The Billion Dollar Shack
In recent years, it has become a cliché to note that the world has become more interconnected. We get it: globalization has changed everything.
But most stories about connectivity focus on hubs rather than spokes, places that are hives of activity set to the soundtrack of the buzzing hum of densely populated cities. I’ve felt a visceral feeling of connection standing in the financial center of the City of London, near the polluting factories of Guangzhou, China, gazing up at the skyscrapers of Manhattan, or marveling at the sprawling port of Singapore.
However, the world has now grown so connected, so intertwined, that you can also now make a striking case for astonishing interdependence in the most unlikely places.
One of those places is an island that’s arguably one of the most interesting countries in the world, even though few people have heard of it. It’s home to just 11,000 people. And it’s an extraordinary microcosm of globalization.
The Belly Button of the Pacific
“If you look at a map of the Pacific, there's hundreds of islands scattered throughout,” the writer Jack Hitt tells me. “But right there in the center, like a little bellybutton, a little omphalos of the globe, is Nauru.”
Surrounded by vast, empty ocean, the island is one of the most isolated countries on the planet. It’s also one of the smallest. Manhattan is three times larger. It’s an almost perfect circle, an atoll created millions of years ago by volcanic activity deep beneath the ocean. Rich coral reefs formed, and over time, some were shoved upward by the gradual forces of geology, until they soared high above the encompassing sea. As they eroded, parts of the limestone dissolved, creating fissures, sinkholes, and vast empty cavities of rock.
Over tens of thousands of years, exhausted seagulls, eager for a land-based pit stop during long flights, filled those cavities and sinkholes with their guano. Eventually, that guano calcified, leaving phosphate in its place.
Three thousand years ago, humans first arrived. For three millennia, they lived a mostly isolated existence, subsisting on a diet of raw tuna served in coconut milk, fruits, and root vegetables. On the tiny, unknown island cut off from the rest of the world, the pace of human change was as slow as the forces that shaped the atoll itself.
When Europeans first encountered the island on long sailing voyages, they started to trade, exchanging liquor and rifles for coconuts, fish, fruits and vegetables, and fresh drinking water. Soon, guns were in most homes, and alcoholism was rife. A civil war broke out, no mean feat for an island with just 2,000 inhabitants.
A Royal Navy vessel that visited the island transmitted news of the war. “An escaped convict is king,” the captain reported. “All hands constantly drunk: no fruit or vegetables to be obtained, nothing but pigs and coconuts.” A century of radical change had begun…
