The history of Tuvalu

Tuvalu is a chain of nine small coral islands and atolls in the central Pacific, with about 26 square kilometres of land and a highest point less than five metres above the sea. Its Polynesian people, whose ancestors came mainly from Samoa and Tonga, lived for centuries by fishing, coconut and pulaka, a swamp taro, under island chiefs and councils of elders. As the Ellice Islands, the group became a British protectorate in 1892 and was joined to the Gilbert Islands in a single colony. Its people voted to separate in 1974, and Tuvalu became independent in 1978. Because rising seas threaten the islands' existence, Tuvalu has become a leading voice on climate change, and in 2023 it signed the Falepili Union, a treaty giving its citizens a path to move to Australia.

Tuvalu means "eight standing together", for the eight islands that were traditionally inhabited; the ninth, Niulakita, was settled only in the twentieth century. Its people belong to the great Polynesian dispersal that began about 3,000 years ago, and the islands lie on the western edge of the Polynesian world. Possible traces of fire in caves on Nanumanga may point to human presence long before the ancestors named in tradition. Each island has its own story of origins. On Niutao, Funafuti and Vaitupu the founding ancestors are said to have come from Samoa, and on Nanumea from Tonga. A shared myth tells how an eel and a flounder made the islands: the flounder gave the atolls their flat shape, and the eel became the model for the coconut palm.

Voyaging canoes, guided by the skills of Pacific wayfinding, kept the islands in contact with each other and with their neighbours. Tuvalu lay within the reach of the Tuʻi Tonga, and Niutao's oral history recalls Tongan war parties defeated on its reef in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and invasions from the Gilbert Islands, now Kiribati, repelled in the seventeenth. Tuvaluans also sailed west and settled some of the Polynesian outlier islands in Melanesia and Micronesia.

Each island was governed by its high chief, the aliki or tupu, together with the falekaupule, the assembly of elders that met in the island's open meeting house, the maneapa. Families held land and fishing rights by descent, and food was shared through elaborate customs of exchange. Religion centred on ancestors, spirits and the priests who mediated with them, the vaka-atua.

The first Europeans to see the islands were the crew of Álvaro de Mendaña's Spanish expedition, which passed Nui on 16 January 1568. Later navigators gave the atolls a string of names, and in 1819 the American captain Arent de Peyster named Funafuti Ellice's Island after the owner of his ship's cargo. The name Ellice Islands later spread to the whole group. Whalers came from the 1820s, and from the 1850s traders settled on the atolls to buy coconut oil and then copra, often marrying into chiefly families.

The worst blow came in 1862 and 1863, when Peruvian ships combing Polynesia for labourers for plantations and guano mines reached the islands. With help from resident traders, they took about 180 people from Funafuti and about 200 from Nukulaelae, whose population fell from about 300 to fewer than 100. Almost none returned.

Christianity arrived by accident in 1861, when Elekana, a deacon from Manihiki in the Cook Islands, drifted for eight weeks in a storm and landed on Nukulaelae, where he began to teach. The London Missionary Society followed in 1865 and sent Samoan pastors to every island. By the late 1870s nearly all Tuvaluans had become Protestant Christians, and the Samoan pastors, who often became powerful figures, shaped the islands' laws, language and music. The Church of Tuvalu grew from their work.

An Anglo-German agreement of 1886 placed the islands in Britain's sphere, and between 9 and 16 October 1892 Captain Herbert Gibson of HMS Curacoa declared a protectorate over each island. The British Empire governed lightly at first, through a resident commissioner in the Gilberts and native laws drawn from the rules already set by the pastors, with each island's high chief keeping order. Between 1896 and 1898 expeditions of the Royal Society drilled deep into the coral of Funafuti to test the theory of Charles Darwin on how atolls form, and their results supported him.

In 1916 the protectorate became part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, governed from the Gilberts. The office of high chief was abolished, and in 1930 Resident Commissioner Arthur Grimble issued strict regulations covering both public and private behaviour. Copra trading passed to island cooperatives, and many young men worked on overseas ships or on the phosphate island of Banaba. From 1947, families from crowded Vaitupu began to settle Kioa, an island in Fiji that they had bought.

In the Second World War the islands escaped Japanese occupation. United States forces landed on Funafuti on 2 October 1942 and later on Nanumea and Nukufetau, moving islanders to smaller islets while they built airfields. The atolls became bases for the attack on Tarawa and Makin in November 1943. Japanese air raids struck Funafuti, but casualties were few. The runways cost the islands tens of thousands of coconut trees and much of the land used for growing pulaka, and pits dug for coral fill remained on Funafuti for decades.

After the war the colony's capital moved to Tarawa, and elected councils were introduced in stages. The Polynesian Ellice Islanders, a small minority of the colony's people, feared being a permanent minority in an independent state dominated by the Micronesian Gilbertese. In a referendum in 1974 they voted 3,799 to 293 to separate. Tuvalu became a separate British colony on 1 October 1975 and independent within the Commonwealth on 1 October 1978, with Toaripi Lauti as prime minister and the British monarch as head of state. In 1983 the United States gave up its old claims to four of the islands.

The new state had no political parties, and governments formed and fell through shifting alliances among its small parliament of independent members. Revenue came from fishing licences, remittances from seafarers, the Tuvalu Trust Fund set up in 1987 by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and later the lease of the country's internet domain, .tv. Tuvalu joined the United Nations in 2000. It has kept diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Cyclone Bebe in 1972 had already shown the islands' vulnerability, destroying most buildings on Funafuti. Since the 1990s Tuvaluan leaders have warned that rising sea levels, saltwater seeping into gardens and king tides that flood the airport threaten to make the atolls uninhabitable. The tide gauge at Funafuti shows the sea rising about 3.9 millimetres a year, roughly twice the global average. Tuvalu stalled the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 to press for a binding deal, and Cyclone Pam caused heavy damage in 2015. Scientists have found that many islets have grown slightly as waves pile up sand, a finding Tuvaluan leaders say ignores the loss of fresh water and habitable land. Projects funded by international donors are building raised land on Funafuti, and in 2023 a revised constitution recognised the island councils, the falekaupule, as traditional governing authorities.

On 9 November 2023 Prime Minister Kausea Natano signed the Falepili Union with Australia, named after a Tuvaluan word for good neighbourliness. Australia offered permanent residence to up to 280 Tuvaluans a year and help in the event of disasters, pandemics or military aggression, and in return Tuvalu agreed to consult Australia before any security or defence arrangement with another country. Critics, including the former prime minister Enele Sopoaga, said this gave away part of Tuvalu's sovereignty, and the treaty became an issue in the January 2024 election. Feleti Teo, elected unopposed as prime minister in February 2024, chose to proceed, and the treaty came into force on 28 August 2024. When the first visa ballot ran from June to July 2025, about 8,750 people, more than half of the country's citizens, applied.