The history of Vanuatu

Vanuatu is a Y-shaped chain of more than 80 volcanic islands in Melanesia, between the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. Its people, the Ni-Vanuatu, descend from Lapita seafarers who arrived about 3,000 years ago and from later Melanesian migrants, and they speak more than a hundred languages, one of the highest numbers of languages for its population anywhere. In the nineteenth century sandalwood traders and the labour trade known as blackbirding devastated the islands' population. From 1906 Britain and France ruled them jointly as the New Hebrides Condominium, under which the islanders were citizens of neither power. Vanuatu became independent in 1980 and has since become known for unstable coalition politics, severe natural disasters and its campaign to bring climate change before the world's highest court.

The first settlers, carriers of the Lapita culture with its finely stamped pottery, reached the islands between about 1100 and 700 BCE, probably from the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago. At Teouma on Efate archaeologists have excavated a Lapita cemetery holding the remains of 94 people, among the oldest in the Pacific. Ancient DNA from Teouma shows that these first settlers had mainly East Asian ancestry, while from about 2,500 years ago new arrivals related to the peoples of New Guinea and the Bismarcks brought a gradual but almost complete change in ancestry. The Austronesian languages of the first settlers survived, and all of Vanuatu's languages belong to the Oceanic branch of that family. The settlers brought yams, taro, bananas, pigs and chickens, and their arrival coincided with the extinction of a land crocodile, a giant tortoise and several flightless birds.

Over the following centuries the islands developed distinct local cultures. Society was organised in clans and villages and, in many northern islands, in graded societies through which men rose in rank by sacrificing pigs, especially valuable boars with curved tusks. Chiefs and elders met in the nakamal, the men's house, and land belonged to kin groups as a trust passed between generations, an idea that later became central to the fight against colonial land loss. Some Polynesian peoples settled outlying islands such as Futuna and Aniwa. Oral tradition and archaeology agree about the life of Roi Mata, a chief or line of chiefs of central Vanuatu around 1600 who is remembered for uniting rival clans and keeping the peace. His burial on Eretoka, with many members of his community, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 1606 Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Empire, reached the largest island and, believing he had found the great southern continent, named it La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. His settlement at Big Bay lasted only weeks. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville passed in 1768, and in 1774 James Cook charted the group and called it the New Hebrides.

Sustained contact began in 1825, when the trader Peter Dillon found sandalwood on Erromango. A series of booms followed until the trees were almost exhausted in the 1860s, marked by violence between traders and islanders. Missionaries met fierce resistance at first: John Williams and James Harris of the London Missionary Society were killed on Erromango in 1839. Presbyterians from Scotland and Nova Scotia, notably John Geddie on Aneityum from 1848 and John Gibson Paton, Anglicans of the Melanesian Mission and later Catholics made steady progress, though on Tanna local people repeatedly drove them away. Ni-Vanuatu often blended Christianity with kastom, their customary beliefs and practices. Epidemics of measles, dysentery and other introduced diseases killed large numbers of people.

From the 1860s planters in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa needed cheap workers for cotton, sugar and copra, and recruiters turned to the New Hebrides. The Queensland trade began in 1863, when Robert Towns, hoping to profit from the cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War, had 67 islanders from the New Hebrides and the Loyalty Islands brought to Brisbane. Over the next four decades some 55,000 to 62,500 Pacific Islanders were taken to Queensland, most of them from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. Some signed up willingly for three-year contracts; many others were tricked aboard or kidnapped at gunpoint, and around a quarter were under sixteen. Roughly 30 per cent of those taken to Queensland died there. At the height of the trade more than half the adult men of some islands were working abroad. Together with disease, the labour trade caused a severe fall in population, and islanders sometimes took revenge on recruiting ships and traders. Australia ended the trade in 1906 and deported most of the islanders under its White Australia policy, and Fiji and Samoa ended recruitment in 1910 and 1913.

Meanwhile British and French settlers competed for land, first for cotton and then for coconuts, coffee and cocoa. The Compagnie Calédonienne des Nouvelles-Hébrides, founded in 1882, claimed vast areas, and by 1906 French settlers outnumbered the British. Neither power would let the other annex the islands. A joint naval commission was set up in 1887 to protect settlers, and in 1889 the settlement of Franceville, now Port Vila, briefly declared itself an independent commune. In 1906 France and the United Kingdom agreed to rule the New Hebrides jointly as the Anglo-French Condominium.

The arrangement was unique and widely mocked as the "Pandemonium". There were two resident commissioners, two police forces, two legal systems, two currencies, two prisons and two sets of schools and hospitals, with only a joint court in common. Settlers could choose which system to live under, but Ni-Vanuatu could become citizens of neither, and to travel abroad they needed papers signed by both commissioners. Land seizures and labour abuses continued, and services were largely left to the missions. From the 1920s French planters also brought in thousands of contract workers from Vietnam.

In the Second World War the islands lay just behind the front line of the Japanese advance. From May 1942 United States forces built airfields, roads and a vast base on Espiritu Santo, which supported the Guadalcanal campaign, while about 10,000 Ni-Vanuatu men served in a labour corps. When the Americans left in 1945 they dumped much of their equipment into the sea at what is now called Million Dollar Point. The war's display of wealth fed the John Frum movement on Tanna, which had begun in the late 1930s as a rejection of missionary and colonial rule and a revival of kastom. The authorities jailed its leaders, but its followers came to expect the return of the American figure John Frum with cargo. The movement still exists as a church and a political party.

Land became the key issue in the 1960s, when Europeans owned about 30 per cent of the land and planters began clearing more for cattle. On Espiritu Santo, Chief Buluk and Jimmy Stevens founded the Nagriamel movement in 1966 to protect kastom land. In 1971 the Anglican priest Walter Lini founded the party that became the Vanuaʻaku Pati, which demanded independence and the return of land. Britain was willing, but France, fearing the effect on New Caledonia, resisted, and the colonial powers' rivalry split politics along English- and French-speaking lines. After years of boycotts and clashes, the Vanuaʻaku Pati won elections in 1979.

In 1980 Jimmy Stevens, backed by French-speaking settlers and by the Phoenix Foundation, an American libertarian group, declared Espiritu Santo independent as the State of Vemerana. The Republic of Vanuatu became independent on 30 July 1980 with Lini as prime minister. When Britain and France withdrew, Lini called in troops from Papua New Guinea, who ended the rebellion in what the press called the Coconut War; Stevens surrendered on 1 September after his son was shot dead at a roadblock. The new constitution returned all land to its customary owners.

Lini governed until 1991, following a non-aligned foreign policy and opposing French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Since then, coalitions have risen and fallen through frequent no-confidence votes, and in 1996 members of the paramilitary Vanuatu Mobile Force mounted a coup attempt over a pay dispute. Cyclone Pam struck in March 2015, killing 16 people and destroying homes across the southern islands, and Cyclone Harold followed in 2020.

Vanuatu also led a campaign, begun by Pacific law students, for the United Nations to ask the International Court of Justice what international law requires of states on climate change. The General Assembly adopted the request by consensus on 29 March 2023. Three prime ministers held office within eighteen months in 2023 and 2024, and on 17 December 2024 a magnitude 7.3 earthquake killed 19 people and heavily damaged Port Vila. After a snap election in January 2025, Jotham Napat, a former meteorologist from Tanna, became prime minister in February. On 23 July 2025 the court delivered its advisory opinion.