The history of Easter Island is rich and controversial. Its inhabitants have endured famines, epidemics, civil war, slave raids and colonialism, and the crash of their ecosystem; their population has declined precipitously more than once. They have left a cultural legacy that has brought them fame disproportionate to their population.

300–400 CE has been put forward as a date for initial settlement of Easter Island, which would coincide approximately to the arrival of the first settlers on Hawaii. Although some scholars argue for initial settlement of 700–800 CE, there is an ongoing study by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that suggests: “Radiocarbon dates for the earliest stratigraphic layers at Anakena, Easter Island, and analysis of previous radiocarbon dates imply that the island was colonized late, about 1200 CE. Significant ecological impacts and major cultural investments in monumental architecture and statuary thus began soon after initial settlement." Jared Diamond points out in "Collapse" that Caleta Anakena is the landing point which provides the best shelter from prevailing swells, together with a sandy beach for canoe landings and launchings, so it seems likely to have been an early place of settlement.

The island was populated by Polynesians who navigated in canoes or catamarans from the Marquises islands (3200 km away) or Tuamotou islands (Mangareva, 2600 km away) or Pitcairn (2000 km away). When Captain Cook visited the island, one of his crew members, who was a Polynesian from Bora Bora, was able to communicate with the Rapa Nui. In 1999, a voyage with reconstructed Polynesian boats was carried out, reaching Easter Island from Mangareva in 19 days.

According to legends recorded by the missionaries in the 1860s, the island originally had a very clear class system, with an ariki, king, wielding absolute god-like power ever since Hotu Matu'a had arrived on the island. The most visible element in the culture was production of massive moai that were part of the ancestral worship. With a strictly unified appearance, moai were erected along most of the coastline, indicating a homogeneous culture and centralized governance.

For unknown reasons, a coup by military leaders called matatoa had brought a new cult based around a previously unexceptional god Makemake. The cult of the birdman (Rapanui: tangata manu) seemed largely to blame for the island's misery of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Contradicting these "legends", however, Katherine Routhledge (who systematically collected the island's traditions in her expedition in 1919) showed that according to the natives, all these conflicts and misery are precisely dated to the period after the arrival of the Europeans. Regardless, with the island's ecosystem fading, destruction of crops quickly resulted in famine, sickness and death.

According to Diamond and Heyerdahl's version of history, the huri mo'ai - the "statue-toppling" - continued into the 1830s as a part of fierce internecine wars. By 1838 the only standing moai were on the slopes of Rano Raraku and Hoa Hakananai'a at Orongo. However, there is little archaeological evidence for "internecine wars" in pre-European periods, and much less of pre-European societal collapse. In fact, bone pathology and osteometric data from islanders of that period clearly suggest few fatalities can be attributed directly to violence (Owsley et al., 1994).

The first recorded European contact with the island was on April 5 (Easter Sunday), 1722 when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited the island for a week and estimated there were 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants on the island. The next foreign visitors (on November 15, 1770) were two Spanish ships, San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia. They reported the island as largely uncultivated, with a seashore lined with stone statues. Four years later, in 1774, British explorer James Cook visited Easter Island, he reported the statues as being neglected with some having fallen down. In 1825, the British ship HMS Blossom visited and reported no standing statues. Easter Island was approached many times during the 19th century, but by then the islanders had become openly hostile towards any attempt to land, and very little new information was reported before the 1860s.

A series of devastating events killed or removed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. A dozen islanders managed to return from their slavery, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island's population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried. Contributing to the chaos were violent clan wars with the remaining people fighting over the newly available lands of the deceased, bringing further famine and death among the dwindling population. The first Christian missionary, Eugène Eyraud, brought tuberculosis to the island in 1867 which took a quarter of the island's remaining population of 1,200. "Queen Mother" Koreto with her daughters "Queen" Caroline and Harriette in 1877.

Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier bought up all of the island apart from the missionaries' area around Hanga Roa and moved a couple of hundred Rapanui to Tahiti to work for his backers. In 1871 the missionaries, having fallen out with Dutrou-Bornier, evacuated all but 171 Rapanui to the Gambier islands.[16] Those who remained were mostly older men. Six years later, there were just 111 people living on Easter Island, and only 36 of them had any offspring.[17] From that point on and into the present day, the island's population slowly recovered. But with over 97% of the population dead or having left in less than a decade, much of the island's cultural knowledge had been lost.

Easter Island was annexed by Chile on September 9, 1888, by Policarpo Toro, by means of the "Treaty of Annexation of the Island" (Tratado de Anexión de la isla), that the government of Chile signed with the Rapanui people.

Until the 1960s, the surviving Rapanui were confined to the settlement of Hanga Roa while the rest of the island was rented to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm until 1953.[18] The island was then managed by the Chilean Navy until 1966, at which point the island was reopened in its entirety. In 1966, the Rapanui were given Chilean citizenship.

On July 30, 2007, a constitutional reform gave Easter Island and Juan Fernández Islands the status of special territories of Chile. Pending the enactment of a special charter, the island will continue to be governed as a province of the Valparaíso Region.