For most of the last century, Iceland was little more than a rest stop for North Atlantic fishing fleets trawling the waters between Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Reykjavik, where much of the island's population of 320,000 is based, still feels like a provincial port. Taxi drivers wave to the president and there is a sense that most people are linked by blood, business or politics. But for all its sleepy air, the Icelandic capital has been transformed over the past decade. A headlong expansion into foreign markets brought the country influence out of proportion to its size and made its population one of the richest, per capita, in the world.