Iceland

Iceland was among the last sizeable land masses in Europe to be settled, with no clear evidence of a substantial pre-Norse population. Medieval Icelandic sources, including the twelfth-century Islendingabok and the later Landnamabok, describe a small number of Irish hermits, the so-called papar, who may have lived briefly on the island before withdrawing at the arrival of Norse settlers. Permanent settlement is conventionally dated to 874, when the Norwegian chieftain Ingolfr Arnarson is said to have founded a homestead at Reykjavik. Over the following decades, settlers from Norway, together with people of Gaelic origin from the British Isles, established farms across the habitable coast and inland valleys.

In 930 the settlers founded the Althing, a general assembly held annually at Thingvellir, which gave rise to the Icelandic Commonwealth. The Commonwealth had no king and relied on a network of regional chieftains, the godar, who legislated and adjudicated through the Althing. Christianity was formally adopted around the year 1000 by decision of the assembly. The Commonwealth weakened during the thirteenth century amid feuding among powerful families during the Sturlung era, and in 1262 to 1264 Icelandic chieftains accepted the sovereignty of the Norwegian crown under the Old Covenant. When the Kalmar Union joined the Scandinavian crowns in 1397, Iceland passed with Norway under Danish rule, and following the dissolution of the union with Norway in 1814 the island remained a Danish dependency.

Centuries under Danish rule were marked by a royal trade monopoly, recurring famine, and the catastrophic Laki volcanic eruption of 1783 to 1784, which killed a large portion of the population and livestock. A national revival in the nineteenth century, associated with the politician and scholar Jon Sigurdsson, secured the restoration of the Althing as a consultative body in 1845 and a constitution in 1874. Home rule followed in 1904, and the Act of Union of 1918 made Iceland a sovereign state in personal union with the Danish king while leaving foreign affairs and defence with Copenhagen.

During the Second World War, Denmark fell under German occupation in 1940, after which British and then American forces occupied Iceland to forestall a German landing. With ties to Copenhagen severed, Icelanders voted in a 1944 referendum to terminate the union, and the Republic of Iceland was proclaimed at Thingvellir on 17 June 1944. The young republic became a founding member of NATO in 1949 and signed a defence agreement with the United States in 1951, which underwrote a long American military presence at Keflavik. The postwar decades were shaped by the expansion of the fisheries economy and a series of confrontations with the United Kingdom known as the Cod Wars, which extended Icelandic maritime jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles by 1976.

The end of the Cold War brought the closure of the American base in 2006 and a reorientation toward European economic integration through membership in the European Economic Area in 1994 and the Schengen Area in 2001, although accession talks with the European Union were opened in 2009 and shelved after 2013. The 2008 banking collapse triggered severe economic and political upheaval, prompting constitutional debate and a turnover of governments. Iceland today is a parliamentary republic with a directly elected president serving as head of state and a prime minister accountable to the Althing, the framework within which its contemporary institutions operate.