On the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it began to shell and bomb other American possessions across the Pacific. Included in the first set of targets was a string of American bases and stations, including Baker, Howland, and Jarvis islands. Living on these islands were young Hawaiian men, sent there as part of the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project. Their purpose, according to the US government, was to create a firm legal claim to the islands by providing a continuous American presence in the event of Japanese aggression. Replacing the “thin white line” of entrepreneurs from the previous century, this group also had a racialized dynamic. These small colonies were populated with Hawaiian men because, in the American imagination, only people from the South Pacific were suited to the climate. Success meant they survived until another wave of young men arrived to take their place. After Pearl Harbor, these “colonists” were trapped on the islands, without a means of escape.Footnote 1
This American colonial project of the 1930s was part of a much longer historical program to acquire islands like these as part of an expanding American Pacific empire. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States began an aggressive campaign to acquire uninhabited islands in the Pacific. International Relations scholars usually ignore these acquisitions. After all, they were uninhabited. Scholars of imperialism, however, cannot ignore their importance. The United States not only acquired the territory, but populated it. Thousands of Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, and African Americans were kidnapped or lured with false promises to the islands to shovel seabird droppings known as guano, which were used as fertilizer in the United States. The working conditions were horrendous. One American sailor who visited the guano islands wondered “how human beings could live in such a place and not go mad.”Footnote 2
These islands suddenly became famous during the Pacific War. For many of the war’s pivotal sea battles, the central goal was to protect former guano islands. Most famously, the Battle of Midway – the turning point in the Pacific War – was fought over an old guano acquisition in the Pacific that had become a strategically important place to ambush the Japanese Navy. While IR scholars have overlooked the origins of the guano islands, the soldiers who fought in the war could not help but notice the origins of the islands as they hid in, navigated around, or reengineered the guano pits and other mining operations that still scarred the terrain.
Guano imperialism marked the first major commodity rush into the Pacific. Between 1850 and 1900, the United States claimed over a hundred islands across the world through the Guano Act of 1856. This plunged the United States into a seaborne competition for territory in the Pacific, vying against Australia, Chile, Ecuador, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico. Under the terms of the Act, whenever an American citizen discovered an uninhabited, unclaimed island containing deposits of guano, that island would then “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States” (48 U.S. Code §1411). At the time, no one quite understood what it meant to say an island “appertained” to the United States. Nonetheless, it was generally understood that the islands would be subject to US laws and regulations, and presidents could retain possession of the islands for as long as they saw fit.Footnote 3
Why did the United States develop a guano empire? In the next section, we show that scholars have paid significant attention to state-led explanations for guano imperialism. Some argue that the state led the way into the Pacific to acquire fertilizer at the behest of American farmers; others emphasize naval lobbies. In both views, the state first expressed interest and then entrepreneurs followed. Rather than searching for a coherent state interest driving US foreign policy, this chapter presents evidence that entrepreneurs led the way into the Pacific. A sudden rise in guano prices led US entrepreneurs to search for guano, and threats to their interests from foreign competitors pushed them to ask for government protection.
Guano imperialism is essential for understanding the US entry in the Pacific. Of the islands discussed in this book, only Hawaii receives considerable attention in the existing literature. This distorts the track record of America’s Pacific imperialism. It shrinks the duration and reach of early American imperial adventures in the Pacific and, in doing so, dramatically limits the evidence available for understanding American foreign policy. One goal of this book is to open the empirical terrain and examine all acts of expansion (and nonexpansion) within the Pacific. This chapter is essential to that widening. Guano imperialism happened decades before other imperial acts and had a massive geographic sweep. To understand guano imperialism, we need to look for commonalities and compare it to later imperial actions. A careful analysis of guano imperialism shows the pattern that emerges from the three mechanisms described in Chapter 1 – price, threat to profits, and lobbying – are present as early as the 1850s, enlarging the size and scope of our account of empire.
This chapter begins by describing the period of booming guano prices, sometimes called “guano mania.” We describe how a period of high prices led entrepreneurs abroad. Second, we describe how one entrepreneur – Alfred J. Benson – sought out islands in order to profit from a spike in guano prices. We emphasize how threats to Benson’s profits turned this entrepreneur into a lobbyist for imperialism. Finally, we show how Benson, hoping to protect this exhaustible resource, raised expectations of spectacular guano deposits in the Pacific and agitated policymakers in Washington to secure this resource. This lobby was successful. The Guano Act provided the legal basis for further expansion in the hopes of chasing high guano prices. With US protection assured, more entrepreneurs entered the Pacific searching for territory.
2.1 Guano and Conventional Explanations
Kenneth Shewmaker observed that the acquisition of guano islands would appear “so totally out of character as to defy explanation.”Footnote 4 Scholars who study the guano islands have attempted to understand why the United States sought unclaimed and uninhabited islands in the Pacific at a time when the nation was still expanding across the continent. What made these barren rocks so attractive? This section reviews the strategic and economic factors scholars have suggested as explanations for why the United States sought out guano islands, showing that these explanations cannot account for the timing and location of American activity.
Scholars sometimes emphasize strategic motives for US interest in the guano islands. The strategic account focuses on William Seward, the senator who introduced the Guano Act. Michael Green, for example, describes Seward as an ambitious expansionist who was deeply concerned about the balance of power in Asia. In his account, Seward sought naval bases that could block British expansion from China into the Pacific.Footnote 5 Such work suggests the Guano Act provided Seward with cover to pursue his expansionist agenda at a time when the United States was ambivalent toward overseas expansion.Footnote 6 It also provided the US Navy with “stepping stones” across the Pacific.
Yet strategic interests do not explain American interest. There is little evidence that Seward believed the guano islands were important for naval bases. For example, in 1842, the Navy published its report of an extensive 4-year exploring expedition in Polynesia; some of the islands listed in the report would later become the guano islands, such as Baker, Howland, Canton, and Palmyra.Footnote 7 The US Navy considered almost all these islands unsuitable for harbors and coaling stations.Footnote 8 Midway Island was the exception that proved the rule. The US Navy briefly took possession of the island in 1867 for the purpose of establishing a coaling station but abandoned the project after it proved too costly. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the island only seemed to attract poachers, shipwrecks, and a murder mystery novelist.Footnote 9 The US Senate declared it “as bad a midway station as could be found and could never be made a repair and equipment station.”Footnote 10 This view did not change until after World War I.Footnote 11 Islands beyond Midway did not receive the attention of nineteenth-century strategic thinkers in the United States. Unlike the doomed Midway project, they were often thousands of miles from major sea lanes, sometimes surrounded by reefs, had no natural harbors, and had insufficient land for naval operations (see Map 2.1).
The geography and timing of acquisitions provide the most decisive evidence against any relationship between naval power and guano acquisitions. American naval enthusiasm in the late 1880s and 1890s is usually cited as an explanation for Pacific imperialism. Yet, this is decades after the primary period of US guano imperialism. Map 2.1 provides a visualization of the growth of American guano imperialism. Most acquisitions occur in the 1850s, decline in the 1860s, and barely exist in the 1880s and 1890s. This is precisely the opposite of what strategic explanations would expect. And these later acquisitions – such as Clipperton, Huon, and Starbuck – had no strategic significance. They are very far from nineteenth-century shipping lanes and saw no attention from military strategists, ever, as far as we can identify.
Economic explanations for guano imperialism often emphasize major domestic interest groups in the United States. These accounts typically claim the islands were valuable to American farmers. For instance, Daniel Immerwahr notes that guano was an effective fertilizer, so securing these islands was critical for sustaining agricultural productivity in the United States.Footnote 12 Walter Nugent agrees, stating that American farmers exerted pressure on the Peirce administration to secure an affordable supply of guano. The administration responded by helping pass the Guano Act of 1856. In sum, the guano islands “had no purpose except to ensure that their one asset, bird dung, was accessible (solely) to American farmers.”Footnote 13 These explanations are similar to ours in emphasizing economic factors, but they differ because they concentrate on large businesses in the metropole, rather than small businesses on the periphery.
Theories that emphasize major American metropolitan interests are correct that farmers wanted guano; this chapter begins with this fact – guano mania – and how it seized the imagination of American farmers. But these theories cannot account for the turn in US foreign policy from trade to expansion as a strategy for obtaining fertilizer. Farmers in the United States primarily wanted to trade for guano with large guano-producing states, especially Peru; Pacific expansion was not originally part of the story.Footnote 14 The shift to a territorial strategy emphasizing small claims was stunning and sudden. American Pacific guano claims were unlikely to have moved the needle on prices because they were smaller than South American sources and were originally viewed as low quality, or about “as valuable as bone dust” by analyses often read by American farmers.Footnote 15 The claims also required a revolution in American foreign policy thinking. The Guano Act, as Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine observed at the time, “is something of a novel experiment” and “a very new kind of legislation, never known before.”Footnote 16 Economic explanations emphasizing farmers’ interests, in sum, cannot explain the focus on seizing new territories. It was simply not on the agenda.
2.2 The Search for Guano
The central argument of this section is that rising guano prices led American entrepreneurs abroad. As explained in the last chapter, this price mechanism provides evidence that entrepreneurs, rather than the state, led the way into the Pacific. We now test the price mechanism. The first section reviews the sharp increase in guano prices and how they seized the entrepreneurial imagination. The next section tests the effects of this on entrepreneurs’ decisions to locate abroad by examining American entrepreneurial activity following passage of the Guano Act. The Guano Act required entrepreneurs to file claims with the US government, which means we can directly examine the relationship between prices and entrepreneurial activity.
2.2.1 Guano Mania
The demand for fertilizers rose dramatically in the early nineteenth century. Agriculture was a relatively unsophisticated industry in the mid-nineteenth century. American farmers practiced primitive agricultural techniques that eroded the soil and led to declining agricultural productivity.Footnote 17 Farmers desperately sought solutions for “soil exhaustion.”Footnote 18 They experimented with various fertilizers: animal manures, putrefied animal remains, ash, blood, bones, cotton seeds, fresh urine, “night soil” (human excrement), and many others.Footnote 19 Guano excited American farmers the most. Peru used calcified piles of seabird droppings, which were found in its Chincha Islands, sometimes in piles more than one hundred feet high.Footnote 20 While indigenous Peruvians traditionally used guano as a fertilizer, it was mostly unknown to the rest of the world. The Peruvian government nationalized ownership of its guano reserves in the hopes of starting an export trade and charging royalties on its extraction.Footnote 21 Samples turned up in North America and Europe and elicited favorable reviews in the agricultural press.Footnote 22 The editor of the American Farmer received a sample of this “celebrated manure used in South America” from his son-in-law and discovered its “astonishing fertilizing properties” (p. 316).Footnote 23
The guano trade picked up in 1844, and the American agricultural press developed a mania for the product.Footnote 24 Pages were filled with testimonials of guano’s “magical” properties in producing crops on “worn-out land, long considered worthless […] where not a return for the seed sown could have been expected before.”Footnote 25 Lands that produced 3 to 5 bushels of wheat per acre now promised 20 to 25 bushels; similar results were found with corn and tobacco.Footnote 26 Urban legends also spread: Cucumber seeds fertilized with guano grew so fast that their vines almost killed a farmer, “fast curling about him, like a serpent”; a farm boy fell asleep on some bags of guano stored in a barn and woke up “a giant eight feet tall”; and cockroaches aboard a ship carrying guano “became so large that they could get up sail on the brig.”Footnote 27
Guano quickly became an important import within the United States.Footnote 28 Southern farmers accepted testimonials of Peruvian guano’s fertilizing properties as “gospel” and pushed the agricultural press for further information concerning its price, availability, and proper use.Footnote 29 Demand spread from ports along the Atlantic to the Gulf, from tobacco farmers in Virginia to cotton plantation owners in Louisiana.Footnote 30 Precise data on demand are not available because the Department of the Treasury did not track imports of guano until 1847. However, available data suggest guano was being used more widely each succeeding year. The total amount of guano imported into the United States rose from 66,000 tons throughout the 1840s to one million tons in the 1850s.Footnote 31 Much of this came from Peru. Annual imports of Peruvian guano tripled in less than a decade.Footnote 32
Yet, the surge in guano imports could not keep pace with demand. Guano was an extractive commodity: The supply was finite and limited geographically to arid, barren islands.Footnote 33 Moreover, the Peruvian government had a monopoly on production, tightly controlling its exports of guano to profit from its extraction over the long term.Footnote 34 Peru also faced production delays. For example, there was a “want of power of loading at the [Chincha] islands,” causing the demand for guano to exceed the means of export.Footnote 35 Farmers besieged their representatives in Washington with complaints – about inadequate supply, irregular deliveries, and high prices – asking the government to help them reduce the cost of guano.Footnote 36
Guano mania is important for our argument because it drove prices sky high but did not in itself create a drive for expansion. The price of guano rose sharply, as explained in more detail in the next section. This provided the impetus for American entrepreneurs to travel abroad. Yet, this was not a state-led expansion. The initial US response was trade, not territorial expansion. This focus on imports was underscored by President Fillmore in the State of the Union when he promised “to employ all the means” in his power to have guano “imported into the country at a reasonable price.”Footnote 37 By this, he meant convincing Peru to speed the export of guano to the United States.
2.3 Rising Prices and Expansion
The rise in guano prices stimulated entrepreneurs – not the US government – to begin looking abroad for islands to mine guano. The last chapter describes this as the price mechanism. When prices rise for commodities that cannot be grown or mined in US territories, entrepreneurs look for islands on which to locate operations abroad. This section examines broad patterns of land acquisition to show that price increases led to the claiming of territory.
The primary period of US acquisitions of guano claims occurred between 1856 and 1869 (see Figure 2.1). During this time, the price of guano per ton went through two major cycles, rising to $65 on the eve of the Civil War, falling during the war, and then rising to $70 after the war ended.Footnote 38 American entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to profit off this “white gold” and began to scour the world for guano, importing bird droppings from Africa, the Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain, Central America, the Caribbean, and, more importantly, the Pacific Ocean.Footnote 39
Figure 2.1 Guano price and acquisitions over time.Footnote 41
To demonstrate that the rise in price stimulated entrepreneurship in the Pacific, we examine the timing of Pacific claims by American entrepreneurs. If our theory is correct, the number of claims made by American entrepreneurs should correlate with price. To evaluate this argument, we use Skagg’s inventory of guano island claims and subtract two from the claim year (e.g., we presume a claim from 1858 was initiated in 1856). We do so because most claims took several years to process and were often preceded by voyages to the islands. Our argument is tied to when entrepreneurs invested time and resources in the islands – which preceded recognition of the claim – and thus presuming a brief lag is important. To measure prices, we use data from the London market because of limits to the US price time series, which did not regularly collect guano prices.Footnote 40
Consistent with our expectations, as guano prices increased, the number of acquisitions also increased. Figure 2.1 shows how guano prices and acquisitions unfolded. Recall that most guano acquisitions occurred in the 1850s and steadily declined until the end of the century. The period where most Pacific acquisitions occurred, 1856 to 1869, is shaded gray. This was also the time of rising guano prices; the price of guano was above the median for the nineteenth century. Conversely, acquisitions became infrequent once guano prices began to decline in 1869. The rise of artificial fertilizers decreased demand for guano, causing entrepreneurs to lose interest in the commodity. Moreover, almost all sources of guano in the Pacific had been discovered by the 1870s. The Guano Act did remain law, and some entrepreneurs still filed claims. Nonetheless, claims were much less frequent after 1869 than those before 1869. The rate of acquisition dramatically declined as prices fell. The 1850s – the period of the sharpest price increase – saw a growth in acquisitions, which was larger than that during later periods by 1,000 to 2,000 percent.
Second, we find that the relationship between guano prices and entrepreneurship is not geographically confined to the Pacific. As we described in Chapter 1, some scholars have attributed Pacific imperialism to factors specific to the Pacific Ocean, such as naval power or Chinese markets. These theories would expect entrepreneurial interest in the Pacific guano islands to be conditional on these factors. If entrepreneurial interest was conditional on these factors, then we should expect the relationship between guano prices and claims to be specific to the Pacific during this period.Footnote 42 Yet an inspection of islands in other regions, such as the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean shows the same relationship between guano prices and acquisitions. Table 2.1 shows the same trend as in Map 2.1 and Figure 2.1. The pace of expansion outside the Pacific in the 1850s – when prices were higher – is much faster than that in subsequent decades. This is powerful evidence that alternative explanations have limited explanatory power for the US guano empire.
Table 2.1 Number of Pacific and non-Pacific guano acquisitions, by decade.Footnote 43
The guano islands render an excellent opportunity to study the price mechanism directly. They are the only instance in which American entrepreneurs had to register claims abroad in the middle of the nineteenth century. Evidence for the period shows that entrepreneurs reacted to guano mania by starting enterprises abroad and requesting the United States to claim the territory on their behalf. These incentives drove empire.
In the rest of the chapter, we step back a few decades in time. Statistical evidence presented so far comes from data collected after the Guano Act of 1856. While this evidence clearly demonstrates the price mechanism, qualitative evidence is necessary to explain how the Guano Act came into being, that is, why were guano miners interested in US protection and how did they secure protection in the form of imperialism. In other words, the economic threat and lobbying mechanisms require a different approach, focusing on the period before 1856, when there was no policy protecting guano miners’ investments.
2.4 Creating a Guano Lobby
The previous section described a growing guano mania in the United States that drove prices higher in the 1850s and early 1860s and how this sparked entrepreneurial interest in seizing territory abroad. This account explained the price mechanism of our argument. We now turn to the threat mechanism. Specifically, we ask why guano miners turned from entrepreneurs to imperialists when they felt their profits were threatened. In doing so, we concentrate on the origins of the Guano Act of 1856, which provided the protection entrepreneurs were seeking. This section uses a qualitative approach, following the most important entrepreneur of the period – Alfred Benson – as he seized on guano and faced threats to his mining operations. We first briefly return to the price mechanism as it related specifically to Benson’s operations, before turning to an analysis of the economic threats to his claims and how that motivated interest in imperialism.
2.4.1 Benson and Guano Mania
In the last section, we showed that price changes in 1856 to 1900 mattered for guano acquisitions. We now shift our focus to a few years earlier to understand the origins of the Guano Act. In the early 1850s, entrepreneurs mining guano expected little protection from the United States and certainly did not expect US acquisition of the territories where they hoped to work. Creating this policy required entrepreneurs. In this section, we examine the interests of Alfred Benson. His firm accounted for 85 percent of all guano island claims in the region before the start of the Civil War.Footnote 44 As we detail in the next section, when Benson’s claims were threatened, he became instrumental in lobbying for guano imperialism. This section examines his background and shows how high prices led him to invest in two projects.
From the standpoint of our theory, Benson was the archetypical entrepreneur. He was a prominent American shipping merchant “with several enterprises of value in New York and Brooklyn” and an eye for opportunities to make a quick buck.Footnote 45 He pursued several projects throughout the California Gold Rush, including a secret offer to purchase the entire Hawaiian kingdom to profit off trade with San Francisco.Footnote 46 He was also a crook. Benson had a history of defrauding the government on projects that never materialized and filing damage claims for large sums of money; at one point, he attempted to evade arrest for making false claims with the New York Police Department.Footnote 47
Benson’s involvement in the guano trade fits with our expectations. He first became interested in guano around 1850, when prices began to rise in the United States. At the time, newspapers were advertising guano as “equal to gold in value, because it will bring gold in market.”Footnote 48 Benson wanted to get in on the rush and began searching for guano in the Pacific Ocean.Footnote 49 His search resulted in two moves to secure guano abroad.
Benson’s first move to secure guano in the Pacific Ocean was in the Lobos Islands off the coast of Peru in 1851. Benson “obtained information that heavy deposits of excellent guano existed on the uninhabited Islands of Lobos de Afuera, lying some forty miles off the coast of Peru.”Footnote 50 He enlisted a ship captain, James Jewett, to inspect the islands. Jewett found them potentially profitable, and Benson saw the chance to make his “eternal fortune.”Footnote 51 He quickly laid plans to import 200,000 tons of guano at $35 per ton, or about 40 percent below market price; at that rate, Benson anticipated $3 million in profits.Footnote 52 To accomplish this, he chartered ships and procured equipment to be sent to the Lobos to remove the guano. He also dispatched one ship to the islands outfitted “with houses, tools, provisions, men, boats, water, and everything needed for the occupation and settlement of Lobos de Afuera, for the purpose of loading his vessels as they should arrive.”Footnote 53 Benson raised the idea of imperialism in the Lobos Islands, as we will show, but his plan failed. Peru blocked the ships from mining the islands, and President Fillmore, unwilling to ignite a war over guano, refused to defend Benson’s ships.
Benson moved again to secure guano in the Pacific Ocean in 1855. He learned from an American whaler of two uninhabited islands – Baker and Jarvis – with the “most remarkable kind of soil, the dust of which so enveloped and choked the men that they were compelled to abandon the place first attempted, and choose another nearer the shore, where it was not so dry.”Footnote 54 Benson knew this strange soil to be guano; he estimated the islands contained “more than two hundred million tons of ammoniated guano” and would net $2.4 million in profits in the first year of sales alone.Footnote 55 Seizing the opportunity, Benson hired an attorney to purchase the “discoverer’s rights” from the whaler. He also solicited investors to form the American Guano Company and took measures to reinforce the company’s rights, dispatching a ship to Baker and Jarvis islands for the purpose of establishing proof of occupation.Footnote 56 Meanwhile, Benson proceeded to Washington to press for annexation.Footnote 57 His efforts, as we will show, resulted in the Guano Act.
Benson’s operations provide robust evidence for the price mechanism. He entered the trade at a time when guano was approaching peak importation and prices were steadily increasing, and he continued to chase rising commodity prices. The next section turns to the economic threats that led him to form an imperial lobby.
2.4.2 The Specter of Foreign Competition
After entrepreneurs relocate abroad, we expect them to lobby for protection when they face threats to their profits. In the previous chapter, we described this as the threat mechanism. For extractive commodities, we expect these economic threats to be immediate for two reasons. First, the selection of sites is limited. In the case of guano, there are only so many islands abundant in guano, and each therefore holds value. Entrepreneurs want to claim this territory before other empires’ agents can claim it. This is augmented by the capital-intense requirements for extraction. In the case of guano, the costs of purchasing mining equipment, securing labor, and paying for transport meant one wanted protection before making the initial investment. These threats, we posit, turn entrepreneurs into lobbyists, and in the case of extraction do so almost immediately (see Chapter 1).
Benson’s interest in the Lobos Islands demonstrates the threat to profits mechanism. He faced two threats on the Lobos Islands. The first threat to profits came from other entrepreneurs. This was not an idle worry. When Jewett returned from his inspection of the islands, American and English newspapers reported that English entrepreneurs had also taken an interest in the islands.Footnote 58 Benson sensed he needed to “be early in the field” and get ahead of these entrepreneurs, outracing them into an area untapped by US authority or business.Footnote 59 The second threat came from the Peruvian government. Peru claimed to have dominion over the islands as part of its independence from Spain, which had discovered and taken possession of the islands in 1526. However, the Lobos Islands were far from the Peruvian coast and unoccupied. Benson felt this left “the question of ownership of said Islands in doubt,” but nonetheless, he wanted assurances of protection from the US government before proceeding to the islands.Footnote 60
The same kinds of threats present in the Lobos case also were present in the Baker and Jarvis islands. Benson feared rival entrepreneurs might try to claim the guano before he could get to the islands. After the Lobos crisis, other entrepreneurs began to sniff around for unclaimed guano islands in the Caribbean.Footnote 61 Benson worried they might turn their sights to the Pacific, and he began to “look for protection in their rights of discovery and possession.”Footnote 62 His concerns about British competition were well founded. The British Navy had instructed its ships to search for unclaimed guano islands in the Pacific.Footnote 63 In light of this situation, Benson recognized he needed protection from the US government to “enforce these rights as against other nations.”Footnote 64
Threats to Benson’s profits were the key factor that shifted Benson from an entrepreneur to a lobbyist. He believed that only by securing US protection could he work his claims. This, we show in the next section, was the first lobby for the guano islands; it was also the first significant lobby for Pacific imperialism in US history.
2.5 Positional Resources and the Guano Lobby
In the last section, we described the origins of the guano lobby. Led by Benson, entrepreneurs wanted to develop mining operations. Threats from foreign competition, however, made them anxious for US protection, turning entrepreneurs into imperialists. This section evaluates whether positional lobbying was effective in the case of guano. The last chapter described a direct pathway to lobbying, where entrepreneurs engage directly with US policymakers. Entrepreneurs, we argued, provided legislators with legislative subsidies, providing information, talking points, or writing legislation for them. Their ability to secure this influence required they have a monopoly on information about the islands. Having a monopoly on information allowed entrepreneurs to frame imperial legislation in ways consistent with legislators’ interests.
The benefit of the guano case is that there is clear within-case variation about the effectiveness of guano lobbying.Footnote 65 Benson’s first attempts to secure protection in the Lobos appeared successful, but he was rebuffed in early 1852. We argue this is because exogenous events led the guano lobby to lose its monopoly on information and therefore its positional advantage. In the summer and fall of 1852, however, Benson’s position turned, and he gained support for claims in Baker and Jarvis. We show that in this case, the same exogenous events did not intervene, providing an opportunity for entrepreneurs to advance guano imperialism. The success of Baker and Jarvis was the turning point for guano imperialism. At this point, Benson pushed for the Guano Act, which provided the protection that enabled entrepreneurs to continue to spread across the Pacific in pursuit of guano islands.
2.5.1 Lobos Failures
Benson had clear positional advantages in the early stages of lobbying for protection in the Lobos Islands. While he raised the likelihood of imperialism, he ultimately failed to secure US protection. This section reviews Benson’s positional assets, showing how he manipulated information to make the United States more likely to acquire the Lobos Islands. However, this asset quickly faded due to the emergence of new agents. It also sets the stage for Benson’s successes in Baker and Jarvis described in the next section.
The challenge Benson faced was that he had little influence. He was not well liked in Washington. His history of fraud had made him a pariah in the US government.Footnote 66 He also “had quarreled with the Secretary [of State].” The fight was so bad that the two men had “not spoken with each other for more than a year.”Footnote 67 Consequently, Benson felt he needed to hide his involvement or else Webster “would have seen him in a very bad place.”Footnote 68
Fortunately, Benson had an important positional advantage. American foreign policy officials had little information about the legal status of the Lobos Islands. Webster acknowledged he did not know much about the islands or to whom they might belong.Footnote 69 The extent of his knowledge came from the memoirs of an American sealer who visited the islands in 1823 and who Webster erroneously believed “to have been their discoverer.”Footnote 70 The State Department also had little capacity to apprise him of Peru’s claim to the islands. The US chargé d’affaires in Peru wrote Webster on several occasions that Peru claimed the Lobos Islands.Footnote 71 However, his dispatches on the subject never reached Webster’s desk because the State Department was in “shameful condition” at the time.Footnote 72 Consequently, Webster was never given accurate information on the Lobos Islands. In situations like this, we expect entrepreneurs to have significant influence in lobbying for imperialism.
Benson realized he could exploit this lack of information in Washington as part of a positional strategy for lobbying the United States. Benson selected Jewett, the captain who visited the islands, to lobby on his behalf.Footnote 73 Their strategy was to minimize the diplomatic costs of acquiring the Lobos Islands while highlighting the commercial advantages. Benson knew Peru claimed the islands.Footnote 74 Yet, he had Jewett assure Webster that he was “informed that no Government has any rightful claim to these Islands.” Benson’s agent also highlighted the potential commercial gains by describing the “valuable deposits,” which “may be rightfully taken by a citizen of the United States, as citizens or subjects of any country.”Footnote 75
Benson initially was effective in providing legislative subsidies to Webster, supplying information on the costs and benefits of empire. Webster relied on the information in Jewett’s letter, rather than inquiring into the status of the islands himself.Footnote 76 He wrote Jewett that “it may be considered the duty of this government to protect citizens of the United States who may visit the Lobos Islands for the purpose of obtaining guano” and proposed that a “vessel-of-war be ordered” to safeguard their right to do so.Footnote 77 Wanting further assurances of protection, Benson instructed Jewett to go to Washington to meet with the Secretary of the Navy.Footnote 78 When Jewett confirmed that orders had been dispatched for full protection, Benson moved fast to occupy the Lobos Islands. He quickly procured equipment, chartered ships, advertised for seamen, and purchased weaponry.Footnote 79 Ship captains were instructed to “take possession of all available loading places” on the Lobos Islands and furnish “the letter from the honorable Secretary of State of the United States” should they encounter a US warship in the Pacific.Footnote 80
However, Benson quickly lost his positional advantage. The information environment shifted against Benson after news outlets reported Webster’s decision.Footnote 81 Peru dispatched a special envoy to meet with Webster and inform him of Peru’s claim. The envoy provided Webster with a mass of information on the discovery, occupation, and legal status of the islands, which proved “in the most incontestable manner, the rights and sovereignty which Peru exercises and always exercised over the aforementioned islands of the Lobos.”Footnote 82 Peru was prepared to defend its claim by force, if necessary.Footnote 83 Then, Webster learned of Benson’s involvement in the scheme from a private New York merchant who had traded with Peru. The merchant so despised Benson and “that scoundrel Jewett” that he took it upon himself to write Webster, after having “heard with extreme interest the agitation of the Lobos Islands question” and “that Benson had the government foul.”Footnote 84 Realizing he had been tricked, Webster countermanded the order to the Navy and warned that any resistance to Peruvian authorities would be considered “an act of private war, which can never receive any countenance from this government.”Footnote 85 Peru impounded Benson’s ships and the American press charged Webster with collusion.Footnote 86 The Lobos Islands were never taken.
The Lobos Islands allow us to trace two key elements about the role of entrepreneurs’ positions and the effectiveness of lobbying. First, even within Lobos, there is clear within-case variation. At the beginning stages of the case, Benson was able, through surrogates, to provide legislative subsidies to Weber that made it more likely the United States would acquire the islands, minimizing the diplomatic costs of acquiring the Lobos Islands while advertising commercial gains. However, once this positional advantage was lost, the US government abandoned the project. In itself, this provides an excellent opportunity to understand what advantages entrepreneurs had in pursing imperial agendas. Second, Lobos also sets up a useful contrast to the Baker and Jarvis islands, discussed next. Whereas Benson ultimately failed to win support for the Lobos Islands, he was successful later that year using a similar positional strategy.
2.5.2 Baker and Jarvis Islands Successes
Thus far, we have shown that American entrepreneurs – motivated by rising guano prices – searched for Pacific Islands. Threatened by foreign competition, they became an early lobby for imperialism. However, in the case of the Lobos Islands, they failed to secure imperialism. The reason, we showed, was that entrepreneurs were unable to effectively preserve a monopoly on information about the islands for American decision-makers. In this section, we describe the conditions that led to the lobby’s first successes over Baker and Jarvis islands and how this sparked guano imperialism across the Pacific.
Benson enjoyed the same positional benefits in Baker and Jarvis islands. The US government knew practically nothing about the islands because they were undiscovered and unclaimed.Footnote 87 The US Pacific Squadron heard of the islands from American whalers but knew them by another name and never visited.Footnote 88 The US also had limited capacity to learn more about the islands and the magnitude of their guano deposits. Benson kept the location of Baker and Jarvis islands secret, “under seal of the [American Guano Company], until said company shall have full and undisputed possession of said island and the guano thereon.”Footnote 89 Only three individuals within the company knew the “precise locality of the island[s].” This made it difficult for the government to learn of the islands without the company’s assistance.Footnote 90
Benson and his agents used their exclusive knowledge of Baker and Jarvis to lobby for annexation. Benson wrote President Peirce requesting that a vessel of war be sent to the yet unidentified islands to “take possession thereof, under the flag of the United States, as property of the undersigned.” Although he would not yet disclose the locality of the islands, Benson assured Peirce that the diplomatic costs of acquiring the islands were low. The islands were “discovered and taken possession of by an American shipmaster,” who swore under oath that the island “remained unoccupied and uninhabited.” The shipmaster also attested to the commercial gains of acquiring the islands, believing the islands held guano “of the same kind and of equal quality to that of the Chincha Islands.”Footnote 91 Benson reminded Peirce of “the immense importance, commercially and agriculturally considered, which must accrue to this country by the importation and the introduction of said guano into the United States at a low price.”Footnote 92
Peirce was optimistic but reluctant to annex the islands outright. He feared a repeat of the misinformation of the Lobos crisis and dispatched a naval vessel to sail to the islands to verify “the correctness of the information.”Footnote 93 A company associate with knowledge of the islands was to escort the detachment to the islands. Benson complied but worried that the naval inspection might jeopardize his investments: Once information about the inspection leaked to the press, entrepreneurs in eastern American ports would seek information on the location of this “Guano El Dorado.”Footnote 94
These threats to profits led Benson to favor outright annexation. He directed his counsel to submit a petition to William Seward, who was his senator at the time, that sought “title to certain guano islands lying in the Pacific Ocean, acquired by discovery, purchase, and assignment.” The petition also urged “legislative action by Congress should recognize the acts of discovery and occupation and assert and maintain over the territory in question the jurisdiction of the United States.”Footnote 95 To help accomplish this task, Benson’s counsel also issued a statement to the Committee on Foreign Relations that stressed the commercial benefits of annexing the islands. He wrote that the United States would “secure almost inestimable source of wealth and benefit” and “promote our own commercial and agricultural industry.”Footnote 96 He explained that there were no diplomatic costs to acquiring the islands since American rights to the islands were “in conflict with no other people or nation” and the company had already established occupancy. In situations such as this, the United States had a well-established right under customary international law to “acquire dominion over important and extensive tracts of country, insular or connected with the mainland of the continent.”Footnote 97
The request was well received and provided an important legislative subsidy to the administration and Senate. Seward relied completely on Benson’s information, rather than waiting on the Navy to verify it.Footnote 98 In the Senate, he submitted Benson’s petition to take possession of Jarvis and Baker islands, as well as a bill to simplify the process by which American entrepreneurs secured future guano deposits. The bill, which would become the Guano Act of 1856, vested American citizens with the power of eminent domain to take possession of islands with guano deposits. Seward stressed that acquisition of these territories would not cost the United States. The discoverers would pay the costs of development, and cheaper fertilizer would “bring [gain] to all the people of the United States.”Footnote 99 Moreover, the United States was not required to keep the islands once the guano was depleted. Few senators contemplated the implications of the bill.Footnote 100 They agreed with Seward that it was better to pass the bill now rather than wait for the navy inspection and “run the counter-risk of losing the discovery [of Jarvis and Baker islands] altogether.”Footnote 101 The bill passed with little debate in the Senate and the House of Representatives, quickly becoming law on August 18, 1856.Footnote 102
The Guano Act of 1856 kickstarted guano imperialism. Baker and Jarvis were the first islands to receive protection. But the price mechanism continued to operate over subsequent decades, expanding the extent of imperialism for several years afterward. Benson’s firm discovered and claimed so many islands that European geographers began to refer to the islands as “American Polynesia.”Footnote 103
Passage of the Guano Act was clearly due to the influence of entrepreneurs. First, no other lobbies were present. The historical record shows little to no role for any early China lobby or Naval lobby. These lobbies formed decades later, closer to the Spanish-American War. Instead, it was entrepreneurs who pushed for the first acquisitions in the Pacific. Fearing foreign empires, they sought American protection. They tabled the issues for legislators, wrote the legislation that would animate guano imperialism, and provided evidence and data to justify it. The flag followed entrepreneurs across the Pacific, securing territory and protecting them from threats to their investments.
2.6 Conclusion
America’s first step toward empire in the Pacific was led by entrepreneurs chasing profits. The key finding of this chapter is that guano imperialism had three aspects. First, it was led by entrepreneurs. The state followed their lead. Second, the entrepreneurs turned into an imperial lobby because their profits were threatened. Finally, entrepreneurs were successful because of their positional advantages. They used their unique knowledge of the islands to provide legislative subsidies to lawmakers, drafting the legislation and providing the supporting arguments that were necessary to advance the American imperial project. Benson himself was spectacularly successful. The rest of this book shows that the model first demonstrated by Benson – entrepreneurs chasing profits leading the United States abroad – would drive America’s Pacific policy for the next five decades.
The guano islands were the first significant US imperial project that involved taking and holding land in the Pacific. As might be expected from a newfound Pacific power without extensive experience abroad, the United States adopted a strange amalgam of imperial practices. First, after the United States seized the guano islands, US businesses developed worker colonies on them. They induced foreign labor, mainly Melanesian, Polynesian, and Hawaiian, into signing long and ambiguous contracts. Conditions were miserable: Overseers were abusive, the sun was blazing hot, water and food were scarce, rats ran rampant, and the ammoniac air was practically unbreathable.Footnote 104 The rise of alternative fertilizers and depletion of available supplies caused the guano industry to steadily contract beginning in the 1870s until the end of the nineteenth century. However, America’s guano empire continued to live on. During World War I, the United States began to consider its Pacific guano islands as a bulwark against a Japanese expansion. This ushered in a second phase of colonization for the islands. The US government needed, under international law, to occupy the islands to claim undisputed sovereignty. It formed teams of boys from Hawaii, sending them to the islands to live, as part of an explicit colonization project described in the introduction to this chapter. After the war began, a third phase started. President Roosevelt established military facilities on the islands. Many, such as Midway, became famous during the Pacific War. Today, nine guano islands continue to be US possessions.
Guano imperialism also paved the legal ground for empire, which is likely its most lasting contribution to American imperialism. An important legacy of this “first step into the path of imperialism” in the Pacific was the distinction between incorporated territories that were on the path to statehood and unincorporated territories that were doomed to remain perpetual territories.Footnote 105 The term “appurtenance” originally only covered uninhabited islands, providing the legal basis for several Guano islands to remain US possessions as minor outlying islands in the Pacific. The Supreme Court later extended the legal principle to the new colonies acquired after the Spanish American War through a series of landmark decisions known as the Insular Cases. The court permitted the United States to acquire these territories without extending constitutional liberties to the new American nationals living on them.Footnote 106 Their decision to distinguish between the status of territorial inhabitants was based “on fears of other races” and created a kind of legal apartheid, where Pacific Americans became “second-class citizens” relative to those on contiguous American territory.Footnote 107 This system remains in force and relevant to struggles for rights in Guantanamo Bay, Puerto Rico, and modern American Samoa.Footnote 108
