Solomon Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  Solomon Islands sits at one of the most contested crossroads on Earth, a scatter of more than a thousand islands in Melanesia where some of the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War unfolded, where the first European to set eyes on the archipelago died chasing a fantasy of biblical gold, and where a question posed in the twenty-first century is whether this small nation is a failed state or simply one that never had the chance to fully form. The total area of the country is 28,896 square kilometres, its population approaching 830,000 people, and its capital, Honiara, sits on the same island of Guadalcanal where Allied and Japanese forces killed each other in the tens of thousands. What drew the Spanish here in 1568? How did a place settled more than 30,000 years ago come to be governed, fought over, and eventually left to find its own way? And what does it mean today for a nation this size to sign a security pact with China that could permit the deployment of Chinese military forces on its soil?

• 2. Thirty Thousand Years Before Columbus

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  Kilu Cave on Buka Island holds the oldest evidence of human settlement in the Solomons, placing the first arrivals somewhere between 30,000 and 28,800 BC. They came from the Bismarck Islands and New Guinea during the Pleistocene, a time when sea levels were low enough that Buka and Bougainville were physically joined to the southern islands in a single landmass researchers call Greater Bougainville. That vast landform fractured as the Ice Age ended and seas rose, roughly 4,000 to 3,500 BC, producing the scattered islands that exist today. Poha Cave and Vatuluma Posovi Cave on Guadalcanal contain evidence of later settlers, dating from around 4,500 to 2,500 BC, whose ethnic identity remains unclear though they are believed to be the ancestors of speakers of the Central Solomon languages, a self-contained language family unlike any other spoken in the islands. From around 1,200 to 800 BC, Austronesian Lapita people began arriving from the Bismarcks, carrying their distinctive ceramics. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests the Lapita did something counterintuitive: they bypassed the already inhabited main islands and settled the Santa Cruz group first, only later back-migrating to the main chain. Their languages gradually became dominant, and today most of the 60-70 languages spoken in the Solomons belong to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. By the period AD 1000-1500, extensive permanent settlements existed throughout the islands, one of the most striking being the Roviana cultural complex off the southern coast of New Georgia, where a large number of megalithic shrines and other structures were built during the thirteenth century.

• 3. A Name Built on a Biblical Myth

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  On the 7th of February 1568, Spanish navigator Alvaro de Mendana de Neira landed on Santa Isabel, the first European ever to reach the Solomon Islands. He explored Makira, Guadalcanal, and Malaita before relations with the islanders soured and he returned to Peru in August of that year. Crucially, Mendana did not name the archipelago; he named only certain individual islands. The name that would eventually stick came from others who received word of his voyage and mapped his discovery. They conflated the islands with stories of Ophir, the city of gold mentioned in the Bible in connection with King Solomon, believing Mendana had found the source of Solomon's legendary wealth. So the entire country carries the name of a biblical king who had no connection to it whatsoever. Mendana returned in 1595 with a larger crew intending to colonise the islands, landing at Nendo in the Santa Cruz group and establishing a settlement at Gracioso Bay. The venture collapsed. Poor relations with the islanders and disease epidemics among the Spanish caused numerous deaths; Mendana himself died in October of that year. His navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queiros took command and abandoned the settlement, sailing north to the Philippines. Queiros returned to the region in 1606, sighting Tikopia and Taumako, though his primary destination was Vanuatu in the search for the mythical southern continent. After that, save for Abel Tasman's sighting of the remote Ontong Java Atoll in 1648, no European came near the Solomons for more than a century.

• 4. Blackbirding, Missionaries, and Colonial Rule

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  By the late eighteenth century, whaling vessels from Britain, the United States, and Australia were making regular visits to the Solomons for food, wood, and water. The visits sometimes ended in bloodshed, and the spread of European diseases hit islanders who had no immunity to them. Beginning in the 1840s and accelerating sharply in the 1860s, a practice known as blackbirding began: islanders were recruited, and often simply kidnapped, to serve as plantation labourers in Australia, Fiji, and Samoa. The blackbird trade was chronicled by writers including Jack London. Christian missionaries arrived in parallel, starting with a failed French Catholic mission in 1845, when Jean-Baptiste Epalle was killed by islanders on Santa Isabel. Anglican missionaries followed from the 1850s. In 1884, Germany annexed northeast New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and by 1886 had extended its reach over the North Solomon Islands. Britain and Germany formalised their respective spheres of influence that same year, with Britain claiming the south. The British declared a protectorate over the southern Solomons in March 1893. Charles Morris Woodford was appointed Resident Commissioner on the 17th of February 1897, tasked with curbing blackbirding and the illegal arms trade. He established his administrative headquarters on the small island of Tulagi after declaring it the protectorate capital in 1896. By 1900, under the Tripartite Convention of 1899, Germany ceded the Northern Solomons to Britain, with Bougainville and Buka remaining German, beginning a political boundary that would shape the region for generations. The colonial administration remained chronically underfunded; by 1902 there were only about 80 European colonists on the islands. The most violent flashpoint of the colonial era came in 1927 when Basiana of the Kwaio people killed colonial administrator William R. Bell on Malaita as Bell attempted to collect an unpopular head tax. Basiana and his accomplices were later executed.

• 5. The Pacific War Comes Ashore

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  In May 1942, Japanese forces launched Operation Mo, occupying Tulagi and most of the western Solomon Islands, then beginning construction of an airstrip on Guadalcanal. The British administration had already relocated to Auki on Malaita, and most of the European population had been evacuated. On the 7th of August 1942, Allied forces launched simultaneous amphibious landings on the Florida Islands at Tulagi and at Red Beach on Guadalcanal. What followed became one of the most prolonged and destructive campaigns of the Pacific War, running from 1942 through 1943 and extending to the end of 1943 in the Solomons more broadly. The human cost was staggering: the Solomon Islands Campaign cost the Allies approximately 7,100 men, 29 ships, and 615 aircraft. The Japanese lost 31,000 men, 38 ships, and 683 aircraft. Scattered across remote jungle and shoreline were coastwatchers, Solomon Islander and European observers who provided critical early warning of Japanese naval and aircraft movements. U.S. Admiral William Halsey later said of them: "The coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific." Around 3,200 men served in the Solomon Islands Labour Corps during the war, and about 6,000 enlisted in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force. Their contact with American forces produced lasting social effects; the Americans extensively developed Honiara, and the capital formally shifted there from Tulagi in 1952. Among the lesser-known details of the campaign is the role of islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who were the first to find the shipwrecked crew of PT-109, commanded by John F. Kennedy. They suggested carving a rescue message into a coconut and delivered it by paddling a dugout canoe. Kennedy kept the coconut on his desk when he became President.

• 6. Independence and the Tensions

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  Full self-government came in 1976, and on the 7th of July 1978 Solomon Islands gained independence under the Solomon Islands Act 1978, with Sir Peter Kenilorea of the Solomon Islands United Party becoming the first prime minister. The decades that followed were marked by political instability, with prime ministers cycling in and out through votes of no confidence. Solomon Mamaloni dominated the political landscape through much of the 1980s and 1990s, creating the Central Bank and national airline but also establishing a discretionary fund for politicians that fostered corruption. Excessive logging, conducted at rates described as unsustainable, drained the country's natural resources while government finances deteriorated. The crisis that nearly ended the state as a functioning entity is known simply as "the Tensions." For years, Malaitans had been migrating to Honiara and Guadalcanal seeking economic opportunities. In late 1998 the Isatabu Freedom Movement formed and began a campaign of violence against Malaitan settlers on Guadalcanal; the Malaita Eagle Force emerged in mid-1999 to protect Malaitans in return. On the 5th of June 2000, Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu, himself a Malaitan, was kidnapped by the MEF and resigned to secure his release. By early 2001 the economy had collapsed and the government was bankrupt. In April 2003, seven members of the Melanesian Brotherhood, including Brother Robin Lindsay, were killed on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal by the rebel leader Harold Keke. In July 2003, Australian and Pacific Islands police and troops arrived under the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, RAMSI, with a force of 2,200 police and troops from about 15 Pacific nations. Some 200 people had died in the conflict by the time violence ended and Keke surrendered.

• 7. The China Question

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  In September 2019, Solomon Islands switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, a decision that sparked rioting in Honiara when Manasseh Sogavare returned to power as prime minister after the 2019 election. The pivot deepened in March 2022 when Solomon Islands signed a memorandum of understanding on policing cooperation with China and then, in April 2022, concluded a full security cooperation agreement. A leaked draft of that agreement, verified by the Australian government, indicated that Beijing could deploy forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order. Sogavare said the pact would not undermine peace and harmony in the region. The response from Canberra was measured but pointed: Australia noted that Pacific Island nations have the right to make sovereign decisions while expressing concern about any action that could destabilise regional security. New Zealand and the United States voiced similar concerns. China also donated a shipment of replica firearms to the Solomon Islands police for training purposes. The agreement formalized what amounts to a potential Chinese military and naval presence in a country that has no regular armed forces of its own since 1978, that relies on a police force of nearly 500 for all border protection and maritime surveillance, and that has operated two patrol boats as its de facto navy. In May 2024, Jeremiah Manele was elected as the new prime minister following the National General Election, and the country's geopolitical alignment remains one of the most closely watched questions in the Pacific.

• 8. Coral, Coconuts, and a Coconut Messenger

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  Solomon Islands holds the second highest diversity of corals in the world, trailing only the Raja Ampat Islands in eastern Indonesia; a baseline survey in 2004 found 474 species of corals in the Solomons, as well as nine species that may be new to science. The country's forests cover 78.1% of its land area, placing it seventh globally in forest coverage as of 2022, yet those forests are under sustained pressure from logging. Rough wood makes up two-thirds of exports as of 2022. In 2017, 317,682 tons of coconuts were harvested, making the country the eighteenth ranked producer of coconuts worldwide, with copra accounting for 24% of exports. The country also produced 285,721 tons of palm oil in 2017, ranking it twenty-fourth globally. A 2025 report found that one third of Solomon Islanders have no access to basic drinking water and two thirds have no access to basic sanitation. Gold Ridge on Guadalcanal began gold mining in 1998 but the mine was closed after the riots in 2006. More than 230 varieties of orchids and other tropical flowers grow across the islands, and the Tinakula and Kavachi volcanoes remain the most active of several ongoing volcanic features. On the 2nd of April 2007 a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck, generating a tsunami that killed at least 52 people, destroyed more than 900 homes, and extended the shoreline of Ranongga Island by up to 70 metres as land was thrust upward, exposing coral reefs that had never seen daylight. The Kurukuru futsal team holds the world record for the fastest goal in an official futsal match, scored by captain Elliot Ragomo against New Caledonia three seconds into a game in July 2009.