Honolulu in the 19th Century: Notes on the Emergence of Urban Society in Hawaii *

after the english merchant captain william brown discovered hono-lulu Harbour in the early 1790s, ¹ foreigners in the growing Pacific trade quickly learned that Honolulu was the only place in the Hawaiian archipelago—and, for that matter, in the central northern Pacific—where deep draught vessels could find protected anchorage. The harbour made the town. Each successive change in the economy of the islands—the provisioning of ships, the exploitation of sandalwood, the servicing of whalers, the re-export trade, and the marketing of sugar—strengthened Honolulu’s position. By the middle of the 19th century Honolulu had grown from a tiny village to a busy Pacific port of call, the metropolis of the islands and the capital of the kingdom; and Honolulu’s people were witnesses, initiators, beneficiaries or victims of almost every major movement and contest in the islands.