Geography and history

This region of Oceania consists of many hundreds of small islands spread over a large region of the western Pacific.

The only empire known to have originated in Micronesia was based in Yap.

The term "Micronesia" was first proposed to distinguish the region in 1831 by Jules Dumont d'Urville; before this the term "Polynesia" was in use to generally describe the islands of the Pacific.

Much of the area was to come under European domination quite early. Guam, the Northern Marianas, and the Caroline Islands (what would later become the FSM and Palau) were colonized early on by the Spanish. Full European expansion did not come, however, until the late 19th century, when the area would be divided between:

the United States, which took control of Guam during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and colonized Wake Island;
Germany, which took Nauru and bought the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands from Spain; and
the British Empire, which took the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati).
During the First World War, Germany's Pacific island territories were taken from it and were made into League of Nations Mandates. Nauru became an Australian mandate, while Germany's other territories were given as mandates to Japan. This remained the situation until Japan's defeat in the Second World War, when its mandates became a United Nations Trusteeship ruled by the United States, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Today, all of Micronesia (with the exceptions of Guam and Wake Island, which are U.S. territories, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which are a U.S. Commonwealth) are independent states.