Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about our seasteading episode, specifically that failed pitch to French Polynesia, and he's asking a broader question. How many UN member states actually have overseas dependencies? And looking at the archipelagos and territories scattered across the planet, is there a common thread in how they were created? Because the list is surprisingly small, and the territories that do exist are some of the most geopolitically fascinating places on Earth.
This is one of those questions where the answer seems like it should be huge — every former colonial power, right? — but the actual number of countries with non-contiguous overseas territories is maybe fifteen to twenty out of a hundred ninety-three UN member states. And the list is dominated by just a handful.
Fifteen to twenty. So we're talking what, eight percent of the world's countries holding essentially all the overseas territory?
And most of those territories are concentrated under five or six countries. The United Kingdom, France, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia. After that, the list gets sparse — Norway, Chile, Portugal, China in its own weird category. And the common thread is nearly always the same thing: European colonial expansion between roughly the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, followed by a twentieth-century decolonization wave that left these places behind for very specific reasons.
That's a loaded phrase. Most of these places are populated. People live there. They're not storage units.
No, and that's the first thing most coverage gets wrong. These aren't just flags on a map. British Overseas Territories alone have about two hundred seventy thousand residents. French overseas departments and collectivities have close to three million. Puerto Rico has three point two million people, more than twenty US states. The population of these territories combined is probably north of fifteen million.
Before we dive into how they were created, let's define what we're actually counting. Because "overseas dependency" is doing a lot of work.
I'm using it as a catch-all for territories that are under the sovereignty of a UN member state but are not themselves sovereign, are not contiguous with the mainland, and have some distinct political status. That includes overseas departments like French Guiana, crown dependencies like Jersey, unincorporated territories like Guam, special administrative regions like Hong Kong, and countries within a kingdom like Aruba. The legal arrangements vary wildly, but the common denominator is that they're not independent and they're not just another province.
We're excluding things like Alaska or Hawaii, which are non-contiguous but are fully integrated states.
Hawaii is a state with full representation. It's not a dependency. Same with the Canary Islands for Spain — they're an autonomous community, but they're fully part of Spain. The French overseas departments are trickier because legally they are fully part of France, but we include them because their geography and history put them in this conversation.
Let's do the list. Who has what?
The United Kingdom tops the count with fourteen British Overseas Territories. These are the ones people usually think of — Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Helena and its dependencies, the Pitcairn Islands, the British Antarctic Territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus. Plus there are the three crown dependencies — Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man — which are technically not part of the UK but are under the Crown.
France has twelve overseas territories, but they come in different flavors. Five are overseas departments and regions — French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion. These are constitutionally as French as Paris. Then you've got five overseas collectivities — French Polynesia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Wallis and Futuna. Plus New Caledonia, which has a special status, and the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
The United States?
Five permanently inhabited territories — Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. Plus a collection of uninhabited ones like Midway, Wake Island, and Palmyra Atoll. The inhabited ones have about three and a half million people total.
The Netherlands — this is the one people always forget about.
Because it's genuinely confusing. The Kingdom of the Netherlands consists of four constituent countries — the Netherlands proper, plus Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. Those three are in the Caribbean, they have their own parliaments and currencies, but defense and foreign affairs are handled by the kingdom. And within the Netherlands proper, there are three special municipalities also in the Caribbean — Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba — often called the BES islands.
A kingdom with four countries, one of which is itself called the Netherlands and contains three special municipalities that are thousands of miles away.
Constitutional clarity is not the Dutch strong suit here. But Denmark is simpler — two autonomous territories, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Both have extensive self-government, their own languages, their own parliaments. Greenland is the world's largest island and has only about fifty-six thousand people.
Three territories in free association or dependency. Tokelau is a non-self-governing territory. The Cook Islands and Niue are self-governing states in free association — they handle their own internal affairs, but New Zealand manages defense and foreign policy at their request. The Cook Islands has been pushing for more autonomy recently.
Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, and the Cocos or Keeling Islands are the inhabited external territories, plus uninhabited ones like Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Norfolk Island had its self-government significantly reduced in 2015 by the Australian government, which is an interesting case of autonomy being rolled back.
Then the small-timers. Norway — Bouvet Island, plus Svalbard under a weird treaty arrangement. Chile — Easter Island, plus the Juan Fernández Islands. Portugal — the Azores and Madeira, though Portugal considers them autonomous regions, not dependencies.
China with Hong Kong and Macau, which are special administrative regions under "one country, two systems." These are unique because they weren't retained from colonialism — they were returned to China by the UK and Portugal in 1997 and 1999 respectively. They're dependencies of a sort, but the historical mechanism is the opposite of every other case on this list.
That's what, a dozen countries? And the common thread — they all had colonial empires.
Nearly all, yes. China is the exception. But let's talk about that common thread, because it's not just "they had colonies." It's that these specific territories survived decolonization for very particular reasons. The key insight is that every territory that remained a dependency served a strategic or economic function that the mainland couldn't replicate at home.
That's the ur-example. In the nineteenth century, the British Empire needed coaling stations for its navy and merchant fleet scattered across the globe. Gibraltar controlled the Mediterranean entrance. Bermuda sat astride Atlantic shipping routes. The Falklands provided a base in the South Atlantic. Aden, which later became independent, was the Red Sea coaling station. These weren't settler colonies — they were infrastructure.
The United States picked up the same logic later. Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico — all taken from Spain in eighteen ninety-eight.
The Spanish-American War gave the US an instant overseas empire, and the strategic logic was naval. Guam and the Philippines provided Pacific bases. Puerto Rico secured the Caribbean approaches. But here's where the legal architecture gets fascinating. The Insular Cases of nineteen oh one — a series of Supreme Court decisions that still shape US territorial law today — established that these new territories were "unincorporated," meaning the Constitution didn't fully apply.
The Constitution doesn't fully apply to American citizens living in American territory.
That's the Insular Cases in a sentence. Justice Henry Brown wrote that these territories were "inhabited by alien races" and that "differences of race, habits, laws, and customs" might make full constitutional rights impractical. It's one of the most openly racist doctrines in Supreme Court history, and it has never been fully overturned. In twenty twenty-two, the Court in United States versus Vaello-Madero declined to revisit it.
Three point two million Puerto Ricans live under a legal doctrine that was explicitly designed to exclude them because of race. In twenty twenty-six.
Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas are in the same boat. American Samoans aren't even birthright citizens — they're US nationals, which means they can't vote, can't serve on juries, and can't hold certain jobs unless they naturalize. All because of a doctrine from nineteen oh one.
That's the dark underbelly of the "common thread." These territories weren't just retained for strategic reasons — they were retained under legal frameworks that were deliberately designed to be unequal.
The British version has its own version of this. The British Indian Ocean Territory is the starkest example. In nineteen sixty-five, the UK created this territory by excising the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and Seychelles before those countries became independent. The Lancaster House Agreement effectively paid Mauritius three million pounds for the islands. The entire Chagossian population — about two thousand people — was forcibly removed between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-three.
To build a military base.
The US wanted a base in the Indian Ocean, and the UK provided the territory. The Chagossians were shipped to Mauritius and Seychelles, many ending up in slums. They've been fighting in British courts ever since. In twenty nineteen, the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK's continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago was unlawful, and the UN General Assembly voted a hundred sixteen to six demanding the UK withdraw within six months. The UK ignored it.
A hundred sixteen to six. That's not a close vote. That's the world saying "you're wrong" and the UK saying "we don't care.
The six that voted with the UK? The US, Australia, Hungary, Israel, and the Maldives — mostly countries with their own territorial interests or strategic relationships. The US position was straightforward — Diego Garcia is too important. It's been used for bomber missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's one of the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate on the planet, and it exists because the UK invented a territory and depopulated it.
The common thread is strategic utility, but the second layer is that the legal frameworks were designed to allow the imperial power to do things it couldn't do at home.
That brings us to the economic thread. The Cayman Islands has no direct taxation — no income tax, no corporate tax, no capital gains tax. It's a British Overseas Territory with a GDP per capita of about ninety thousand dollars, higher than the UK itself. The financial services industry there manages trillions in assets. The UK allows this because the Caymans are a dependency — the UK provides the legal and diplomatic cover, and the Caymans provide the regulatory loophole.
The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper with offshore accounts.
It's not just the Caymans. Bermuda is the world's largest captive insurance market. The British Virgin Islands has over four hundred thousand registered companies for a population of thirty thousand. Jersey and Guernsey are major banking centers. These territories function as legal gray zones — not independent enough to be fully regulated, not integrated enough to be fully taxed.
The creation pattern is basically three categories. Strategic military outposts, economic exploitation zones, and the leftovers that were too small or too dependent to become independent.
Sometimes all three overlap. Let's talk about French Guiana versus Suriname, because this is the comparison that makes the pattern visible. Both were colonized around the same period. Both are on the northern coast of South America. Suriname became independent in nineteen seventy-five. French Guiana became an overseas department of France — fully integrated, part of the European Union, uses the euro.
What made the difference?
Population and economics, mostly. Suriname had about four hundred thousand people at independence, a diverse ethnic mix, and a resource base that seemed viable. French Guiana had about fifty-five thousand people in the nineteen seventies and was seen as too small and too economically dependent to survive alone. Plus, France had a strategic interest — it's where the Guiana Space Centre is, launching Ariane rockets. You don't give up your spaceport.
Now French Guiana has about three hundred thousand people, uses the euro, has French infrastructure, and no independence movement of any significance. Suriname is independent but has struggled economically.
The GDP per capita comparison is stark. French Guiana is around eighteen thousand euros. Suriname is about six thousand dollars. Being a dependency of a wealthy country has material benefits, and the populations in most of these territories know it. That's why independence referendums usually fail.
Except when they don't, or when they're boycotted.
New Caledonia is the frozen conflict case study. It's a French overseas collectivity in the Pacific with about two hundred seventy thousand people. It has a quarter of the world's nickel reserves. The indigenous Kanak population has been pushing for independence for decades. Under the Nouméa Accord, three independence referendums were held — twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, and twenty twenty-one.
The first two voted no.
Fifty-six point seven percent no in twenty eighteen, fifty-three point three percent no in twenty twenty. Narrowing each time. Then the third referendum in twenty twenty-one was boycotted by pro-independence groups because France refused to postpone it due to the pandemic. Turnout was forty-four percent, and ninety-six percent of those who voted said no to independence.
You've got a referendum where the side that wants independence didn't participate, the result is technically a landslide for staying French, but nobody considers the matter settled.
France is in a bind. If New Caledonia became independent, France would lose its strategic presence in the Pacific and access to those nickel reserves. But if France keeps pushing integration, the Kanak population may radicalize. It's a sovereignty trap — neither full integration nor full independence is achievable.
This is what I mean about these territories being geopolitically fascinating. They're not museum pieces. They're active pressure points.
The pressures are intensifying. Climate change is reshaping the calculus for a lot of these territories. Tokelau, a New Zealand territory, has a maximum elevation of five meters. Rising sea levels are an existential threat. The Marshall Islands aren't a dependency — they're a sovereign nation in free association with the US — but they face the same problem. When your country might physically disappear, what does sovereignty even mean?
Meanwhile, Greenland is having the opposite problem. Melting ice is revealing resources and shipping routes.
Greenland is the dependency that's becoming more strategically valuable by the year. The ice sheet contains about ten percent of the world's fresh water and significant rare earth mineral deposits. As Arctic ice melts, the Northwest Passage becomes a viable shipping route. The US opened a consulate in Nuuk in twenty twenty. Trump's twenty nineteen offer to buy Greenland — which was widely mocked — was actually a signal of genuine strategic interest.
Denmark said no, of course.
Denmark said no, and Greenland said no. But the interest hasn't gone away. China has been investing in mining projects in Greenland. Russia has been expanding its military presence in the Arctic. The US has Pituffik Space Base — formerly Thule Air Base — in northern Greenland, which is a critical part of the missile warning system.
Greenland is a Danish autonomous territory that hosts a US military base, attracts Chinese investment, and sits on rare earth minerals that everyone wants. That's not a sleepy dependency. That's a geopolitical chess piece.
Greenland's government knows it. They've been pushing for more autonomy from Denmark, including control over natural resources. The 2009 Self-Government Act gave Greenland control over most domestic affairs and recognized Greenlanders as a people under international law with a path to full independence. But independence would mean losing the annual block grant from Denmark, which is about five hundred million dollars — roughly a third of Greenland's GDP.
The dependency trap. You want independence, but you can't afford it.
That's the story of almost every territory on this list. The ones that could afford independence — like Bermuda or the Caymans — don't want it, because dependency provides legal and diplomatic cover for their financial services industries. The ones that might want independence — like New Caledonia or Tokelau — can't afford it, or are too small to be viable.
Which brings us back to the seasteading question. If you want to create a new political entity outside the current system, what can you actually learn from the territories that already exist in this gray zone?
The seasteaders who approached French Polynesia in twenty seventeen understood something real — dependencies have enough autonomy to be attractive hosts, but not enough to actually grant you sovereignty. French Polynesia has its own government, its own assembly, its own president. But France retains control over foreign affairs, defense, and justice. The seasteaders needed a host that could give them a degree of legal independence, and French Polynesia couldn't deliver that without French approval. France wasn't interested.
The only seasteading-like projects that have actually gotten off the ground have been in fully sovereign nations. The Próspera ZEDE in Honduras — which itself was recently revoked by the Honduran government.
Próspera is the perfect counterexample. It was a special economic zone with its own legal system, built on the Honduran island of Roatán. It had real investment, real buildings, real residents. But it was created under Honduran law, and when the Honduran government changed its mind, it was revoked. The lesson is that even in a sovereign nation, these experiments are fragile. In a dependency, they're nearly impossible — you're negotiating with a government that doesn't have full authority to make the deal.
The seasteading dream of a sovereignty-free zone is probably dead, but the dependency model — partial sovereignty, strategic utility, legal gray zones — is more alive than ever.
It's not just alive — it's actively contested. China's "one country, two systems" model for Hong Kong and Macau was supposed to be a template for Taiwan. But the erosion of autonomy in Hong Kong — the national security law, the electoral changes, the crackdown on dissent — has made that template far less attractive. The dependency model works when the mainland keeps its promises. When it doesn't, you get a very different outcome.
Hong Kong was the crown jewel of the dependency model in the nineteen nineties. Financial hub, rule of law, separate legal system. Now it's a cautionary tale.
Macau is the quieter version — the world's largest gambling hub, generating more gaming revenue than Las Vegas, under Chinese sovereignty but with its own legal system. Macau has been less politically contentious than Hong Kong, partly because it's smaller and partly because its economy is so narrowly focused on casinos. But the same structural tension exists.
Let's zoom out for a moment. How many of these territories are actually on the UN's list of non-self-governing territories?
The UN list includes places like Gibraltar, the Falklands, Tokelau, New Caledonia, Western Sahara, and American Samoa. But it's a political list, not a comprehensive one. France doesn't submit its overseas departments because it considers them fully integrated. The US doesn't submit Puerto Rico or Guam because it considers their status settled. The UK removed several territories from the list after granting them new constitutions, even though they remain dependencies.
The UN list is a subset, and the actual number of dependencies is larger.
Depending on how you count, there are about sixty permanently inhabited overseas territories or dependencies. But the number of countries that hold them is small and stable. No new major dependency has been created since the nineteen seventies. Hong Kong and Macau were handovers, not creations.
Is that number likely to change? Are we going to see new dependencies?
The map is largely fixed, but there are two possible futures. One is fragmentation — existing sovereign states breaking apart and creating new entities that are de facto dependencies of their neighbors or former rulers. Think of Abkhazia or South Ossetia, which are breakaway regions of Georgia that are effectively Russian dependencies. They're not recognized by most of the world, but they function as dependencies in practice.
The other future?
Climate-driven dependency creation. If a low-lying island nation becomes uninhabitable, its population might relocate to another country under some kind of special status — not full integration, not full independence. The Pacific island nation of Kiribati has already bought land in Fiji as a potential relocation site. Tuvalu has an agreement with Australia for climate mobility. These aren't dependencies yet, but they could become something like them.
The number of countries with dependencies might actually increase, even if the number of traditional overseas territories stays the same.
The form might change, but the function — partial sovereignty, strategic relationships, legal distinctiveness — is likely to persist.
What should a listener actually do with this information? Beyond being interesting at dinner parties.
Look up the dependencies that your own country controls, or the ones near where you live. The UK's Foreign Office publishes detailed profiles of each Overseas Territory — their governance, economy, environmental challenges. The US Department of the Interior has fact sheets on each territory. France's overseas ministry has similar resources. Understanding these relationships is a window into how sovereignty actually works.
Because sovereignty isn't a binary. It's a spectrum.
That's the mental model I want people to take away. We tend to think of countries as either independent or not, like a light switch. But the reality is a dimmer switch. The Cook Islands is mostly independent but not fully. Greenland is mostly autonomous but not fully. Puerto Rico is part of the US but not fully. Every dependency on this list exists somewhere on that spectrum.
The position on the spectrum is negotiated constantly. It's not fixed.
New Caledonia's three referendums, Greenland's push for resource control, the Cook Islands' move toward more autonomy, the Chagossians' legal battle — these are all negotiations over where the dimmer switch should be set. And the outcome matters not just for the people in those territories, but for how the international system works.
The system runs on the fiction that sovereignty is absolute and territory is inviolable. Dependencies are the exception that proves the rule, and also the evidence that the rule is more flexible than anyone admits.
That's what makes them so fascinating. They're the loopholes in the Westphalian system. They exist because the rules were written by the same countries that maintain these territories, and the rules have always had carve-outs for strategic convenience.
The next time someone pitches a seasteading project or a micronation, the real question isn't whether they can find unclaimed land. It's whether they can find a sovereign willing to rent them a piece of the spectrum.
The answer, so far, is that sovereigns are willing to rent — but they're not willing to let go of the dimmer switch.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The Bay of Fundy tidal bore on the Petitcodiac River in New Brunswick was considered extinct after causeway construction in nineteen sixty-eight, but it reappeared when the causeway gates were opened in twenty ten, making it one of the few documented cases of a tidal bore being deliberately resurrected. The Vikings likely witnessed this same bore when they explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence around the year one thousand.
A resurrected tidal bore witnessed by Vikings. That's the most metal hydrology fact I've ever heard.
I have so many questions about how you classify a tidal bore as "extinct" versus "just not happening right now.
Don't go down that road. We'll be here for another hour. The question that I think we should leave listeners with is this: as climate change reshapes coastlines and resource availability, will we see a new wave of dependency creation? Or will existing dependencies use their newfound strategic value to push for full independence? The Cook Islands is already testing that boundary with New Zealand. Greenland is testing it with Denmark. Something is shifting.
If the seasteading dream taught us anything, it's that sovereignty isn't something you can just declare. It's something you negotiate, usually with a much larger power that has its own interests. The dependencies we've talked about today are the successful negotiations — or the unsuccessful ones, depending on whose perspective you take. The ones that failed are at the bottom of the ocean.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for the tidal bore facts and everything else that keeps this show running. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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