The Marshall Islands are an archipelago of thirty-four low-lying atolls in the Western Pacific, lying in a double arc running north-south at latitude 5-14 North and longitude 162-173 East. In an area encompassing 800,000 square miles, the Marshalls has a total land area of only 70 square miles. The population of 50,000 (1999 census) is distributed throughout twenty-four inhabited atolls, but over two-thirds of Marshallese are crowded onto two atolls: Majuro, the capital, and Kwajalein, the site of a U.S. missile-testing base.
The Marshalls was first settled about 2,000 years ago, probably from central Melanesia. The Marshallese language, a member of the Micronesian language family, is closely related to the languages of its neighbors in the Carolines to the west. Although Marshallese share a common language and cultural tradition, minor differences distinguish the eastern chain (Ratak) from the western (Ralik). Marshallese have always been skilled navigators, employing celestial navigation systems similar to those used throughout Micronesia, as well as distinctive stick charts to map wave patterns. Paramount chiefs (iroij) once had absolute authority over their people and even today retain primary rights to the land.
The first recorded European visits to the Marshalls date back to the early sixteenth century. Two centuries later, the British sea captain John Marshall gave his name to the group. Otto von Kotzebue, a Russian naval commander, explored and mapped the archipelago on his visits there in 1817 and 1824. American Protestant missionaries began evangelizing the islands in 1857, just a few years before Adolph Capelle and Anton DeBrum arrived to establish the beginnings of the trade in dried coconut meat, or copra (the source of coconut oil).
To expand its copra trade interests in the area, Germany signed a treaty in 1878 with the most powerful chief in the Ralik group. The combined pressure of the German trade firms led to full German annexation of the Marshalls in October 1885. The Jaluit Company, formed by the merger of two large trading firms, was given full administrative authority over the Marshalls until 1906. Afterward, the German government directly administered the islands from its headquarters in Rabaul.
At the outbreak of World War I, Japan occupied all former German possessions north of the equator. After 1914, the Japanese Navy was responsible for the administration of the Marshalls, with its capital in Jaluit. In 1919 the Marshalls was officially entrusted to Japan as a League of Nations mandate, after which a government bureaucracy was set up to rule the islands. Japanese fortification of the islands began in 1940, and the military facilities were used in the Japanese invasion of Kiribati and Nauru.
In early 1944, U.S. forces captured Kwajalein and Enewetak, following which the U.S. Navy established a military administration over the other islands in the group. After the war, the Marshalls, together with the remainder of the former Japanese Mandate, were designated the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and placed by the United Nations under U.S. administrative authority. The capital was transferred from Jaluit to Majuro at that time. Between 1946 and 1958 the islands of Bikini and Enewetak were evacuated and used as sites for nuclear testing. From 1960 on, Kwajalein was developed into a defensive missile-testing site and supported a large American community.
In 1979, following ten years of negotiations with the United States over its political status, the Marshalls became self-governing under a parliamentary democracy, ending nearly a century of colonial rule. The constitution of the Republic of the Marshall Islands provides for an elected legislature as well as the Council of Iroij, with its twelve paramount chiefs as members. The independent status of the Marshall Islands was formalized in October 1986 when it signed the Compact of Free Association with the United States and was subsequently admitted as a member of the U.N.
