Kiribati, officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The country's 33 atolls are scattered over 1,351,000 square miles (3,500,000 km²) near the equator. Its name is pronounced and is a Kiribati language rendering of "Gilberts", the English name for the main group of islands: the former Gilbert Islands.

History

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Kiribati was inhabited by a single Micronesian ethnic group that spoke the same Oceanic language for 2,000 years before coming into contact with Europeans. The islands were first sighted by British and American ships in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The islands were named the Gilbert Islands in 1820 by a Russian admiral, Adam von Krusenstern, and French captain Louis Duperrey, after a British captain, Thomas Gilbert, who crossed the archipelago in 1788 ('Kiribati' is the islanders' pronunciation of plural 'Gilberts'). The first British settlers arrived in 1837. In 1892, the Gilbert Islands became a British protectorate together with the nearby Ellice Islands. The Gilbert and Ellice Islands became a Crown colony in 1916. Kiritimati (Christmas) Atoll became a part of the colony in 1919 and the Phoenix Islands were added in 1937.

Tarawa and others of the Gilbert group were occupied by Japan during World War II. Tarawa was the site of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. Marine Corps history when Marines landed in Nov. 1943, the Battle of Tarawa was fought at Kiribati's capital Bairiki on Tarawa atoll.

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