Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the second and last Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, ruled Iran for thirty-seven years, from his accession in September 1941 to 16 January 1979, when he left the country he could no longer hold and went into a wandering exile from which he never returned. Within weeks the monarchy he embodied — and the 2,500-year tradition of Persian kingship he claimed to inherit — had been swept away by a revolution that placed the exiled cleric Ruhollah Khomeini at the head of a new Islamic Republic. The Shah did not abdicate and was not deposed by a parliament; he was overwhelmed by a popular uprising that crossed every class and faction of Iranian society.
He had ruled an oil-rich state of roughly thirty-five million people, modernized at speed and policed by fear. From the early 1960s his “White Revolution” pushed land reform, female suffrage, and industrial growth from the top down, financed by surging oil revenue, while his secret police, SAVAK, jailed, tortured, and silenced dissent of every stripe — secular, leftist, and religious alike. The result was a country transformed physically yet starved of any legitimate channel for political life. When the pressure broke in 1978, there was no loyal opposition to absorb it, only the street and the mosque.
The revolution built through 1978 in waves of strikes and mass demonstrations met by repression, including the killings of “Black Friday” in September. By the winter the oil workers had struck, the economy had seized, and the army’s will to fire on its own people had drained away. The Shah, gravely ill with cancer he concealed from his people, vacillated between concession and crackdown until both failed. He flew out of Tehran on 16 January 1979; Khomeini returned in triumph on 1 February; the monarchy was formally abolished by referendum that spring.
What followed for the Shah was humiliation and a slow death. Refused durable refuge by allies who had once courted him, he moved through Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, and Panama before Anwar Sadat gave him final asylum in Egypt. His admission to the United States for cancer treatment helped trigger the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis that defined the new order’s confrontation with the West. He died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was buried in the Al-Rifaʿi Mosque, a king without a kingdom.
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.
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.