Solomon Islands' history: named by Spain, bounded in 1899 and governed from a wartime airfield

Who settled the islands before any European arrived

People from the Bismarck Islands and New Guinea reached the archipelago in the Pleistocene, between about 30,000 and 28,000 BC, on the evidence of Kilu Cave on Buka Island, now part of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. Sea levels were lower and Buka, Bougainville and the southern Solomons formed one landmass, called Greater Bougainville, which split into the present islands as the seas rose at the end of the Ice Age, around 4000 to 3500 BC. On Guadalcanal itself, settlement is dated to about 4500 to 2500 BC at Poha Cave and Vatuluma Posovi Cave. Speakers of the Central Solomon languages, a small family unrelated to the others spoken in the country, are thought to descend from those first settlers.

Austronesian Lapita people arrived from the Bismarcks between about 1200 and 800 BC, bringing their stamped pottery. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests they passed over the inhabited main islands, settled the Santa Cruz group first and moved back west later. Britannica dates Lapita pottery in Santa Cruz and the Reef Islands to about 1500 BC, earlier than Wikipedia's range, and both figures are given here as each source gives them. Over time the newcomers' languages came to dominate, and most of the 60 to 70 languages spoken in the islands now belong to the Oceanic branch of Austronesian.

Communities lived in small villages, grew their own food and traded between islands. Off the south coast of New Georgia the Roviana cultural complex built megalithic shrines in the 13th century, and the fortress and shrines of Nusa Roviana were the hub of a regional trade network from the 17th to the 19th century, when Roviana grew into a regional power through trade and headhunting raids. The national statistics office dates the arrival of Polynesian islanders on the small outer islands to around 1500 AD, which is why Rennell, Bellona, Tikopia, Anuta, Sikaiana and Ontong Java speak Polynesian languages today.

How a Spanish voyage named the islands

Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, sailing from Peru, sighted Santa Isabel on 7 February 1568, the first European to reach the islands. He explored Makira, Guadalcanal and Malaita and sailed back to Peru in August 1568. The sources disagree on the name. Wikipedia's history article says Mendaña found signs of alluvial gold on Guadalcanal and named the group himself; its main article says he named only individual islands, and that others who heard of the voyage conflated it with King Solomon's wealth and called the group Islas Salomón. Britannica calls the rumours of gold unjustified.

Mendaña came back in 1595 with a larger crew to found a colony at Graciosa Bay on Nendö in the Santa Cruz Islands. Disease and poor relations with the islanders broke the settlement, Mendaña died there in October, and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós took the survivors on to the Philippines. Queirós returned in 1606 and sighted Tikopia and Taumako. Geographers then came to doubt that the islands existed, and Britannica records that they were not accurately charted until the late 18th century, after Philip Carteret of HMS Swallow reached the Santa Cruz Islands and Malaita in 1767 and Louis Antoine de Bougainville named Choiseul in 1768. The French expedition of Jean-François de La Pérouse was wrecked on Vanikoro in 1788; its fate was settled only in 1826, when Peter Dillon found its relics on Tikopia.

Whalers came for food, wood and water from late in the 18th century, followed by traders after turtle shell, sea cucumber, copra and sandalwood. Contact spread diseases to which islanders had no immunity and shifted power towards coastal groups that could get European weapons. From the 1840s, and faster from the 1860s, islanders were recruited, often by kidnapping, to work plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, a trade known as blackbirding. Britannica puts recruitment at about 30,000 labourers between 1870 and 1910, and the plantation pidgin they brought home became the root of Pijin. Missions followed: a French Catholic attempt on Santa Isabel ended when Jean-Baptiste Epalle was killed in 1845, Anglicans arrived from the 1850s, and Catholic missionaries settled successfully in 1898.

Why Britain declared a protectorate in the south

Germany annexed northeast New Guinea in 1884 and extended its rule over the North Solomons in 1886, and an Anglo-German agreement that year gave Britain a sphere of influence over the southern islands. In June 1893 Captain Herbert Gibson of HMS Curacoa declared the southern Solomon Islands a British protectorate. Britannica gives three reasons: the abuses of labour recruitment, the need to regulate contact between islanders and European settlers, and, mainly, the threat of annexation by France.

The protectorate was meant to cost little. The Colonial Office proposed in 1897 that the Australian colonies take it on, and the Australian premiers refused at that year's Colonial Conference because they would not carry the expense. Charles Morris Woodford was appointed Resident Commissioner on 17 February 1897 and set up his headquarters on the small island of Tulagi. Rennell and Bellona, the Santa Cruz Islands and the outlying islands were added in 1898 and 1899. Under the Tripartite Convention of 1899, Germany handed Choiseul, Santa Isabel, the Shortlands and Ontong Java to Britain in 1900 and kept Buka and Bougainville, in return for British recognition of German claims in Western Samoa. That trade drew the border between Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea that stands today.

Development was left to companies and churches. By 1902 there were only about 80 European colonists. Levers Pacific Plantations, a Lever Brothers subsidiary, built a copra plantation industry that employed many islanders, while schools and medical care stayed with the missions. Order was kept by force. In 1927 District Commissioner William R. Bell, enforcing an unpopular head tax, was killed on Malaita by Basiana of the Kwaio, together with a cadet and 13 Solomon Islanders in his charge. The punitive expedition that followed, backed by an Australian warship, killed at least 60 Kwaio, detained nearly 200 at Tulagi and destroyed or desecrated sacred sites and objects. Basiana was hanged in public on 29 June 1928, and Britannica records that his young sons were made to watch.

The protectorate's own figures show what the period cost. The national statistics office estimates that the population fell from well above 100,000 at the start of the 20th century to 94,000 at the first census-type count in 1931, and it points to epidemics in the 19th century and headhunting into the 20th as the reasons.

What the Guadalcanal campaign left behind

Japanese forces occupied Tulagi and most of the western Solomons in May 1942 and began building an airstrip on Guadalcanal. The British administration had already moved to Auki on Malaita and most Europeans had been evacuated to Australia. On 7 August 1942 about 6,000 men of the US 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal and Florida Island, surprising some 2,000 Japanese defenders, and took the almost finished airfield within 36 hours. They named it Henderson Field. Two nights later, in the Battle of Savo Island, Japanese cruisers and destroyers sank three American cruisers and crippled an Australian one, and so many ships were lost north of Guadalcanal over the following months that the channel became known as Ironbottom Sound. Japanese strength on the island peaked at 36,000 troops in October 1942. The last 12,000 were evacuated in the first week of February 1943, and resistance ended on 8 February.

Solomon Islanders worked and fought on the Allied side. Around 3,200 men served in the Solomon Islands Labour Corps and some 6,000 enlisted in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force. Coastwatchers on Japanese-held islands reported ship and aircraft movements, and Admiral William Halsey later said that "the coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific." Two scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, were the first to find the shipwrecked crew of PT-109, John F. Kennedy's boat, and carried a rescue message on a coconut by dugout canoe.

The war gave the country its capital. Tulagi had been destroyed in the fighting, and Honiara, beside the American airfield and logistics base on the Guadalcanal coast, had military buildings and flat land. The capital moved there from Tulagi in 1952. No war reparations were paid and the pre-war plantations, once the mainstay of the economy, were in ruins, so reconstruction was slow.

How Maasina Rule pushed the protectorate towards self-government

Men who came home from the Labour Corps carried the war into politics. Malaitan leaders including Aliki Nono'ohimae, Nori and Jonathan Fifi'i founded Maasina Rule, a name from the 'Are'are language for the rule of siblings together, to improve islanders' economic position, gain autonomy and speak for them to the administration. Britannica dates the movement from 1944 to 1952. It spread beyond Malaita. In 1947 the British launched Operation De-Louse and arrested the leaders under the Sedition Act; most were sentenced to six and a half years' hard labour. Villages refused taxes en masse, and under Operation Jericho some 2,000 people were arrested on Malaita alone. In 1951 and 1952 the administration negotiated with the imprisoned leaders, released them and agreed to an island council for Malaita.

Elected government came in stages. Legislative and Executive Councils were set up in 1960; the first national election, for the Honiara seat, was held in 1964; and by 1967 all but one of the 15 representative seats were filled by election. A 1970 constitution merged the councils into a single Governing Council run through committees. Elected members opposed it, and a 1974 constitution brought a Westminster cabinet and a Chief Minister, first Solomon Mamaloni from July 1974. The territory was renamed Solomon Islands in 1975 and became self-governing in January 1976, a year after Papua New Guinea's independence.

Wikipedia's history article notes that outside a small educated group in Honiara there was little indigenous independence movement, and that the oil price shock of 1973 had made the protectorate dearer for Britain to support. In the western islands, fear of a state run from Honiara or Malaita produced the Western Breakaway Movement. A conference in London in 1977 agreed on independence, granted on 7 July 1978 under the Solomon Islands Act 1978. Peter Kenilorea became the first prime minister, the British monarch remained head of state through a governor-general, and Solomon Islands joined the Commonwealth.

What happened during the years called the Tensions

The first two decades of independence ran on logging money. Much of the budget came from timber cut at an unsustainable rate, and Wikipedia's account links a discretionary fund for politicians, created under Solomon Mamaloni, to fraud and corruption. Under the economic pressure lay a question about land on Guadalcanal. Ground around Honiara and the airfield had been taken over during the war, and according to Wikipedia's history article its customary owners were never compensated; meanwhile people from Malaita had been moving for decades to Honiara and the Guadalcanal plains for work.

In late 1998 the Isatabu Freedom Movement, first called the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army, began driving Malaitan settlers out of rural Guadalcanal. About 20,000 Malaitans fled to Honiara or back to Malaita, by the history article's count, and it gives about 30,000 refugees over the whole conflict. The Malaita Eagle Force formed in mid-1999 to defend Malaitan interests. The government declared a four-month state of emergency and asked Australia and New Zealand for help, which was refused. On 5 June 2000 the Malaita Eagle Force, armed from raided police armouries, detained Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu and forced his resignation, an event Britannica calls a coup. Parliament elected his successor by 23 votes to 21.

The Townsville and Marau agreements ended most of the fighting between the two militias, but the Guadalcanal militant Harold Keke refused to sign, and the conflict moved to the Weather Coast of southern Guadalcanal. In Honiara armed men turned to extortion. By early 2001 the government was bankrupt, and in December 2002 the finance minister resigned after being forced at gunpoint to sign a cheque to militants. In April 2003 Keke's group killed seven members of the Melanesian Brotherhood, six of whom had gone in search of a brother already killed; the Anglican church commemorates them on 24 April.

Counts of the dead differ: Wikipedia's main article says some 200 people were killed, its history article gives an estimated 100. The scholars Kabutaulaka (2001) and Dinnen (2002), cited there, argue that the label of ethnic conflict oversimplifies a dispute over land and resources. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to examine the period, in 2008 by Wikipedia's dating and 2009 by Britannica's. It held hearings in 2010 and 2011 and delivered its final report in February 2012. The report was not sent to Parliament or published as the commission's founding law required, and in April 2013 one of its editors released an unofficial copy.

How the regional mission restored order

In April 2003 Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza asked Australia for urgent help. Australia offered to lead a regional mission if the Governor-General requested it on Cabinet's advice and the region endorsed it, and Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers did so in June 2003 under the Biketawa Declaration of 2000. Parliament backed the request unanimously. From 24 July 2003 more than 2,000 soldiers, police and civilians from Australia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu arrived at Henderson airport under the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, known in Pijin as Helpem Fren. Keke surrendered to the mission in August 2003. By the mission's own count its first 100 days saw 3,700 firearms destroyed, 340 arrests and the government payroll restored.

The mission stayed fourteen years and changed shape as it went. Its military element shrank from November 2003 while civilian advisers rebuilt the public finances. An Australian officer, Adam Dunning, was shot dead in Honiara in December 2004, the mission's only death caused by armed opposition. After the April 2006 election, riots burned and looted Chinese-owned businesses in Honiara's Chinatown and seriously injured 25 of the mission's police; the new prime minister resigned after eight days. Successive governments disagreed about the mission: one prime minister in 2006 and 2007 accused it of being dominated by Australia and undermining sovereignty, while his successor said it was there by invitation and supported it. The mission's own annual People's Survey reported public support above 85%. Revenue collections passed SBD1 billion for the first time in 2010. The military element left in 2013, and the mission, by then police only, ended on 30 June 2017. In 2014 the Lowy Institute estimated Australia's spending on it at A$2.6 billion.

What has tested the settlement since the mission left

In September 2019 Solomon Islands ended recognition of Taiwan and established relations with the People's Republic of China. The premier of Malaita Province opposed the change, held an independence referendum in 2020 that the national government dismissed as illegitimate, and continued to receive support from Taiwan and the United States. On 24 November 2021 protesters, mostly from Malaita, tried to storm Parliament; buildings beside it were burned and Honiara's Chinatown was looted over three days, and police later found three bodies in a burned building. Australia sent police and troops at the government's request under the bilateral security treaty of 2017, the first time it had been activated, and Papua New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand also sent personnel. A motion of no confidence failed on 6 December 2021.

In April 2022 Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with China after a draft was leaked in March; Australia, New Zealand and the United States said they were concerned. A law passed in September 2022 put back the general election due in 2023, the government arguing that the country could not host the Pacific Games in November 2023 and hold an election in the same year, and the vote took place in April 2024. In June 2026 Australia and Solomon Islands agreed to begin negotiating a comprehensive treaty.