The history of the Solomon Islands

Solomon Islands is a double chain of large volcanic islands and many smaller ones in Melanesia, east of New Guinea. People reached the archipelago some 30,000 years ago, and Austronesian seafarers added their languages and crafts about 3,000 years ago, producing one of the most linguistically diverse societies on earth. Spanish explorers named the islands in 1568, but Europeans made little impact until the nineteenth century, when the labour trade carried thousands of islanders to plantations abroad. Britain declared a protectorate in 1893. In 1942 and 1943 Guadalcanal became the scene of one of the decisive campaigns of the Pacific war, and the islands became independent in 1978. Ethnic conflict between 1998 and 2003 and the country's turn towards China since 2019 have dominated recent decades.

When sea levels were lower in the Ice Age, Buka, Bougainville and the main Solomons from Choiseul to Nggela formed a single landmass, sometimes called Greater Bougainville. Settlers from New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago had reached it by about 28,000 BCE, as finds at Kilu Cave on Buka show, and caves on Guadalcanal were in use by around 4500 BCE. The speakers of the small Central Solomon language family, on islands such as Savo and the Russells, are probably descendants of these early peoples.

From about 1200 to 800 BCE, Austronesian voyagers of the Lapita culture, known for their stamped pottery, arrived from the Bismarcks. They seem to have passed the inhabited main islands at first and settled the Santa Cruz group further east, before spreading back west. Their Oceanic languages came to prevail, and most of the country's sixty to seventy languages descend from them. Later, Polynesian voyagers settled outlying islands such as Tikopia, Anuta, Rennell, Bellona and Ontong Java, which remain Polynesian in language and custom.

Society was organised in small villages of clans and lineages, led by "big men" who earned influence through feasts, exchange and warfare, and in some areas by hereditary chiefs. Shell money, still used in bride price on Malaita, circulated in wide trade networks. In the Roviana Lagoon of New Georgia a powerful chiefdom grew up, with a hilltop fortress and megalithic shrines from the thirteenth century onwards; by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Roviana was a regional power whose war canoes raided far afield. Headhunting, practised especially in the western islands, was bound up with religion and the prestige of chiefs, and skull shrines survive today.

The Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña, sailing from Peru for the Spanish Empire, reached Santa Isabel on 7 February 1568. Hearing of gold on Guadalcanal, he named the islands after the biblical King Solomon. His second expedition in 1595 tried to found a colony at Graciosa Bay on Nendö in the Santa Cruz Islands, but disease and conflict with the islanders destroyed it, and Mendaña died there. Europeans then largely forgot the islands until Philip Carteret passed in 1767, followed by Bougainville and other French navigators. La Pérouse's ships were wrecked on Vanikoro in 1788, a fate not discovered until 1826.

From the late eighteenth century whalers called for food and water, and in the nineteenth century traders sought turtle shell, sea cucumber, sandalwood and copra. Guns acquired from them changed the balance between coastal and inland groups and fuelled headhunting raids. From the 1860s, recruiting ships took islanders to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa in the trade known as blackbirding. Some went willingly, many were deceived or kidnapped, and many died abroad. Islanders sometimes retaliated by attacking ships and traders. Missionaries followed: a French Catholic mission on Santa Isabel ended when Bishop Jean-Baptiste Epalle was killed in 1845, but the Anglican Melanesian Mission from the 1850s, and later Catholic, Methodist, Seventh-day Adventist and South Seas Evangelical missions, gradually made the islands overwhelmingly Christian.

Germany took the northern Solomons in 1886 as part of its New Guinea colony, and in 1893 the British Empire declared a protectorate over the southern islands, partly to regulate the labour trade. Charles Morris Woodford became resident commissioner in 1896 and set up his headquarters on Tulagi. In 1900, after the Tripartite Convention over Samoa, the German Empire handed Choiseul, Santa Isabel, the Shortlands and Ontong Java to Britain, but kept Buka and Bougainville, which is why they now belong to Papua New Guinea. Australia ended its own labour trade in 1906, deporting most of the islanders in Queensland.

The protectorate was a poor backwater. Warships carried out punitive raids against villages accused of killing Europeans, and the administration imposed a head tax to push men into plantation work. Lever Brothers built a large copra industry, while schools and clinics were left to the missions. In 1927 William Bell, the district officer on Malaita, was killed with thirteen others by the Kwaio warrior Basiana while collecting tax. The punitive expedition that followed killed at least 60 Kwaio, detained nearly 200 and desecrated their shrines, events still remembered bitterly on Malaita.

In the Second World War most Europeans were evacuated, and in May 1942 forces of the Empire of Japan occupied Tulagi and began building an airfield on Guadalcanal. On 7 August 1942 United States Marines landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the first major Allied land offensive against Japan. They captured the airfield, named Henderson Field, and held it through six months of fighting on land and a series of naval battles off the coast, among them Savo Island and the decisive Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November. The Japanese evacuated their last troops by 9 February 1943. About 7,100 Allied servicemen died, and some 19,200 Japanese soldiers, more than half of them from starvation and disease. The number of islanders killed is unknown. The campaign continued up the chain to New Georgia and Bougainville in 1943.

Solomon Islanders played a central part. Scouts and coastwatchers reported Japanese ships and aircraft, and Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, tortured and left for dead by Japanese soldiers, warned the Marines of an attack in August 1942. In 1943 the scouts Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana found the stranded crew of PT-109, including the future president John F. Kennedy, and carried a message cut into a coconut to the Allies. Thousands of men served in the Solomon Islands Labour Corps, where contact with American wealth and organisation helped inspire political change.

On Malaita, the movement known as Maasina Rule, from a word meaning brotherhood, began around 1944 under leaders such as Aliki Nonoʻohimae. It codified custom, built new villages, refused plantation work and the head tax, and demanded self-government. Britain arrested its leaders in 1947, and thousands of followers were jailed for civil disobedience, until a compromise in 1952 created a Malaita Council. That year the capital moved to Honiara, the town built around the American base on Guadalcanal.

As decolonisation spread, Britain introduced legislative and executive councils in 1960, elected members from 1964, a governing council in 1970 and ministerial government in 1974, when Solomon Mamaloni became chief minister. Self-government followed in 1976, a year after Papua New Guinea's independence, and the country became independent within the Commonwealth on 7 July 1978, with Peter Kenilorea as prime minister. Mamaloni, who led several governments until 1997, dominated the following decades, while logging became the main source of revenue and political patronage. Refugees and soldiers crossed the border during the Bougainville conflict from 1988.

From late 1998 Guale militants on Guadalcanal, angry at the settlement of migrants from Malaita around Honiara and at unresolved land claims, drove some 20,000 Malaitans from their homes. The Malaita Eagle Force formed in response, raided police armouries and on 5 June 2000 seized Honiara and forced Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufaʻalu to resign. The Townsville Peace Agreement of October 2000 ended the main fighting, but lawlessness and extortion continued, and the government went bankrupt. At its request the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), led by Australia with New Zealand and other Pacific states, arrived in July 2003, restored order and secured the surrender of the warlord Harold Keke. About 200 people had been killed. RAMSI stayed until 2017. Riots after the election of Snyder Rini in 2006 destroyed much of Honiara's Chinatown.

In 2019 Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare switched recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China. The leaders of Malaita Province opposed the move, and in November 2021 protesters, many from Malaita, tried to storm parliament, and rioters burned buildings and looted Chinatown, prompting Australia and other neighbours to send police and troops. In 2022 Sogavare signed a security agreement with China, alarming Australia, New Zealand and the United States. After the general election of April 2024, Sogavare stood aside, and on 2 May parliament elected his foreign minister, Jeremiah Manele, as prime minister.