Marshall Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Marshall Islands is 98.62 percent water. No other sovereign state on Earth carries so much ocean against so little land. Its 29 coral atolls and five main islands scatter across the Northwestern Pacific in two long chains, Ratak in the east and Ralik in the west, with 1,220 other very small islands besides. Add it all together and you get roughly 70 square miles of land floating in about 180,000 square miles of sea. The capital, Majuro, holds about half the country's people. How do you build a nation on coral that barely rises above the waves? How did sailors here cross open ocean to islands they could not yet see, reading the swell with their bodies? Why did the United States detonate 67 nuclear devices on these atolls, and why are some islanders still in exile decades later? And how did a place with few natural resources become the second largest ship registry in the world, then the first country to make a cryptocurrency legal tender?

• 2. Reading The Ocean

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  Austronesian settlers reached these atolls as early as the 2nd millennium BC, arriving, linguistic and anthropological studies suggest, from the Solomon Islands. They brought coconuts, giant swamp taro, breadfruit, and domesticated chickens, the crops and animals that made the islands permanently habitable. Radiocarbon dating places possible habitation at Bikini Atoll as early as 1200 BCE, though the samples may have come from insecure contexts. Firmer evidence of human life around the 1st century CE turns up at the village of Laura on Majuro and on Kwajalein Atoll.

  The southern islands receive heavier rainfall than the north, and that split shaped how people ate. Wet southern communities lived on taro and breadfruit; northerners leaned on pandanus and coconuts. The southern atolls, better watered, probably supported larger and denser populations. Settlers may have seeded distant islands by leaving coconuts at seasonal fishing camps, returning years later to settle for good.

  Marshallese sailors crossed between islands on walaps, canoes built from breadfruit-tree wood and lashed with coconut-fiber rope. They set their initial course by the stars. The deeper skill came from the water itself. They learned that ocean swells refract around the undersea slope of an atoll, and that when refracted swells from different directions meet, they create disruption patterns a trained pilot could read to find land hidden below the horizon. Interviewed by anthropologists, some sailors described navigating by both sight and the changing motion of the boat. To teach this knowledge, they wove stick charts mapping the swells. Unlike western charts, these were tools for instruction and for study before a voyage. Navigators left them behind when they finally set sail.

• 3. Strangers At The Reef

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  On the 21st of August 1526, the Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar became the first European to sight the Marshall Islands. Commanding the Santa Maria de la Victoria, he saw an atoll with a green lagoon, possibly Taongi, but strong currents and water too deep for his anchor kept him from landing. He sailed for Guam two days later. His crew were survivors of a larger expedition that had left Spain in 1525 under Garcia Jofre de Loaisa.

  On the 2nd of January 1528, the expedition of Alvaro de Saavedra Ceron landed on an uninhabited island, possibly in Ailinginae Atoll, resupplying over six days. They named the islands Los Pintados, the Painted Ones, for the tattooed people they met. Later Spanish visitors included Ruy Lopez de Villalobos and Alvaro de Mendana de Neira, though imprecise 16th century logs leave real doubt about which islands they actually saw.

  The 6th of July 1565 brought near disaster when the San Jeronimo almost wrecked at Ujelang Atoll after the pilot Lope Martin led a mutiny. Crew members retook the ship and marooned Martin and twenty-six other mutineers in the Marshalls. By the late 16th century, Spanish galleons kept to a sea lane at 13 degrees north, provisioning at Guam and avoiding the Marshalls as unprofitable islands in dangerous waters.

  In 1788 the British captains John Marshall and Thomas Gilbert passed through. Their vessels had carried convicts in the First Fleet to Botany Bay and were bound for Guangzhou. On the 25th of June 1788 they traded peacefully with islanders at Mili Atoll, possibly the first European contact since the Mendana expedition of 1568. Later charts gave the islands John Marshall's name.

  From the 1820s through the 1850s the islanders grew hostile to western ships, in part because some captains punished theft violently and others abducted Marshallese for sale into slavery on Pacific plantations. In February 1824 the people of Mili Atoll killed marooned sailors from the American whaler Globe. As late as 1851 and 1852, three separate attacks struck ships at Ebon, Jaluit, and Namdrik Atolls.

• 4. Copra And Flags

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  In 1857 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent two families to start a mission church and school at Ebon. By 1875 missionaries had founded churches on five atolls and baptized more than 200 islanders. A traveler noted that by the mid-1870s most women on Ebon wore western clothes and many men wore trousers. Contact also carried disease, with lethal outbreaks of influenza, measles, syphilis, and typhoid fever, while alcohol and firearms brought new conflicts between rival iroij, the Marshallese chiefs.

  The copra trade reshaped the economy. In 1859 Adolph Capelle and another merchant set up a trading post at Ebon for the German firm Hoffschlaeger and Stapenhorst. When it went bankrupt in 1863, Capelle partnered with the Portuguese ex-whaler Anton Jose DeBrum to form Capelle and Co. In 1873 they moved their headquarters to Jaluit, home of Kabua, a powerful iroij. By 1885 the German firms Hernsheim and Co. and the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen-Gesellschaft controlled two-thirds of the trade.

  Germany moved from commerce to control. On the 26th of November 1878 the warship SMS Ariadne anchored at Jaluit to negotiate most favored nation status, with military demonstrations meant, as one officer later said, to show the islanders the power of the Europeans. On the 29th a treaty with Kabua and other Ralik chiefs secured a German fueling station and free use of the harbor.

  On the 29th of August 1885, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck authorized annexation as a protectorate. A gunboat reached Jaluit on the 13th of October, and on the 15th the iroij Kabua, Loeak, Nelu, Lagajime, and Launa signed a protection treaty in German and Marshallese. The Marshallese text made no distinction of rank among them, but the German text named Kabua King of the Marshall Islands. Nauru was added to the protectorate in 1888. The joint-stock Jaluit Company financed the colony's administration, collecting license fees and a poll tax and nominating staff, until on the 31st of March 1906 Germany took direct control and folded the territory into German New Guinea.

• 5. Empire And War

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  On the 29th of September 1914, at the start of World War I, the Imperial Japanese Navy invaded Enewetak, taking Jaluit the next day and stationing an occupation force on the 3rd of October. After the war, Germany's Pacific colonies north of the equator became the Japanese South Seas Mandate under the League of Nations, and Germany ceded the Marshalls to Japan with the Treaty of Versailles on the 28th of June 1919.

  Japanese surveys judged the islands' value to be mainly strategic, a potential springboard for southward expansion. Yet Japanese settlers stayed a minority of under 1,000 people throughout the period, because the islands lay far from Japan and offered the most limited economic potential in Micronesia. Japan declared its intent to leave the League on the 27th of March 1933 and withdrew in 1935 while still holding the mandate.

  Military planners first dismissed the Marshalls as too distant to fortify, then reconsidered as long-range bombers made them a forward base against Australia and the United States. In 1939 and 1940 the navy built airfields on Kwajalein, Maloelap, and Wotje and seaplane facilities at Jaluit.

  On the 1st of February 1942 the United States Pacific Fleet struck Jaluit, Kwajalein, Maloelap, and Wotje in the Marshalls-Gilberts raids, the first American air raids on Japanese territory. The United States invaded on the 31st of January 1944, taking Majuro and Kwajalein at once. By autumn 1944 the Americans held all the Marshalls except Jaluit, Maloelap, Mili, and Wotje. Those four cut-off garrisons ran out of provisions in late 1944, suffering high casualties from starvation and disease.

• 6. The Atomic Proving Ground

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  Between 1946 and 1958 the Marshall Islands served as the Pacific Proving Grounds, where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll. Operation Crossroads began the testing at Bikini in 1946 after residents were forcibly evacuated. On the 1st of November 1952, local date, the world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Mike, was detonated at Enewetak, producing significant regional fallout.

  The Castle Bravo test of the first deployable thermonuclear bomb went badly wrong. Unforeseen reactions involving lithium-7 made the explosion more than twice as large as predicted, and the fallout spread east onto the inhabited Rongelap and Rongerik Atolls, which had not been evacuated. Many islanders suffered radiation burns and radioactive dusting, sharing the fate of the Japanese fishermen aboard the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, with little if any compensation.

  The damage outlasted the tests. Of more than 60 affected islands, just one was cleaned by the U.S. government, and islanders still await the 2 billion dollars in compensation assessed by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal. Many descendants live in exile because the islands remain contaminated with high levels of radiation. On Runit Island, the Runit Dome was built to hold U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium, and concerns persist about its deterioration and a possible radioactive spill.

• 7. Building A Republic

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  On the 1st of May 1979 the United States recognized the constitution of the Marshall Islands and the establishment of its government, a document blending American and British constitutional ideas. The country signed a Compact of Free Association with the United States in 1986, and trusteeship ended under United Nations Security Council Resolution 683 on the 22nd of December 1990. The Marshall Islands joined the United Nations on the 17th of September 1991. Under the compact the U.S. holds sole responsibility for defense and lets Marshallese emigrate to the United States without a visa.

  Real power long rested with the iroij despite the constitution. Only in 1999, after corruption allegations, was the aristocratic government overthrown, when Imata Kabua was replaced by the commoner Kessai Note and the United Democratic Party won the general election. The country runs a mixed parliamentary-presidential system. Voters in 24 constituencies elect senators to the unicameral Nitijela, which then elects the president. Four of the five presidents chosen since 1979 have been traditional paramount chiefs.

  In January 2016 the Nitijela elected Hilda Heine as the first female president, after Casten Nemra lost a confidence vote two weeks into office. In January 2020 David Kabua, son of founding president Amata Kabua, was elected, unseating Heine. Migration ran alongside this politics. By the 2010 US Census, over 7,000 Marshallese lived in Hawaii and over 4,000 in Arkansas, with about 4,300 settling in Springdale, the largest concentration outside the islands.

  The Marshalls kept a role in spaceflight too. All five SpaceX Falcon 1 flights launched from Omelek Island within Kwajalein Atoll, and the fourth was the first privately developed, fully liquid-fueled vehicle to reach orbit.

• 8. A Nation On Coral

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  The average altitude across the entire country is 7 feet above sea level. That single number governs everything about its future. The sea around these Pacific islands has risen 3.4 millimeters a year since 1993, more than twice the global rate. With one meter of sea level rise, 37 percent of buildings in Kwajalein and 50 percent in Ebeye would be permanently flooded. With two meters, every building in Majuro would be flooded or at high risk. The government has pledged net zero emissions by 2050.

  The economy improvises around scarcity. Imports far outpace exports, and U.S. assistance is the mainstay, committed at 57.7 million dollars a year through 2013 and 62.7 million through 2023, when most compact aid was set to expire before being extended in 2023 for another 20 years. Majuro is the world's busiest tuna transshipment port, handling 704 transshipments totaling 444,393 tons in 2015. The Marshallese ship registry, begun in 1990, was the second largest in the world by 2017, behind Panama, even though no requirement ties a flag vessel to a Marshallese owner.

  The country keeps testing financial frontiers. In February 2018 it became the first nation to recognize a cryptocurrency as its own legal tender, passing the Sovereign Currency Act, which was later repealed in August 2025. In November 2025 the Ministry of Finance announced ENRA, a universal basic income program paying citizens through direct deposit, mailed checks, or a digital wallet called Lomalo, which translates to shared waters.

  In October 2011 the government reserved nearly 2,000,000 square kilometers of ocean as the world's largest shark sanctuary, banning all shark fishing within it. For a state that is almost entirely sea, protecting the water may be the truest act of sovereignty, even as some question whether the Marshall Islands can enforce so vast a zone.