A TERRITORY OF THE United States, roughly 65 km (40 mi) east of Puerto Rico, these islands were named by Christopher Columbus in honor of the 11,000 martyred companions of Saint Ursula, Las Once Mil Vírgenes.
AN OVERSEAS TERRITORY of the United Kingdom, and poorer cousins to the U.S. Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands have looked to their larger and more populous neighbors to the west for much of their economic and cultural influences: most tourists to the islands are from the mainland United States, and the islands have used U.S. currency since 1959.
UPON ACHIEVING independence from France and Great Britain in 1980, the peoples of the islands known as the New Hebrides renamed the island nation Vanuatu—“ forever our land”—in a strident attempt to break with one of the most turbulent colonial histories of the developing world.
EIGHT TINY SPECKS of land dotting the Pacific Ocean are the marks of the U.S. military presence in the region during the two major conflicts of the 20th century.
AN OVERSEAS DEPENDENT territory of the United Kingdom, the Turks and Caicos islands lie at the southeastern end of the Bahamas chain, north of Haiti in the Caribbean Sea.
GEOLOGICALLY, THE ISLAND of Sri Lanka is considered a southerly extension of peninsular India’s Deccan region and was clearly part of the peninsula all through the last Ice Age.
SOUTH GEORGIA and the South Sandwich Islands are two island formations at the southern extremities of the Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Antarctic Peninsula that juts out from Antarctica, 1,000 mi (1,600 km) to the south.
THE SOLOMON ISLANDS form an archipelago lying east of Papua New Guinea, between the Solomon Sea and the South Pacific Ocean. The country is composed of 992 islands and atolls, approximately one-third of which are inhabited.
AS A RESULT OF competing colonial claims for dominance in the Indian Ocean, the island republic of the Seychelles displays an intriguing mixture of indigenous, French, and British characteristics.
ONE OF AFRICA’S smallest countries, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe consists of two main islands (São Tomé and Príncipe) of volcanic origin with some smaller islets.
SAKHALIN IS THE LARGEST island of the Russian Federation, 589 mi (948 km) long and 16 to 105 mi (25 to 170 km) wide, with an area of 24,560 square mi (78,000 square km).
THE COUNTRY OF Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is located in the Windward Islands section of the Antilles chain, between Saint Lucia and Grenada in the Caribbean Sea.
AS FRENCH TERRITORIES (93 square mi or 242 square km) and a curious leftover from the chessboard games of colonial diplomacy of the 18th-century great powers, the tiny islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon are the only remaining fragments of the once mighty French North American empire.
PITCAIRN (18.1 square mi or 47 square km) is an isolated island located in the east-central Pacific Ocean, approximately 400 mi (644 km) southeast of Mangareva, the closest inhabited island.
A COMMONWEALTH IN political union with the United States, the Northern Mariana Islands (or CNMI) consists of a string of fourteen volcanic and limestone islands in the far western Pacific Ocean.
ONE OF THE WORLD’S largest coral islands and smallest countries, Niue is about the size of metropolitan District of Columbia in the United States and has a population the size of a small town.
AN OVERSEAS TERRITORY of the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles consists of four and a half islands, separated by about 545 mi (880 km) of the Caribbean Sea.
THE ISLAND OF Montserrat, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, is part of the chain of islands in the Caribbean Sea that were formed millions of years ago by volcanoes, some of which remain active, while others are completely dormant.