failed to regulate. Each has its own lobby and its own litigation.

The land organisations are not a party and do not want to be one. They are charitable trusts, hālau, the homestead associations and one old federation founded in the renaissance which has now outlived three of its founders. Small budgets, long memories, and a record of winning things twenty years after appearing to lose them. With the Court gone cautious they have begun to say openly that litigation is closed to them, which is the sentence that precedes an occupation.

The sovereignty question barely exists, and its absence is the most interesting political fact about the Kingdom. Where the Crown, the language, the courts and the land all survived, the grievance that fuels sovereignty movements elsewhere never accumulated. What exists is a small and articulate intellectual current and a very large quantity of ordinary Hawaiian patriotism conducted comfortably inside the Realm.

The Crown itself is under a kind of pressure it has not faced before. A King who is trustee of a third of the country, who is blamed for the housing crisis in consequence, who must decide the defence question, who is popular because of a remark he never confirmed making, and who has no heir, is carrying more than the constitution intended any one person to carry.

Assessment

The Kingdom is usually described from outside as a survival: a monarchy kept on as a courtesy, a flag and a palace and a language preserved by a generous treaty. That description is wrong in the way that matters.

The Hawaiian Crown is not decoration. It holds a third of the land, which makes it the decisive actor in the economy of a place where land is the only scarce thing. It is the reason no federal officer exists in the Kingdom. It is a fount of honour in its own right. It appoints the head of government with a real choice, and it appoints the Supreme Court whose interpretive power is the Kingdom’s only constitutional flexibility. When the Realm’s own sovereign comes to Honolulu he takes the lower seat. A monarchy that works is the surprise of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and mainland visitors who see a young man on a surfboard and a palace full of tourists consistently fail to notice it.

The corresponding failure is a Hawaiian one and it is about fairness rather than about power. The Kingdom refused a descent-based legal category, deliberately, on the generous and defensible ground that the subjects of a Hawaiian kingdom are Hawaiian. In a country where land is everything and where land was taken unevenly in a single generation of the nineteenth century, a civic definition has allowed the consequences of the Māhele to run on untouched. The Kingdom tells itself that having no blood rule makes it fair. It makes it consistent, which is a different thing.

The deeper constitutional difficulty is that the Kingdom has run out of room. The Treaty did what it was written to do and it did it well, and it cannot be amended, and the court that made it answer new questions has stopped answering them. The questions now before it, which are land, arrival, the sea and the fleet, all sit in the Treaty’s silences, and the legislature that must now answer them has not had to legislate constitutionally in a century and shows it.

All of which converges, at present, on a single unsigned document. Whether a young trustee puts his name to a new defence instrument will decide the disposition of the Kingdom’s land, its relationship with the Realm, the future of Kahoʻolawe and the shape of its economy for the next half-century. That this should be true of one person is either the Kingdom’s greatest constitutional achievement or its most obvious structural flaw, and Hawaiians have not decided which.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag carries a union flag in the canton and eight horizontal stripes of white, red and blue, one for each island. It was adopted under Kamehameha I in about 1816, decades before the United Kingdom of America had any claim on the islands of any kind. Hawaiians hold, and say, that the canton commemorates a friendship the Kingdom chose rather than a sovereignty it received, and the distinction is pressed hard whenever a visitor gets it wrong. The Treaty could have altered the flag in 1898 and did not.

The arms are the nineteenth-century achievement of the Kalākaua period: the quartered shield with the puloʻuloʻu staffs, the puela banners, two chiefly supporters in feather cloaks and helmets, and the motto beneath. The restoration of 1900 did not alter it, on the reasoning that altering it would have conceded that something had ended.

The motto is Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono, the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness, spoken by Kamehameha III on 31 July 1843 when the islands were restored after the French seizure. A phrase coined at the lowering of a foreign flag has since been carried through an accession, a war and a dynastic restoration, and Hawaiians have meant something a little different by it each time.

The anthem is Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī, Kalākaua’s words to Berger’s tune. At any state occasion in the Kingdom it is played before the Realm’s. This is written into nobody’s protocol and has never once been departed from. Liliʻuokalani’s Aloha ʻOe is not an anthem and does more.

The Kingdom is a fount of honour in its own right, one of six polities that are, with Alaska and the four grand duchies. The Royal Order of Kamehameha and the Order of Kalākaua are in the King’s personal gift, conferred without the advice of the Kuhina Nui or of any minister of the Realm, and are worn in the Realm’s order of wear, though they confer no rank in its order of precedence. The Kingdom has its own Great Seal.

The royal mausoleum at Mauna ʻAla in Nuʻuanu holds both dynasties and the chiefs, and has been tended by the same family across generations. Kamehameha I is not there. Nobody knows where he is, which is exactly as it was intended.

Trivia

See also

• Daily life in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, the texture of the islands below the constitution
• The Royal American Navy, whose Pacific fleet left Honolulu in 1945 and is partly returning
• The Royal American Armed Forces, under whose establishment the Hawaiian formations serve
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the Realm’s founding instrument, which the Treaty of Honolulu sits beside rather than beneath
• Parliament, to which the Kingdom returns three members
• Elections and constituencies, for the Kingdom’s three Commons seats
• The Navajo Republic, the Realm’s other great constitutional exception
• The Free City of Philipsburg, a third exception on wholly different grounds
• The Empire of Japan, the state that struck Honolulu in 1941 and is now the Kingdom’s largest foreign relationship
• The Kingdom of the Philippines, the Pacific realm that shares the Realm’s King
• The Commonwealth of California, the polity Hawaiʻi actually deals with
• The Second Great War, the attack, the Pacific campaigns and the postwar settlement
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

Hawaiʻi · Kingdom · Constituent Monarchy · Polities · The Pacific · Crown Lands · Unresolved Questions