this act effectively did, it allowed american citizens who might be searching for new guano islands in the pacific or caribbean, if they found a new islands covered in guano, and/or otherwise unclaimed, to claim these islands a sovereign territory of the united states. islands act of 1856. and this huge guano island rush. other guano islands had much smaller deposits and were much less rich in nitrogen because of rain leaching. nonetheless, there was a rush to find it. this is a bit of a digression, it did not articulate comfortably with the u.s. system of incorporating into nations. westward moving americans usually would settle a territory, and it would be incorporated into the nation as a territory and then estate. islands wouldo never become part of the united states like states. they would just be islands connected in formally. let me read the language of the act. whenever a citizen of the u.s. not within the lawful jurisdiction of any government or occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof and occupies, such an island may, at the discretion of t

there is an ad for pacific guano. and just a look at the period of guano export, really peaking and in the 1870's. a little decline there, and then going down again after that. in this period, exports were more than 12.6 million metric tons. totaling about $750 million in value. talk about mining. i think you should think about this in relationship to our lecture on coal mining. because i think there is a real analog here between tapping into these fossil forms of soil fertility and the shift in organic to fossil fuel regime. now, the peruvians retained control of the islands, but it was dominated by british trade houses. w.j. myers out of liverpool, and another ad from london that had a motto applied to them, "the house of gibbs made its dibs selling the turds of foreign birds." that is how this works. i will mention this quickly, and there is a chapter in the mann book that i almost had you read, but it was almost certainly the case that the potato blight that would undo the irish potato crop in 1840's and prompting