Uninhabited until modern times, the Falklands were considered by the seafaring powers of the early modern era to be of some strategic importance, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the islands repeatedly changed hands between the French, Spanish, and British crowns. For the Spanish, the Falklands were a base from which to protect their possessions in the New World; for the French and English, the Falklands could serve as a seat for the raiding of those possessions. Their potential notwithstanding, the Falklands were never put to much use, due to their harsh climate and extreme remoteness, and the European powers never kept more than a skeleton crew at their outposts on the islands.

By 1820, the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, which would subsequently become the Argentine Republic, had achieved independence from a receding Spain, and in that year seized the Falklands. The British, who had abandoned their colony on the islands in 1774, leaving them empty, immediately protested, and with American support took the islands back from Argentina in 1833. From that date until now, excepting the months of war in 1982, the Falklands have remained a British possession, much to the frustration of the Argentines.

Argentina traces her claim to the Falklands back to the Papal Bull of 1493, when pope Alexander VI assigned all land west of an imaginary line 370 leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands to Spain, and all land to the east of that line to Portugal. As successor to the Spanish empire, the Argentine Republic maintains that it is entitled to Falklands. The British, for their part, have claimed that John David and Richard Hawkins, explorers who made landfall on the islands in the seventeenth century, established British ownership in perpetuity.