Kingdom of Tonga

By the late eighteenth century the old order of Tonga, in which the sacred Tuʻi Tonga reigned while junior royal lines such as the Tuʻi Kanokupolu held political power, was breaking down, and the assassination of the Tuʻi Kanokupolu Tukuʻaho in 1799 opened half a century of civil wars. Out of them rose Tāufaʻāhau, born around 1797, who inherited a contested position in the Haʻapai islands in 1820 and defeated Laufilitonga, heir to the Tuʻi Tonga title, at the Battle of Velata on Lifuka in 1826. Wesleyan Methodist missionaries established a permanent mission that year, and Tāufaʻāhau, baptised in 1831, took the name Siaosi, or George. He gained control of Vavaʻu in 1833, and when the Tuʻi Kanokupolu Aleamotuʻa died in November 1845 he succeeded to the title on 4 December as King George Tupou I, making Nukuʻalofa on Tongatapu his capital. Chiefs of Tongatapu who rejected his rule and his faith, among them converts of a Catholic mission founded at Pea in 1842, held out in fortified villages until their strongholds at Pea and Houma fell in 1852. When Laufilitonga died in 1865 the Tuʻi Tonga title was not renewed, and Tupou I stood alone at the head of a united kingdom.

Tongan society was ranked by descent into chiefs (ʻeiki), their ceremonial attendants (matāpule) and commoners (tuʻa), who owed their chiefs labour and produce. George Tupou I’s code of laws proclaimed on 4 June 1862, still marked as Emancipation Day, freed commoners from forced service and from the arbitrary seizure of their goods by chiefs. The constitution of 1875 forbade the sale of land, so that Tongan land could not pass to foreigners, and later land laws entitled every Tongan man from the age of 16 to a farm allotment of about 8¼ acres and a town plot, granted from the hereditary estates of the nobles or from government land. Yams, taro, plantains, breadfruit and coconuts fed the islands, and copra, dried coconut kernel, became the main export. Methodism became the dominant faith, and church schools spread literacy in the Tongan language. The population rose from 20,019 at the first census in 1900 to about 100,000 today, while from the 1960s many Tongans emigrated to New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Their remittances have in recent years equalled around two-fifths of the national economy, one of the highest shares in the world, and tie the islands closely to the communities abroad.

Tupou I’s kingdom was won in war. In the civil wars of 1826–1852 his forces, drawn from Haʻapai and Vavaʻu and bound together by the new Wesleyan faith, fought chiefs who defended themselves in fortified villages; Tongatapu is still marked by the earthwork defences of these and earlier wars, recently mapped by airborne laser scanning. In 1840 the British warship HMS Favourite joined the fighting on Tongatapu in support of the Christian party, and its commander, Walter Croker, was killed in an assault on a fort. The final campaign of 1852 took the strongholds of Pea and Houma. Tupou I also carried Tongan power abroad: in 1855 he sailed to Fiji with a large force and won the Battle of Kaba for his ally Cakobau of Bau, while his kinsman Enele Maʻafu built up a Tongan-led domain in the Lau islands of eastern Fiji. Tonga afterwards kept only a small royal guard. In 1939 a Tonga Defence Force was raised with New Zealand training, and some of its men fought in the Solomon Islands during the Second World War. Its successor, His Majesty’s Armed Forces, has served with coalition forces in Iraq between 2004 and 2008, with British troops guarding Camp Bastion in Afghanistan from 2010 and in regional peacekeeping in the Solomon Islands.

George Tupou I turned a chiefly polity into a constitutional state. A code of laws issued at Vavaʻu in 1839 and revised in 1850 was followed by the code of 1862 and, on 4 November 1875, by a written constitution prepared with the help of the missionary Shirley Baker. It guaranteed freedom of religion, created a privy council, a cabinet, courts and a legislative assembly in which nobles sat beside elected representatives of the people, and fixed the succession in Tupou’s line; amended many times, it remains in force. Baker served as premier through the 1880s, and in 1885 he and the king founded the Free Church of Tonga, independent of the Wesleyan conference in Australia. The persecution of Wesleyans who refused to join, and an attempt on Baker’s life in 1887, led the British high commissioner for the Western Pacific, Sir John Thurston, to deport him in 1890. Tupou I died in 1893, aged about 95, and was succeeded by his great-grandson George Tupou II. From 1900 Tonga was a British protected state, governing itself internally while Britain conducted its foreign relations. Queen Sālote Tupou III, who reigned from 1918 to 1965, ruled within the limits of the constitution and worked to heal the divisions among Tonga’s Methodists, and her son Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV (r. 1965–2006) led the kingdom to full independence.

Tonga is the only Pacific island state that was never formally colonised, and its survival shaped the region’s political history. Tupou I’s treaties with Germany in 1876, Britain in 1879 and the United States, signed in 1886, recognised Tonga as a sovereign kingdom while Britain, France and Germany were annexing its neighbours, and even under the protection treaty of 1900 it kept its monarchy, its laws and its land. The rule that land cannot be sold kept Tongan soil in Tongan hands through the colonial era, and the constitution of 1875, still in force, has framed Tongan government for 150 years. In Fiji, Tongan intervention in the 1850s helped Cakobau of Bau towards supremacy and made Maʻafu a power in the Lau islands. Queen Sālote became one of the best-known Pacific figures when she rode through the rain in an open carriage at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953; she was also a poet and composer, and from 1954 she chaired the Tonga Traditions Committee, which collected and recorded Tongan history and genealogies. The distinctive Tongan union of chiefly rank, Methodist Christianity and monarchy now extends overseas through large communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, whose churches and family networks remain closely bound to the homeland.

Tonga’s independence was most constrained in the early twentieth century. The Treaty of Friendship of 18 May 1900 made it a British protected state, and an agreement of 1905 increased the authority of the British agent and consul over its government and finances. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed about 1,800 Tongans, some eight per cent of the population. Under Queen Sālote the kingdom recovered its confidence and its population grew, and on 4 June 1970 the protected-state arrangement ended, making Tonga fully independent within the Commonwealth; it joined the United Nations in 1999. A movement for democracy led by the commoner ʻAkilisi Pōhiva grew from the late 1980s, and after riots destroyed much of central Nukuʻalofa on 16 November 2006, King George Tupou V agreed to give up most of his powers. Reforms in 2010 gave the people 17 of the 26 elected seats in the Legislative Assembly, which now chooses the prime minister; in 2014 Pōhiva became the first prime minister drawn from the democracy movement, and after the elections of November 2025 the assembly chose a noble, Lord Fakafānua. King Tupou VI has reigned since 2012. Tonga today is a constitutional monarchy of about 100,000 people, rebuilding after the eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano and the tsunami of January 2022.