The USA is, by pretty much all metrics, the most powerful country in the world right now. It has by far the largest nominal GDP and GDP per capita; the strongest and best-funded military; a leading role in just about any international organization or process, and frankly incredible cultural cachet.
It wasn’t always this way. Go back 250 years or so, and the US was little more than an upstart nation, with older countries like France or Great Britain duking it out over who was most powerful.
So when – and how – did the balance of power shift so dramatically? We’ll give you a clue: it has a lot more to do with poop than you’d expect.
Smelling like roses
Picture the scene: it’s the mid-19th century, and the world has gone guano for, well, guano. “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 droppings that had accumulated on many small Pacific islands make spectacular fertilizer,” explained Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus, a professor of legal history at Columbia University.
“The stuff is like magic, and farmers everywhere are suddenly clamoring to get their hands on some,” Ponsa-Kraus told Cabinet magazine in 2010. “Everybody is looking for new sources, there’s tons of fake guano trading hands – it’s chaos.”
Now, the best of the best in terms of bird poop came from Peru: it “stands alone in terms of the nitrogen content,” Mauricio Betancourt, author of a recent paper on the role of guano in US history, told Science News this week, “because of its location in a place […] where it very rarely rains.”
It’s not so much that dry weather makes you poop more nitrogen, he explained – it’s more that the guano doesn’t get its natural nitrogen levels washed away by rain or humidity. That makes it great fertilizer, since nitrogen is a key component of chlorophyll – the green pigment that helps plants photosynthesize – as well as making up part of the compounds that regulate plant growth and development.
Add to that poop cocktail the high levels of other nutrients that came from the birds’ rich equatorial marine diet, and you had the perfect recipe for nothing less than a gold rush. But in brown.
“Guano diggers built settlements on [Peru’s] islands,” Betancourt, who is an environmental sociologist at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, told Science News. “You had hundreds of people living there for 40 years.”
“[It] scared the birds,” he added. “There are no precise estimates of the size of the populations back then. Probably there were about 50 million birds. Today, there are a few hundred thousand birds.”
An empire built on sh… aky legal terminology
As you might imagine, this was hardly a sustainable model – even the most industrious birds can only poop so much, after all. And so, as Peru’s poop mines started running dry, nations that had previously relied on the South American country’s exports started looking for alternative solutions for the doo-doo deficit.
At first, they were pretty common sense: if Peru’s poop is gone, how about Chile’s? But when even that nation’s reserves started running dry, things got more dastardly, and in 1879, backed by guano-hungry Britain, Chile went to war with Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific.
“The war was won by Chile, who, backed by Britain, annexed Peru’s nitrate (and lithium) province of Tarapacá, never to leave it again,” Betancourt wrote in his paper. “Likewise, Bolivia ceded Antofagasta (and thus its access to the ocean) to Chile, which to this day it still claims.”
Still, this would be far from the only international expansionism driven by desire for the doo. Enter the US, who, rather than set up a proxy war to secure its access to guano, opted for a more… unilateral approach.
“Farmers in the United States start pressuring Congress to pass some sort of legislation that will improve domestic access to this vital excrement,” Ponsa-Kraus explained. “The result is the Guano Islands Act, legislation that authorized the United States to take control of a guano island if a citizen discovered it and undertook certain actions to take possession of it.”
While the idea of the US absorbing islands into its territory might seem old hat to us today, what with the existence of places like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, and so on, the passage of the Guano Islands Act was surprisingly controversial at the time.
“The whole thing made a few people pretty nervous,” noted Ponsa-Kraus. “Was all this, they wondered, some sort of secret plot to start setting up overseas island colonies? There’s resistance to this notion in various quarters.”
The solution? Fudge it. Rather than precise legalese, the bill’s sponsors rewrote it in vague, hand-wavey terms: no “territory” or “sovereignty”, since that might impose some kind of political obligations around the islands; instead, they were to “appertain” to the US as “possessions” – a turn of phrase which was unprecedented in this context before this particular act.
Now, what it meant in technical terms was… not very much, actually. Which was by design – the US wanted the guano on these islands, but not any responsibility for them: “You didn’t want to go out and claim sovereignty over all these messy places,” Ponsa-Kraus said. “From a legal perspective, that would be a total pain!”
The upshot, though, was immediate: in total, something like 100 guano islands were secured for the US, with 10 percent remaining possessions of the country even today. And they’re not just rocks covered in crap, either: over the years, many have been used as military bases for the US, with one – Johnson Atoll, acquired through the Act in March 1858 – being used during the Vietnam war to store the chemical weapon Agent Orange.
“The Guano Islands Act […] arguably laid the legal groundwork for American imperialism,” Ponsa-Kraus argued. “[It] created a very important and new kind of place […] a weird sort of non-place, from a constitutional perspective. These islands ‘belong’ to the US, but they aren’t really a ‘part’ of the United States.”
A shifty deal
The US’s reluctance to extend its borders into insular colonies didn’t last long. In 1898, having won the Spanish-American War, it suddenly found itself in possession of a bunch of new little islands scattered across the globe: Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, plus, depending on who you ask, Cuba. Suddenly, people needed an answer to the question: what do we do with these places?
Of course, you might think that any extension of your territory is good – more land, more people, more better, as Alexander the Great once said (you know, probably). But this was the 19th century, and people were crazy racist, so “in fact, the acquisition of all these islands […] leads to something close to a constitutional crisis,” Ponsa-Kraus said. “If they are territories, then are they going to become states? But they are full of hot-blooded, swarthy types! The eugenicists, among others, don’t like it.”
The solution? Well, people figured, how about we just do what we did with the guano islands?
“In the end, the court finesses it, and the justices conjure up a distinction between two kinds of US territory: ‘incorporated’ (meaning ‘en route to statehood,’ i.e., ‘containing a good number of Caucasian Protestants with acceptable table manners’) and ‘unincorporated’ (meaning, more or less, ‘the US is in charge here’),” Ponsa-Kraus explained.
“The latter category was basically invented to give constitutional blessing to the US directly governing a network of colonial islands around the world: they were ‘unincorporated territories’,” she continued. “In an international sense, they were part of the US, but they weren’t really ‘the US,’ if you know what I mean.”
The next guano?
And so, perhaps accidentally, and certainly pretty obliquely, the US had gotten itself an empire – and all thanks to the undeniable need for guano. But are the nation’s borders going to grow any further in search of dung?
Well, no. Lucky for us – and the birds of Peru – we don’t need to harvest guano anymore. “Fritz Haber, a German chemist, discovered a chemical reaction in the early 1900s […] whereby he could use molecular nitrogen gas from the atmosphere [and] combine it with hydrogen in a very energy intensive chemical reaction to produce ammonia,” Betancourt explained to Science News.
“Basically, he discovered the way to synthesize synthetic fertilizer from nitrogen in the air,” he said, “which is, to this day, the process whereby most synthetic fertilizer in the world is produced.” Today, pretty much the only farmers using Peruvian guano are in Peru – they “apply it to coffee,” Betancourt said, which “gets exported to Europe and to the US.”
But that happy ending may not last. The world may not need guano anymore – but it does need lithium, and lots of it. And one of the best places to get that particular mineral is… well, pretty much exactly the same area as all that guano.
Exactly what that means for the historically embattled region “remains to be seen,” Betancourt wrote in his paper. “Will a few nations keep profiting from and reaping the ecological and economic benefits of present-day trade? Will the twenty-first-century empires succeed at colonizing Mars and achieve what Cecil Rhodes could only dream of 130 years ago?”
“Or will humanity succeed at preserving our only home as a safe, equal, and operating space for our species and the countless others with whom we share it?” he asked. “Only time will tell.”
