Leveraging Sovereignty: Kauikeaouli's Global Strategy for the Hawaiian Nation, 1825–1854 by J. Susan Corley (review)

In the revised version of her 2019 dissertation in history at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, J. Susan Corley proposes a reappraisal of the transformative political and legal changes undertaken in Hawai'i during the 1840s. Classic accounts, including Ralph Kuykendall, Merze Tate, and Sally Merry, have considered the decade as initiating a phase of Western-dominated governance within the Kingdom of Hawai'i. Reforms included a restructuring of the Kingdom's governance structure to include a cabinet of executive ministries (1845), the appointment mainly of foreigners to serve as the new ministers (1845), the elevation of English to equal legal standing with Hawaiian (1845), the implementation of an explicitly Anglo-American legal and court system (1839–1847), and the conversion of customary land tenure to fee-simple title (1845–1848). In her revisionist account, Corley emphasizes the leading role of Kauikeaouli, King Kamehameha III (r. 1825–1854), who she argues after 1839 "implement[ed] a targeted strategy designed to secure his ability to govern free from international interference." (p. 2). Promising an analysis set apart from previous accounts through attention to Kauikeaouli's decision making process as captured in his "own speech recorded in his own language in archival records," (p. 2) Corley presents the king as a dynamic political actor who savvily confronted threats to his authority posed by a rising population of Western merchants and the gunboat diplomacy practiced by three Western powers: Britain, France, and the United States.

Eschewing a chronological approach, Corley's book is comprised of nine chapters. Four thematic, background chapters set the stage for five chapters examining what she describes as "particular statecraft decisions and their implementing measures" (p. 6). Chapters one and two address state formation from Kamehameha I to Kauikeaouli, the challenge of extraterritoriality, and the rise of Hawaiian literacy. Chapters three and four outline major political actors during the 1840s and the rise of Honolulu as a foreigner-dominated international port town which generated, through a variety of shipping duties and consumption taxes, the primary source of state revenue during the period. Subsequent chapters turn to specific elements of what she describes as Kauikeaouli's governance strategy, including the appointment of white ministers (ch. 5), the implementation of a court system based primarily on American and British common law (ch. 6), and the use of print media to represent the government line, including the purchase of The Polynesian (ch. 7). Chapter eight, which carries the same title as the book, investigates in close detail how the kingdom maneuvered between gunboat diplomacy, imperial great power rivalry, and the threat of militant adventurers (filibusterers) to achieve a tripartite guarantee of the kingdom's independence by France, Great Britain, and the United States by the end of the king's reign. Concluding the book in chapter nine, Corley recasts her analysis by postulating three chronological phases to Kauikeaouli's alleged strategy.

Corley's proposal to place Kauikeaouli at the center of the policy changes of the 1840s is provocative, complementing extensive work on the individual agency of nineteenth-century Hawaiian actors, and, more broadly, non-European rulers in the age of empire. Yet her delimitation of the book to the exposition of a putative "cohesive strategy" of governance (p. 7) carries with it a high burden of proof. One expects to gain clarity in how Kauikeaouli weighed his options and made his decisions. However, the archival evidence deployed in this regard is limited mainly to official speeches, Privy Council minutes, and Kamakau's memorial reflections. While Kauikeaouli, in his status as king, clearly held decisive power, his thoughts are often extrapolated rather than demonstrated. The bulk of her archival and secondary sources, like classic work on the topic, derive from correspondence, diaries, and printed reports of Kauikeaouli's Western ministers and consuls. Rather than a substantially expanded...