The history of the Maldives

The Maldives is a chain of about 1,200 coral islands grouped in 26 atolls, stretched across the Indian Ocean south-west of India and Sri Lanka, none rising more than a couple of metres above the sea. Settled from South Asia more than two thousand years ago, the islands were Buddhist for well over a millennium before their king converted to Islam in the twelfth century, beginning a sultanate that lasted, with brief interruptions, until 1968. The islands' cowrie shells and coconut-fibre rope made them a fixture of Indian Ocean trade. The Portuguese held Malé for fifteen years, but the Maldives otherwise kept its own rulers under Dutch and then British protection, became independent in 1965 and a republic in 1968, and since 2008 has been working through an often turbulent transition to multiparty democracy.

Much of the islands' early history survives only in legend, copper-plate grants and archaeology. The Dhivehi language belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and is closely related to Sinhala, pointing to strong early links with Sri Lanka, while many words, customs and place names show influence from the Tamil and Malayali coasts of southern India. Tradition holds that the first settlers arrived some 2,500 years ago, and the Sri Lankan chronicles mention migration to the islands. A Roman historian recorded that envoys of a people called the Divi brought gifts to the emperor Julian in 362, which some scholars take to mean the Maldives.

Buddhism probably reached the islands from Sri Lanka in the centuries after the reign of Ashoka, and it remained the dominant faith until the twelfth century. Nearly all the archaeological remains in the Maldives are from this period: stupas, monasteries and coral-stone carvings. The monastery at Kaashidhoo has been dated by radiocarbon to between roughly 200 and 560 CE. The Maldivian script, the institutions of kingship and many customs took shape during these Buddhist centuries, though later Muslim histories tended to pass over them as an age of ignorance.

Arab and Persian merchants sailing from the Gulf to Southeast Asia had made the atolls a regular landfall by the tenth century. In 1153, according to the Maldivian chronicles, the last Buddhist king, known as Dhovemi, accepted Islam and took the name Sultan Muhammad al-Adil. Tradition credits his conversion to a visiting Muslim scholar, Abu al-Barakat, whom some sources describe as a North African and others as a Persian from Tabriz. The story told to later visitors held that he freed the islanders from a sea demon that demanded the sacrifice of a girl each month. Some historians date the conversion to 1193 instead. From then until 1932, six dynasties and more than eighty sultans and sultanas ruled from Malé, and the Friday Mosque built there, rebuilt in 1658 from carved coral stone, still stands.

The islands' prosperity rested on trade. Cowrie shells gathered in the lagoons served as currency across South Asia and as far as West Africa, with Bengal one of the main buyers. Coir, the salt-resistant rope made from coconut husks, was used to stitch together the hulls of Arab and Indian ships, and dried tuna, ambergris and tortoiseshell were also exported. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta lived in the Maldives for about nine months in the 1340s, serving as chief judge, marrying into the ruling family and leaving a vivid account of a court then headed by a queen, Khadija. The Chinese fleets of Zheng He visited in the early fifteenth century.

Portuguese ships reached the Indian Ocean after 1498, and in 1558 the Portuguese Empire placed a garrison and an agent in Malé, administered from Goa. Their rule, and their pressure on the islanders to convert to Christianity, provoked resistance. Muhammad Thakurufaanu of Utheemu island and his brothers waged a guerrilla campaign from the northern atolls and in 1573 overran the garrison in Malé. The victory is still celebrated as National Day, and Thakurufaanu founded a new dynasty. It was the only period of direct European rule in the islands' history.

After the Dutch Republic drove the Portuguese from Ceylon in the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch governors in Colombo exercised a loose protectorate over the Maldives, which sent them tribute while running their own affairs. Britain took Ceylon in 1796 and inherited this role. In 1887 an agreement between the sultan and the governor of Ceylon formally made the islands a protectorate of the British Empire: Britain controlled foreign affairs and defence, while the sultan governed internally according to Islamic law and custom.

In the early twentieth century real power shifted from the sultans to chief ministers drawn from a few leading Malé families. A first written constitution was proclaimed in 1932, making the sultanate elective, though it was unpopular and soon torn up by angry crowds. In 1953 the sultanate was briefly abolished and a republic declared under Mohamed Amin Didi, a reformer who had nationalised the fish export trade and promoted education and the rights of women. He was overthrown within months, beaten by a mob during a riot over food shortages, and died soon afterwards; the sultanate was restored in 1954.

During World War II Britain built an air base on Gan in Addu Atoll, the southernmost atoll, and reopened it as a Royal Air Force station in 1956. The base brought jobs to the south, and in 1959 the three southern atolls broke away as the United Suvadive Republic under Abdullah Afeef. Prime Minister Ibrahim Nasir sent gunboats to end the rebellion, and the breakaway state had collapsed by 1963. On 26 July 1965 the Maldives became fully independent, by an agreement signed in Colombo, while the British kept the lease on Gan. In 1968 a referendum ended the monarchy, and on 11 November the second republic was proclaimed with Nasir as president.

Nasir's presidency saw the beginnings of the industry that would transform the country. The first tourist resort opened in 1972, and within a few decades tourism had overtaken fishing as the mainstay of the economy. Nasir governed in an increasingly authoritarian way, exiling his prime minister Ahmed Zaki in 1975, and the British withdrawal from Gan in 1976 and a slump in fish exports hurt the economy. When his term ended in 1978 he left for Singapore, accused of taking state funds with him.

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was then chosen as president and re-elected unopposed in five further referendums, holding office for thirty years. His government spread schools, health services and electricity to the outer atolls and presided over rapid growth, but it also banned political parties and suppressed dissent. Several coup plots failed, and in November 1988 a band of Sri Lankan Tamil mercenaries, hired by a Maldivian businessman, landed in Malé and seized key buildings. At Gayoom's request India flew in paratroopers who restored control within hours and captured the fleeing mercenaries at sea. In the late Cold War and after, the Maldives also became a prominent voice on climate change, since rising seas threaten the survival of the islands themselves.

The tsunami of 26 December 2004 flooded nearly all the inhabited islands, forced the evacuation of fourteen, killed more than a hundred people and caused damage equal to well over half of national output. Pressure for political reform, led by the journalist and activist Mohamed Nasheed and his Maldivian Democratic Party, had already been building, and a new constitution in 2008 introduced multiparty elections. Nasheed defeated Gayoom in that year's presidential run-off.

Nasheed resigned in February 2012 after a mutiny by sections of the police and army; he described his removal as a coup, while his successor's supporters maintained that he had resigned, and a national commission of inquiry later that year found the transfer of power constitutional. In 2013 Gayoom's half-brother Abdulla Yameen won a contested election, after the Supreme Court annulled a first round in which Nasheed had led. Yameen's government jailed opponents, including Nasheed, drew closer to China, and in 2016 took the country out of the Commonwealth. Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Democratic Party defeated Yameen in 2018, and the Maldives rejoined the Commonwealth in 2020.

In 2023 Mohamed Muizzu, a former housing minister and mayor of Malé, won the presidency with about 54 percent of the run-off vote on a campaign to reduce Indian influence, and took office on 17 November 2023. He asked India to withdraw its military personnel from the islands, strengthened ties with China, and in April 2024 his People's National Congress and its allies won a supermajority in parliament. Balancing between India and China, managing heavy foreign debt and coping with the threat of the rising ocean remain the central questions of the country's politics.