History of Vanuatu

Republic of Vanuatu is a Melanesian island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. Many of the islands of Vanuatu have been inhabited for thousands of years with the oldest archaeological evidence dating back to 1300 BC.

In 1606 a Spanish expedition led by explorers Luis Váez de Torres and Pedro Fernández de Quirós became the first from Europe to reach the islands which they believed to be part of Terra Australis. Europeans began settling the islands in the late 18th century after the British explorer James Cook visited the islands on his second voyage and gave them the name New Hebrides. In 1887 the islands came under the administration of a joint French-British naval commission.

It was at this time that missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, arrived on the islands. Settlers also came, looking for land on which to establish cotton plantations. When international cotton prices collapsed, they switched to coffee, cocoa, bananas, and, most successfully, coconuts. Initially, British subjects from Australia made up the majority, but the establishment of the Caledonian Company of the New Hebrides in 1882 soon tipped the balance in favor of French subjects. By the turn of the century, the French outnumbered the British two to one. 

The jumbling of French and British interests in the islands brought petitions for one or another of the two powers to annex the territory. In 1906, however, France and the United Kingdom agreed to administer the islands jointly.

Called the British-French Condominium, it was a unique form of government, with separate governmental systems that came together only in a joint court. Melanesians were barred from acquiring the citizenship of either power. 

In 1906, the French and British agreed to an Anglo-French Condominium on the New Hebrides. Vanuatu suffered from the practice of black birding wherein half of the adult male population of some of the islands became indentured workers in Australia. Due to diseases introduced by the new European populations, the native population fell to a mere 45,000 in 1935.

During World War II the islands of Efate and Espiritu Santo were used as allied military bases. In the 1960s the ni-Vanuatu people started to press for self-governance and, later, independence. Full sovereignty was finally granted by both European nations on July 30, 1980. Subsequently, Vanuatu joined the UN in 1981 and the Non-Aligned Movement in 1983. During the 1990s Vanuatu experienced political instability which eventually resulted in a more decentralised government. The Vanuatu Mobile Force, a paramilitary group, attempted a coup in 1996 because of a pay dispute; there were allegations of corruption in the government of Maxime Carlot Korman. New elections have been called for several times since 1997, most recently in 2004.