Colonial Era
European contact began in the 16th century. Whalers, slave traders, and merchant vessels arrived in great numbers in the 19th century, and the resulting upheaval fomented local tribal conflicts and introduced damaging European diseases. In an effort to restore a measure of order, the Gilbert Islands and the neighboring Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) were forced to become the British protectorate of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892. Banaba (Ocean Island) was annexed in 1901 after the discovery of phosphate deposits.
The entire collection, plus Fanning and Washington islands (part of the Line Islands), was made a British colony, also called Gilbert and Ellice Islands, in 1916, as part of the British Western Pacific Territories(BWPT). Most of the Line Islands including Christmas Island, the Phoenix and even the Union (Tokelau) islands (until 1925) were incorporated piecemeal into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands over the next 20 years. The BWPT was a colonial entity created in 1877, and governed by a single High Commissioner) until 1971, only five years before its abolition.
One very famous colonial officer in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony was Sir Arthur Grimble (1888–1956), at first as a cadet officer in 1914, under Edward Carlyon Eliot who was Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert & Ellice Islands colony from 1913 to 1920. This period is described in Eliot's book "Broken Atoms" (autobiographical reminiscences) (Pub. G. Bles, London, 1938) and in Sir Arthur Grimble's "A Pattern of Islands" (Pub. John Murray, London, 1952). Arthur Grimble became the Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1926.
There is speculation that Amelia Earhart might have crash-landed her plane at Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands group during her 1937 attempt to fly around the world.
Japan seized part of the islands during World War II to form part of their island defenses. In November 1943, Allied forces threw themselves against Japanese positions at Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts, resulting in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific campaign. The battle was a major turning point in the war for the Allies.
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Famous quotes containing the words colonial and/or era:
“The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There’s very little difference between a dead Swede and a young man who’s had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)