History · Northern Mariana Islands

Northern Mariana Islands: The Islands That Voted In

A Chamorro and Carolinian archipelago ruled in turn by Spain, Germany, Japan and the United States — the launch point for the atomic bombings, and the one Pacific territory that chose union with America rather than independence

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

A black-and-white photograph of a four-engined B-29 bomber with a circled R on its tail, wheels down, just above a runway with other aircraft parked behind
The B-29 Enola Gay landing in the Mariana Islands on 6 August 1945, after the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima. US Air Force photograph. (U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain)

The other half of the Marianas

The Northern Mariana Islands are a chain of 14 islands in the western Pacific, stretching north from Guam, with about 47,000 people, most of them on Saipan. They share the Chamorro people and much of their history with Guam, but a quirk of 19th-century imperial dealing separated the two: Guam went to the United States in 1898, while the northern islands passed from Spain to Germany to Japan and only became American after the Second World War. In 1975 their people voted to join the United States permanently — the only Pacific islanders to choose that over independence or free association.

A short history

  1. c. 1500 BCE

    Settlement

    Chamorro ancestors arrive from island Southeast Asia.

  2. c. 900 CE

    The latte period

    Stone-pillar houses; a dense village society.

  3. 1521

    Magellan

    The first European contact, at Guam.

  4. 1668–1698

    The Spanish reduction

    Missions and war cut the Chamorro population catastrophically.

  5. 1899

    Sold to Germany

    Spain sells the northern islands after losing Guam and the Philippines.

  6. 1914–1944

    Japanese rule

    A League of Nations mandate; a sugar-plantation economy.

  7. 1944

    Saipan and Tinian

    US invasions; Tinian becomes the atomic-bomb air base.

  8. 1947–1978

    US Trust Territory

    Administered for the UN with the rest of Micronesia.

  9. 1975

    The Covenant

    Voters approve Commonwealth union with the United States.

  10. 1986

    Commonwealth

    The status takes full effect; islanders become US citizens.

The latte builders, and the reduction

The Chamorro settled the Marianas around 3,500 years ago and by about 900 CE were raising the latte — paired rows of stone pillars capped with hemispherical stones that held up their largest buildings. Ferdinand Magellan made landfall at Guam in 1521, and Spain claimed the whole chain, but only in 1668 did Jesuit missionaries and soldiers arrive in force. Three decades of mission wars, Spanish reprisals and introduced disease reduced the Chamorro from tens of thousands to a few thousand, and the survivors of the northern islands were forcibly resettled on Guam. The northern islands were later repopulated, partly by Carolinians migrating north after typhoons.

A studio photograph of a Chamorro family in the Mariana Islands in 1915
A Chamorro family photographed in 1915, early in the Japanese period. After Spain lost the Spanish–American War, it sold the northern Marianas, along with the Carolines and Palau, to Germany in 1899 for 25 million pesetas. (Ryuzo Torii / Wikimedia Commons)

Germany, then Japan

German rule was brief and light-handed. When the First World War broke out, Japan seized Germany's north Pacific islands, and in 1920 received them as a League of Nations "Class C" mandate. Japan invested heavily: Saipan and Tinian were cleared for sugar cane worked by tens of thousands of migrants from Okinawa and Korea, and the town of Garapan on Saipan became a substantial Japanese city. By the late 1930s the islands were being fortified, in breach of the mandate's terms.

The flattened ruins of the town of Garapan on Saipan after the 1944 battle
Garapan, Saipan's main town, in ruins after the battle of June–July 1944. Around 30,000 Japanese defenders and more than 3,000 Americans died; hundreds of Japanese civilians jumped from cliffs at the island's north end rather than surrender. (US Marine Corps / Wikimedia Commons)

1944, and the bomb

American forces invaded Saipan in June 1944 and Tinian in July. The capture of Saipan put Japan's home islands within range of B-29 bombers and brought down the Tojo government in Tokyo. On Tinian the US built what was briefly the largest airfield in the world; it was from North Field on Tinian that the B-29s Enola Gay and Bockscar took off in August 1945 to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The islands' own people, interned during the fighting, emerged into a landscape remade by war.

Trust Territory and Commonwealth

After the war the United States administered the northern Marianas, with the Marshall Islands, the Carolines and Palau, as the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. As that trusteeship wound down in the 1970s, the other districts moved towards independence or free association, but the Marianas negotiated separately for full political union. A Covenant with the United States was approved by 78.8 per cent of voters in a 1975 plebiscite; it took effect in stages, and in 1986 Trust Territory status ended and the islanders became US citizens. The Commonwealth has its own governor and legislature but is subject to federal sovereignty, and since 2009 its immigration has been federalised.

What the Northern Marianas carry

The Northern Mariana Islands were passed between four empires in a century, and their strategic value peaked at the moment two aircraft left Tinian in 1945. When the choice finally came, in 1975, they did not follow their Micronesian neighbours towards sovereignty; they chose to become American, betting that the security and citizenship were worth the loss of independence. The garment industry that once drove the economy has gone, and the Commonwealth now depends on tourism, much of it Chinese, and on its federal relationship.

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