How seabird excrement paved the way for American imperial expansion

In 1856 , seabird guano was an in - demand fertilizer , so the the United States Congress decease The Guano Islands Act . This statute law was a precursor to American imperialism , as it countenance citizen to claim bird - crap - covered islands in the USA ’s name .

Says Columbia University law professor Christina Duffy Burnett of this scatological land grab :

The Guano Islands Act of 1856 arguably laid the legal groundwork for American imperialism . [ … ] Basically what happened was that in the first half of the nineteenth century , Europeans and Latin Americans figure out that the phosphate - rich deposits of seabird muck that had pile up on many small Pacific island make salient fertiliser . The stuff is like magic , and Fannie Farmer everywhere are suddenly clamor to get their hands on some . There ’s a boom , the price skyrockets , the Peruvians more or less see to it the grocery store , and supplies are shortsighted . Everybody is depend for novel sources , there ’s lots of phony guano trading custody - it ’s pandemonium . introduce the US farm lobby . Farmers in the United States start pressuring Congress to pass some sort of statute law that will improve domestic access to this life-sustaining excrement . The result is the Guano Islands Act , legislating that pass the United States to take control of a guano island if a citizen discovered it and guarantee certain action to take willpower of it . [ … ]

Iniu Portabe Charger

[ The Act passes , and ] there are all these wildcatter and roughnecks cast off up the Stars and Stripes on little mounds of manure all over the cosmos . In the last , more than seventy such islands are really secured under the act , and many more are claimed ( unsuccessfully , for one rationality or another ) . But that ’s not the interesting part , really - although it ’s funny enough , and there are some great stories about what go down on these islands : shanghaiing Polynesian manual laborer , plagiarization ( of course ) , mutiny , etc . Some of the islands are still claimed by various shady types . Indeed , a rather mysterious gentleman contacted me some year ago in connection with his alleged championship to an uninhabited guano island in the Caribbean .

you’re able to scan her full and incredibly captivating discussion of the The Guano Islands Act of 1856 atCabinet Magazine .

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