British and American ships had first sighted Kiribati in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A Russian admiral, Adam von Krusenstern, and French captain, Louis Duperrey, had named the main island chain the Gilbert Islands in 1820, after a British captain named Thomas Gilbert, who had crossed the archipelago in 1788 when sailing from Australia to China.

From the early nineteenth century, Western whalers, merchant vessels, and slave traders have visited the islands, introducing diseases and firearms.

The first British settlers arrive in 1837.