evidence: The Falkland Islands—an archipelago in the South Atlantic located 8,000 miles away from the British Isles—were once one of the U.K.’s more obscure overseas territories, home to a community of just 1,800 people, the majority of whom were of British descent. Almost all of these individuals were rural sheep farmers who worked as tenants on land owned by a local corporation. Per the New York Times’ Larry Rohter, the islanders "depended on the company for everything." [...] Britain’s presence in the Falklands dates back to 1690, when Navy Captain John Strong made the first recorded landing on the unpopulated islands. The British started a settlement on the archipelago in the mid-18th century but abandoned it around a decade later, leaving the area under Spanish control. The newly independent Argentina arrived on the scene in 1820 and promptly laid claim to the Falklands, arguing that it had inherited the islands from the Spanish crown earlier that century. [...] Britain’s government had actually attempted to convince the islands’ inhabitants to join Argentina in the decades leading up to the war, as it "saw little long-term future and was reluctant to invest in making the Falklands prosperous and secure," writes scholar Lawrence Freedman for History Extra. But a 1968 agreement guaranteeing that the islanders would have final say over their home’s sovereignty hampered these efforts, and a proposed lease-back arrangement in which the Falklands would remain under British administration but acknowledge Argentinian sovereignty ultimately fizzled out.