The first inhabitants of Fiji were Melanesian and Polynesians who migrated there over 3500 years ago. According to legend the great chief Lutunasobasoba led his people across the oceans to the land known as Fiji. When they got there, they established a hierarchy of clans until the Europeans came in the seventeenth century. Fiji became a British colony in 1874, and quickly developed a plantation based economy. The British imported workers from India to work on the plantations. This accounts for the diverse ethnicity, and many of Fiji's political tensions between the two main groups.

Fiji gained its independence in 1970. For the next seventeen years, Fiji was controlled by the moderate conservative Alliance Party. The country is broadly pro-western and has formed many alliances with other small island groups. Fiji is a member of the south Pacific forum, which strongly fights against French nuclear testing, and the Commonwealth, from which it has been suspended several times.