The island is located in the central Pacific Ocean and was originally inhabited by immigrant Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians. English Captain John Fearn was the first European to visit the island, which he named Pleasant Island. Throughout the 19th century, the island was frequently visited by whaling vessels until it was annexed by Germany in 1888.
In the year 1900, the Australian Albert Ellis found a stone on his desk in Sydney that a traveler had sent him in the hope that it would be used to make balls for children. The analysis of the stone instead revealed the phosphate that should make Naura a very rich country. In 1905, an Anglo-German company began extracting the mineral resources.
At the outbreak of World War I, Australia occupied Nauru, which at the end of the war became Australian mandated territory. During World War II, the island was occupied by Japan, which deported over 1000 residents to Truk in present-day Micronesia. They were forced into forced labor, and only 700 returned home after the war. The island was again submerged in Australia and a multinational English-Australian-New Zealand group resumed the extraction of phosphate.
According to thesciencetutor, the Naurus are fishermen, so they had difficulty adapting to mining. They were instead replaced by immigrant Chinese. Immigration assumed such an extent that in 1964, the Australian government proposed to the Naurus to move to another island or to Australia. The indigenous people blankly rejected the proposal, demanding immediate autonomy as well as a halt to the extraction of the country’s only natural resource.
The mining was nationalized in 1967, which led to a tremendous growth in per-capita income. In 1992, the minimum wage was $ 6,500. On 31 January 1968, Nauru declared himself independent and rejected the Australian attempts at continued domination. It remains the smallest republic on earth. A year later, it was admitted as a member of the British state community, the Commonwealth.
In 1970, the mining company was nationalized and every family head became a shareholder in it. This raised average income above the level in many industrialized countries, although income distribution is not even.
