ハワイの歴史がつくられたとき : ハワイの過去・現在・未来をめぐる霊的・知的戦い

In the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi between the late 1880s and the early 1890s, attempts were made by the descendants of American missionaries in Hawaiʻi to write the history of Hawaiʻi. Within the framework of postmillennialism, which they had inherited from their American “evangelical” forefathers, they described the history of Hawaiʻi as a story of “progress” from a “barbarous heathen past” to a “civilized evangelical future”, while treating the “heathen” revival, which started in the reign of Kamehameha V and culminated in that of Kalākaua, as a temporary “retreat” in an effort to suppress the long-term effects of the revival of traditional Hawaiʻian culture among the Hawaiʻians. History writing for them was a “spiritual and intellectual battle” for the past, present, and future of Hawaiʻi. The present paper will first overview the controversies over the writing of the history of Hawaiʻi that took place between the missionary descendants and the Hawaiʻians in the 1880s, examine the content of the discourse spread by the former about the history of Hawaiʻi and its political implications in the period between the establishment of the Hawaiian Historical Society in January 1892 and the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi a year later, and analyze the role of historian W. D. Alexander in the annexation movement after the overthrow of the monarchy.