Nauru

The country that was eaten. Nauru is a single raised coral island of twenty-one square kilometres, settled by Micronesian and Polynesian people who organised into twelve tribes still represented on the flag's star. Germany annexed it in 1888; a British company identified its interior in 1900 as almost solid high-grade phosphate rock, formed from seabird guano over millennia, and mining began in 1907. Australia, New Zealand and Britain administered it under mandate between the wars and continued extracting the rock at prices set by themselves. Japan occupied the island in 1942, deported two-thirds of the population to Chuuk, where many died, and fortified it. Independence came on 31 January 1968, and Nauru bought out the phosphate industry, briefly reaching one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. The money was spent and mismanaged - a trust fund lost on bad investments including a London musical - while four-fifths of the island was reduced to uninhabitable limestone pinnacles. By the 1990s the phosphate was nearly gone and the country had almost no other economy. Since 2001 it has depended substantially on hosting an Australian offshore detention centre for asylum seekers. It has no capital city officially and no standing army. Almost the entire population lives on the coastal fringe. Yaren serves as the seat of government. The island lies about forty kilometres south of the equator. It has one road, circling the coast in under twenty minutes. Nauru is the world's smallest republic and third smallest country by area. Its people have among the highest recorded rates of diabetes, a consequence of the imported diet the mining economy brought.

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