Micronesia is a subregion of Oceania, comprising thousands of small islands in the western Pacific Ocean. It is distinct from Melanesia to the south, and Polynesia to the east. The Philippines and Indonesia lie to the west.
The name Micronesia derives from the Greek mikros (μικρός), meaning small, and nesos (νῆσος), meaning island. The term was first proposed to distinguish the region in 1831 by Jules Dumont d'Urville.
HISTORY
The only empire known to have originated in Micronesia was based in Yap. 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 by the Spanish. These island territories were part of the Spanish East Indies and governed from the Spanish Philippines from the early 17th century until 1898. Full European expansion did not come, however, until the early 20th century, when the area would be divided between:
the United States, which took control of Guam following 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 became League of Nations Mandates in 1923. Nauru became an Australian mandate, while Germany's other territories in Micronesia were given as a mandate to Japan and were named the South Pacific Mandate. This remained the situation until Japan's defeat in the Second World War, when its mandate became a United Nations Trusteeship ruled by the United States, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
Today, most of Micronesia consists of independent states, with the exceptions of Guam and Wake Island, which are U.S. territories, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which form a U.S. Commonwealth.