Liliʻuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the independent Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown in Honolulu on 17 January 1893 by a small committee of mostly American and European businessmen, acting with the connivance of the United States minister and under the protection of armed US sailors and Marines landed from the warship USS Boston. The Kanaka Maoli — the Native Hawaiian people — lost the sovereign government of their islands not to a popular uprising or a foreign war, but to a coup mounted by a settler oligarchy and made possible by the guns of a foreign navy. The United States Congress formally apologized for it a century later.
The wrong is best named plainly. Hawaii in 1893 was a recognized independent kingdom with treaties, embassies, and a century of statehood, ruled by a dynasty descended from the chiefs who had united the islands under Kamehameha I. Its monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, sought to restore to the crown and to her people the authority stripped away in 1887, when foreign businessmen had forced her brother King Kalākaua at gunpoint to sign the so-called Bayonet Constitution — a document that disenfranchised most Native Hawaiians and handed power to a wealthy, largely American settler class.
When the queen moved in January 1893 to promulgate a new constitution restoring the franchise and the powers of the throne, that settler class — its fortunes built on sugar, its eyes on annexation and the tariff-free American market — formed a “Committee of Safety” and declared the monarchy abolished. The decisive act was not theirs alone. US Minister John L. Stevens, openly sympathetic to annexation, ordered 162 sailors and Marines ashore from the USS Boston. They fired no shots, but their presence — positioned to overawe the queen’s small guard — made armed resistance hopeless.
Liliʻuokalani yielded under protest, surrendering not to the conspirators but, as she carefully stated, “to the superior force of the United States of America,” and appealing to that government to undo the wrong and restore her. It would not. President Cleveland’s own investigator found the overthrow illegal and unjust, but Congress recognized the settler regime, which became the Republic of Hawaii in 1894 and procured US annexation in 1898. The queen lived until 1917, her kingdom gone. The land, the government, and the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people were taken from them, and — as the 1993 Apology Resolution conceded — never lawfully given up.
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the twentieth and last Mughal emperor, reigned in Delhi from 1837 until 1857, but he ruled almost nothing: by the time he inherited the throne the Mughal Empire had shrunk to a pension, a palace, and a title the British East India Company allowed him to keep. When the Indian Rebellion of 1857 erupted, mutinous sepoys marched on Delhi and proclaimed the elderly poet-emperor the figurehead of a revolt he had not started and could not control. After the British recaptured the city in September 1857, they took Zafar at Humayun’s Tomb, shot his sons and a grandson, tried him for treason, and exiled him to Rangoon in British Burma, where he died in 1862. With his deposition the house of Timur and Babur, which had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent for more than three centuries, came to an end.
Zafar was eighty-two when he died in a foreign country, buried in an unmarked grave so that no shrine could form. He had been a calligrapher, a Sufi devotee, and one of the finest Urdu poets of his age, presiding over a literary court that included Mirza Ghalib and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq. He was not a soldier or a statesman, and the rebellion thrust on him a role he was unequipped to fill. His reign is remembered less for what he governed than for the manner of his fall and the violence of the suppression that ended his line.
The fall of the Mughals was not a single defeat but the closing act of a century of erosion. The empire had been hollowed out long before 1857 — by provincial breakaways, by Persian and Afghan invasions, and above all by the East India Company, which governed in the emperor’s name while reducing him to a client. The 1857 Rebellion did not topple a functioning monarchy; it gave the British the occasion and the pretext to abolish the shell that remained.
The suppression of the revolt was brutal and the reprisals indiscriminate. The recapture of Delhi was followed by mass killings of its inhabitants and the plunder and destruction of much of the old Mughal city; historians’ estimates of the wider rebellion’s death toll run into the hundreds of thousands of Indians, dead in the fighting and in the famines and epidemics that followed. The deposition of one frail emperor was the smallest of these losses, but it was the symbolic end of an empire and the prelude to direct Crown rule over India.
The Empire of Brazil ended on 15 November 1889 in Rio de Janeiro, when a column of soldiers under Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca occupied the capital and a republic was proclaimed, deposing Emperor Pedro II after a personal reign of nearly half a century. There was no battle and almost no bloodshed. The emperor, away at his summer retreat in Petrópolis, returned to a city already lost, declined every proposal to resist, and within two days was put aboard a ship for Europe with his family. He never saw Brazil again.
Pedro II had ruled since 1831, when he inherited the throne at the age of five on his father’s abdication, and personally since 1840. He was, by the standards of nineteenth-century rulers, an unusually scrupulous constitutional monarch: learned, austere, broadly liberal, a patron of science and education who presided over decades of relative stability and a parliamentary system in which cabinets rose and fell. He was also genuinely popular, more respected at the moment of his fall than at almost any earlier point in his reign. The paradox of his deposition is that it was carried out against a sovereign few Brazilians actively wished to be rid of.
The monarchy fell not because it was hated but because the three groups on which it rested had each withdrawn their support. The Catholic Church had been alienated by the emperor’s handling of a clash over Freemasonry in the 1870s. The slaveholding coffee planters of the south-east — the empire’s economic backbone — were embittered by the abolition of slavery in May 1888, which freed roughly 700,000 enslaved people with no compensation to their owners. And the army, swollen and politicized by the Paraguayan War and then slighted in peacetime, had drifted into open contempt for civilian government and into the orbit of Positivist republican officers. By 1889 the throne had no defenders left.
Pedro II accepted his removal with a fatalism that bordered on collusion. Tired, diabetic, and ambivalent about a monarchy he doubted could outlive him through his unpopular daughter Isabel, he offered no fight. He died in a Paris hotel on 5 December 1891. Within a generation Brazil would bring his body home with honors the republic that overthrew him had never shown the living man.