"New Caledonia" was the name given to it by James Cook in 1774.
The Kanaks, who are the Indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of the island, have named the island Kanaky.
The island has been a French colony since 1853 and is 17,000km (11,000 miles) from mainland France.
The Kanaks, who are the Indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of the island, have named the island Kanaky.
The island has been a French colony since 1853 and is 17,000km (11,000 miles) from mainland France.
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1790818216635252790
The island became a penal colony in 1864, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, France sent an est 22,000 prisoners to the island. The same year, it became a penal colony. Nickel was discovered on the banks of the Diahot River.
Subsequently, in 1876, with the establishment of the Société le Nickel, now known as Eramet, a French multinational mining & metallurgy company mining began in earnst. To work the mines, the French imported labourers from neighbouring islands & from the New Hebrides.
The Indigenous Kanak people were excluded from the French economy and from mining work confined to reservations. Diseases such as smallpox and measles were brought to the island by settlers. The Kanak population subsequently declined from around 60,000 in 1878 to...
27,100 in 1921 and their numbers did not increase again until the 1930s. French citizenship would not be granted to all Kanaks regardless of ethnicity until 1953.
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