Fiji Islands historical timeline

Chronology

1. c. 3500–1000 BC — Pottery shows the islands settled by Austronesian peoples, with Melanesians following around a thousand years later. Either the Lapita people or their ancestors are the likely first arrivals; humans have been here since the second millennium BC.
2. 1643 — The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sights Vanua Levu and the north Taveuni archipelago while looking for the Great Southern Continent — the first known European visitor.
3. 1774 — James Cook visits one of the southern Lau islands. The islands are not charted until 1789, when William Bligh, cast adrift from the Bounty, sails between Viti Levu and Vanua Levu en route to Batavia.
4. 1830s–1840 — Christian missionaries arrive from Tonga and Tahiti, and by 1840 the European settlement at Levuka has grown to about forty houses. The 1840s are a decade of war between Fijian clans.
5. 1865 — The blackbirding era begins, with the first New Hebridean and Solomon Islands labourers transported to work cotton plantations after the American Civil War cut off the United States supply. Most were recruited by deceit; thousands of indigenous Fijians were also sold into plantation slavery.
6. 1871 — In June, Cakobau is declared monarch — Tui Viti — and the Kingdom of Fiji is established, with most chiefs agreeing to take part. Conflict with the Kai Colo of the Viti Levu interior follows, and the government forms an army to subjugate them.
7. 1874 — Faced with settlers refusing to pay taxes and a collapsed cotton price, the Cakobau government approaches Britain, and the Colony of Fiji is established.
8. 1875–1876 — A measles epidemic kills over 40,000 Fijians, about one third of the population. It arrived with Cakobau and his sons, who caught the disease in Sydney during the annexation celebrations and whose ship the colonial administrators chose not to quarantine. Colonial officials then spread it to the highlanders at Navuso, and a widespread uprising followed.
9. 1879 — Governor Gordon, having decided in 1878 to import indentured labourers from India for the sugarcane fields, receives the first 463 on 14 May — the beginning of some 61,000 who came before the scheme ended in 1916. This is the origin of modern Fiji's two communities.
10. 1970 — The Union Jack is lowered at sunset on 9 October in Suva and the Fijian flag raised after dawn on 10 October; the country became independent at midnight. A cabinet system had been introduced in 1967 with Ratu Kamisese Mara as first Chief Minister.
11. 1987 — Two military coups, precipitated by a growing perception that the government was dominated by the Indo-Fijian community. The second replaces both the Fijian monarchy and the Governor General with a non-executive president.
12. 1990 — A new constitution institutionalises ethnic Fijian domination of the political system, opposed by the Group Against Racial Discrimination. Sitiveni Rabuka, the officer who carried out the 1987 coup, becomes prime minister in 1992.
13. 2000 — A coup instigated by George Speight topples the government of Mahendra Chaudhry, who had become Fiji's first Indo-Fijian prime minister in 1997 under a new constitution. Commodore Frank Bainimarama assumes executive power.
14. 2006 — Bainimarama stages a military takeover on 5 December against the prime minister he had installed after 2000, taking the powers of the presidency and dissolving parliament. In April 2009 the Court of Appeal declares the interim government illegal.
15. 2009 — Fiji is suspended from the Commonwealth on 1 September for failing to hold elections by 2010. Public Emergency Regulations imposed in April 2009 are not rescinded until January 2012.
16. 2014 — On 14 March the Commonwealth converts Fiji's full suspension to suspension from the councils only, allowing it back into Commonwealth activities including the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
17. 2016 — Cyclone Winston causes widespread destruction and affects hundreds of thousands of people. It is the storm against which every subsequent cyclone here is measured.