The history of the Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands are two parallel chains of coral atolls in the central Pacific, the Ratak in the east and the Ralik in the west. Micronesian navigators settled them about two thousand years ago or earlier and developed one of the most sophisticated systems of ocean navigation in the world, while powerful chiefs held authority over land and people. Germany ruled the islands from 1885, Japan from 1914, and the United States from 1944. Between 1946 and 1958 the United States exploded 67 nuclear weapons at Bikini and Enewetak, displacing whole communities and contaminating several atolls, a legacy that still shapes the country. The republic has governed itself since 1979 and has been sovereign in free association with the United States since 1986.

The first settlers were Austronesian seafarers, probably arriving from the south by way of the Solomon Islands region. Radiocarbon dates from Bikini once suggested settlement before 1000 BCE, but archaeologists doubt them, and securely dated earth ovens at Laura on Majuro and on Kwajalein place people on the atolls by roughly the first century BCE. The settlers brought coconuts, breadfruit, giant swamp taro and chickens. The wetter southern atolls supported larger populations living on taro and breadfruit, while northern communities depended more on pandanus and coconut.

Marshallese pilots sailed fast outrigger canoes, some large enough to carry dozens of people, between islands that lie below the horizon. Besides the stars, they read the way ocean swells from different directions bent around atolls and interfered with each other, sensing these patterns in the motion of the hull. They taught the skill with stick charts, frames of palm ribs and shells mapping swells and islands, which were studied on land and left behind at sea. This guarded family knowledge belongs to the wider tradition of Pacific navigation.

Society was ranked and matrilineal. Land passed through the mother's line, commoners worked it and paid tribute, and chiefs, the iroij, held rights over land and people. Each chain had paramount chiefs, the iroijlaplap, whose fleets collected tribute and fought for supremacy. When the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue visited in 1817, Lamari, chief of Aur, had conquered the northern Ratak and was preparing to attack Majuro, which he took with the help of iron axes from the Russians.

Ships of the Spanish Empire crossing the Pacific after the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan were the first Europeans to see the islands. Alonso de Salazar sighted an atoll in 1526, Álvaro de Saavedra landed at Ailinginae and Enewetak in 1528 and 1529, and Legazpi's fleet met people at Mejit in 1565. Spain claimed the islands but never settled them, and its galleons kept to a route further north. The British captains John Marshall and Thomas Gilbert traded with islanders at Mili in 1788, and later charts named the islands after Marshall.

Contact became frequent and often violent in the nineteenth century. Whaling crews abused islanders, kidnappers took men and women for plantations, and islanders attacked several ships in return. Peaceful contact began at Ebon in the 1850s. In 1857 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions opened a mission there, and Native Hawaiian missionaries from the Hawaiian Kingdom carried on the work, printing scripture in Marshallese. By the 1870s churches stood on several atolls, staffed by Marshallese pastors. Introduced diseases such as measles, influenza and typhoid killed many people, including the paramount chief Kaibuke in 1863, whose death set his heirs Kabua and Loiak against each other for decades.

German traders, led by Adolph Capelle at Ebon and later the Hamburg firms of Godeffroy and Hernsheim, built a copra trade that relied on chiefs collecting coconuts from commoners as tribute. In 1878 the German warship Ariadne secured a treaty at Jaluit recognising Kabua as "King of the Ralik Islands", and on 15 October 1885 Kabua, Loiak and other iroij signed a treaty of protection with the German Empire. From 1888 the Jaluit Company, a private firm, ran the protectorate and collected a poll tax in copra through the chiefs. Marshallese commoners struck for better prices in 1900 and held out against a German blockade until 1904, when wages were doubled. The population fell by more than a third under German rule, from perhaps 13,000 to 15,000 to about 9,200 in 1908, mostly from disease.

Japan, allied to Britain in the First World War, occupied the islands in 1914, and in 1920 the League of Nations made them part of the South Seas Mandate of the Empire of Japan, governed from Palau. Japanese schools taught in Japanese and punished pupils for speaking Marshallese, and islanders were treated as second-class subjects. After leaving the League, Japan fortified the atolls from 1939, building airfields at Kwajalein, Maloelap and Wotje with conscripted Korean and Marshallese labour.

In the Second World War, American carriers raided the atolls in February 1942, and on 31 January 1944 United States forces invaded Kwajalein and Majuro. Japanese garrisons left isolated on Jaluit, Mili, Maloelap and Wotje starved under bombardment, and Marshallese on those atolls suffered with them; among those executed by Japanese troops was the missionary Carl Heine, who had married into a Marshallese family. The United States took control of the whole group, and in 1947 the islands became part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a strategic trust under American administration.

The United States had already chosen the atolls for nuclear testing at the start of the Cold War. In March 1946 the 167 people of Bikini, led by their chief Juda, were persuaded to leave "temporarily" and taken to Rongerik, an atoll too small to feed them; they nearly starved before being moved to Kwajalein and in 1948 to tiny Kili, which has no lagoon. The two Operation Crossroads explosions in July 1946 were the first of 23 tests at Bikini. The people of Enewetak were moved to Ujelang in 1947, and 43 tests followed there. On 1 November 1952 the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike, vaporised the island of Elugelab. On 1 March 1954 the Castle Bravo test at Bikini produced 15 megatons, more than twice the expected yield and about a thousand times the Hiroshima bomb. Fallout fell like snow on Rongelap, Rongerik and Utrik, which had not been evacuated. Rongelap's people suffered radiation burns and sickness, were removed after two days, and were then enrolled in a secret medical study of radiation effects. Islanders later developed thyroid disease and cancers, and the United States was accused of using them as research subjects without consent.

In all, the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the islands between 1946 and 1958, with a combined yield of about 108 megatons. Bikini families returned in the early 1970s after official assurances but were removed again in 1978 after scientists found that their wells and food crops were still dangerously contaminated. Rongelap's people, who had been returned in 1957, left their atoll in 1985 with the help of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. At Enewetak, the United States buried more than 80,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil in a bomb crater on Runit Island between 1977 and 1980, covering it with a concrete dome that is now cracking as seas rise. A Nuclear Claims Tribunal set up under the Compact awarded large sums that were never fully paid.

The Marshall Islands rejected joining a wider Micronesian federation and adopted its own constitution on 1 May 1979, with the high chief Amata Kabua as first president. The Compact of Free Association, approved by voters in 1983, came into force in 1986, giving the United States responsibility for defence, continued use of the Kwajalein missile range and free movement for Marshallese to live and work in the United States, in return for aid and nuclear compensation. The UN ended the trusteeship in 1990, and the republic joined the United Nations in 1991, though American aid remained the mainstay of its economy. Amata Kabua led the country until his death in 1996, and in 1999 the commoner Kessai Note became president, ending the dominance of the chiefly families in government. The Compact was renewed in 2003, and thousands of Marshallese have moved to the United States, notably to Springdale in Arkansas.

Hilda Heine became the first woman to lead a Micronesian nation in 2016, giving way to David Kabua, a son of the first president, in 2020. Heine returned to office in January 2024. In October 2023 the government signed a twenty-year renewal of the Compact's funding provisions, though many Marshallese argued that the United States had still not settled the nuclear legacy. The country remains one of the few that recognise Taiwan. With most land less than two metres above sea level, the low atolls are acutely threatened by rising seas, and the government has made climate change the centre of its diplomacy.