It’s back to MONDAY…

On this day in 1900, the United Kingdom proclaimed a protectorate over Tonga.

The Kingdom of Tonga, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands, of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about 750 km² (290 sq mi), scattered over 700,000 km² (270,000 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean.

Tonga was first inhabited roughly 2,500 years ago by Polynesian settlers who gradually evolved a distinct and strong ethnic identity, language, and culture as the Tongan people. They quickly established a powerful footing across the South Pacific, and this period of Tongan expansionism and colonization is known as the Tuʻi Tonga Empire. From the rule of the first Tongan king, ʻAhoʻeitu, Tonga grew into a regional power. It was a thalassocracy that conquered and controlled unprecedented swathes of the Pacific, from parts of the Solomon Islands and the whole of New Caledonia and Fiji in the west to Samoa and Niue and even as far as parts of modern-day French Polynesia in the east.

n 1845, an ambitious young Tongan warrior, strategist, and orator named Tāufaʻāhau united Tonga into a kingdom. He held the chiefly title of Tuʻi Kanokupolu, but had been baptised by Methodist missionaries with the name Siaosi (“George”) in 1831. Tonga became a protected state under a Treaty of Friendship with Britain on 18 May 1900, when European settlers and rival Tongan chiefs unsuccessfully tried to oust the man who had succeeded Tāufaʻāhau as king. The treaty posted no higher permanent representative on Tonga than a British consul (1901–1970). Under British protection, Tonga maintained its sovereignty and remained the only Pacific nation to retain its monarchical government. The Tongan monarchy has an uninterrupted succession of hereditary rulers from a single family.

The Treaty of Friendship and Tonga’s protection status ended in 1970 under arrangements that had been established by Tonga’s Queen Salote Tupou III before her death in 1965. Owing to its British ties, Tonga joined the Commonwealth in 1970 (atypically as a country that had its own monarch, rather than having the United Kingdom’s monarch, along with Malaysia, Brunei, Lesotho, and Eswatini). While exposed to colonial pressures, Tonga has always governed itself, which makes it unique in the Pacific.