The Annexation Club: Kingdom of Hawaii, 1892

Guns, intrigue, and...sugar tariffs? Welcome to the 1892 Kingdom of Hawaii, a nation in flux as it grapples with questionable monarchial succession, an unsteady balance of power, and the wide-ranging effects of the McKinley Tariff Act, which effectively unbalanced Hawaii’s sugar plantations, its most profitable—and exploitative—industry. Join the Hawaiian League’s secret Annexation Club in its attempts to navigate six turbulent years of public and underground political maneuvering as it clashes with Queen Lili’uokalani’s divisive administration. In an isolated nation with few resources and fewer allies, the club will work to protect their commercial interests, bolster the Hawaiian economy, and perhaps overthrow a monarchy in the process.

 

Background Guide

 

 

Chair - Eric Liu

Eric Liu is a second-year from Vancouver, double-majoring in economics and political science. He looks forward to finally seeing the front-room of a crisis committee, an experience that has eluded him thus far in his Model UN career. Beyond schoolwork and MUN, he can typically be found catching up on Disney movies he never watched in his childhood or cheering on his hometown hockey team, the (as-of-late beleaguered) Canucks. Despite his Canadian citizenship, Eric is fascinated by American history and is extremely excited to chair this committee.

Email: ericliu@uchicago.edu

 

Crisis Director - Carina Baker

Carina Baker is a second year in the college majoring in physics with a specialization in astrophysics. She is excited to be crisis directing a committee this year at ChoMUN after working on the Finnish War Cabinet at ChoMUN XVII. Carina is involved with MUNUC (UChicago’s highschool MUN conference), helps run the Ryerson Astronomical Society, and is also involved with an odd handful of other clubs. Outside of work, she can usually be found having too many opinions on old books and impractical languages or getting really excited about outer space. Carina is thrilled to be able to help simulate the Annexation Club with the inimitable Charlotte von de Bur and Eric Liu, and looks forward to more closely examining this much-neglected yet fascinatingly turbulent period in history.

 

Crisis Director - Charlotte Von De Bur

Charlotte Von De Bur is a second year currently majoring in English Language and Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies, with the intent to study library science and preservation in the future. Hailing from San Jose, California, Charlotte has nonetheless come to identify deeply with the casserole culture of the Midwest. When she’s not running ChoMUN crises or staffing Information Services for MUNUC (UChicago’s high school conference), Charlotte also spends her time cooking, reading, and volunteering with Read/Write Library Chicago, a community archive of books, comics, and oral histories by Chicago residents. Although MUNUC XXVI and ChoMUN XVII were Charlotte’s first introductions to MUN, she has taken strongly to the Dungeons and Dragons of political process since realizing that it doesn’t have to involve rehashing the Congress of Vienna a thousand times over. She can’t wait to bring the underappreciated political machinations of Hawaii to life in conference, and looks forward to the ingenuity and intrigue that delegates will bring to the table.