Among the smallest and most remote scraps of empire, the group of coral atolls and reef islands that made up the colonial Gilbert and Ellice Islands are scattered across the equator at the point where the Micronesia area ends and Polynesia begins. Though they were assimilated under British rule, the languages and peoples of the two Pacific island groups are distinct from one another, a distinction confirmed by the break up of the colony into two separate entities just before independence. The nine islands of the Polynesian Ellice group achieved independence as Tuvalu in 1978, while the sixteen Micronesian Gilberts, together with the Phoenix and Line island groups and Ocean Island (Banaba), became Kiribati a year later.

Contact with Europeans for most of the nineteenth century was chiefly determined by the growth of the whaling industry and the trade in migratory labour. Despite a certain amount of naval regulation to curb more unscrupulous elements in the labour trade (a Pacific Islanders Protection Act was passed in 1875) no detailed responsibility was accepted for the islands until the 1880s. The Anglo-German Agreement of 1886 partitioned New Guinea into British and German spheres, and the partition of influence extended into the Pacific, with Germany claiming islands located to the north of a line drawn south of Nauru and the Marshalls. The Gilberts lay south of the line in the British sphere, but it was only in May 1892 that the latter were declared a Protectorate. The Ellice group was similarly designated later that year (Burroughs, 1999, 193; Macdonald, 1982, 64-70; Scarr, 1968, 252-8.).

However, with the exception of the phosphate mines in outlying Ocean Island, there was little to recommend the islands to their new Imperial masters, and despite being annexed as a Crown Colony in 1916 (a change in status which had no real effect on administration), the Gilbert and Ellice groups became ‘a neglected backwater of the Empire,’ where central control ‘became an end in itself’ in the decades up to the Second World War (Macdonald, 75, 93).   

As elsewhere in the Empire, the post-war years saw attempts to increase local representation in government, but these were largely ineffectual, as they were both applied unevenly and received uneven levels of interest from local people on the variously differing islands. The impetus for decolonisation in the Pacific, when it came, began in the British determination to shed its colonies, and was spurred along in the islands themselves more by the ethnic and political antagonisms that had been growing between the Gilbert and Ellice Islanders than by any hostility to the Imperial power. From the mid-1960s onwards various new forms of representation were instituted, but at centre stage at all times in these new debates about governance was the desire of the Ellice Islanders to separate themselves from the Gilbertese, and it was the achievement of this aim at the end of 1975 that would finally precipitate independence in the following years.

Coral Islands Minister was produced by the Congregational Council for World Mission (CCWM). The successor organisation to the London Missionary Society, the CCWM was formed in 1966 from the merger of the L.M.S. with the Commonwealth Missionary Society. A 1960s production, Coral Islands Minister revisits a theme many previous L.M.S. films (e.g. From Island to Island, or Pacific Schooner) had explored: the scattered Christian missions and churches of the Western Pacific, and the travels of L.M.S./CCWM missionaries and pastors on board the ships of the L.M.S.

As with its predecessor films, Coral Islands Minister functions as both an introduction to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and an exposition of the work of a church minister in the isles. L.M.S. missionaries had been present in the Ellice Islands since 1865, and by the 1870s they had established mission stations throughout the group and into the southern Gilberts (the north Gilberts had had an American Protestant missionary presence since 1857, but were increasingly being evangelised by Roman Catholic missionaries as well; (Sabatier, 1977). Christianity was accepted quickly, not least because the first missionaries were frequently Samoan, and brought a Samoanised Christianity which was conceptually congenial to island sensibilities. (In popular Ellice thought the legendary homeland of the people lay to the west, and thus the fact that the Christian message was being brought by Samoans may also have hastened its acceptance. (Macdonald, 41.)