Empire: World History - 166. How To Hide An Empire

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Not everyone agrees that the USA should be classed as an empire. But in the late 1800s, after white settlers had colonised western states, America turned to acquiring overseas territories in what could be described as an imperial project. And one surprising commodity catalysed the project… bird poo. Joining Anita and William to answer questions like “how did shit shape the American empire?” and more, is Daniel Immerwahr, author of How To Hide An Empire.  Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnens. And me, William Duremberg. We're very, very excited because we have a fabulous guest for you today, Daniel Imavar, and we are huge fans of this professor of history of Northwestern University, the author most importantly, of how to hide an empire,

the short history of the greater United States. And I'm so glad that you are here because William and I, we read a lot of books at the same time, but seldom have we had a book where we talk about it so much to each other. And yours is one such book. Also, has been said, this is unusually. It came to be from my kids. They'd all read this before I got my hands in it.

And when they heard we were thinking of the United States and Empire, they all just said, there's one book, Dad, you've got to get him on. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to boast about this, but I did read your book about three months ago. I'm just saying, you know, even before his kids had flagged it up, I may have mentioned it, he wasn't listening. You know, so there we are. She's going, poof. I should say, for those who don't know Anita, when she gets COVID, we get a slightly spikier

version. Extra bitchy, when get extra dose of feverish, Anita. Anyway, why is this an important book? And why did we rave about it so much, William? We ought to do a proper preamble for our esteemed guest today. So I think it's the whole question of, is the United States an empire or not? We all know that it is, in a sense, the hyperpower, that it is still, despite the rise of China, despite the rumblings in Moscow, it is still, without question, the most powerful nation in the world. But it has always been shy of the label of an empire, partly because of its history. coming out in reaction to the British Empire, it was the bit of the British Empire that first got away. And because of that, it has always tried to put forward its credentials as the home of freedom, the home of liberty,

the antithesis of empire. And yet it has this enormous chain of territories and, frankly, colonies. Daniel, tell us why you think America is so shy of the title of empire. And has it always been that shy of empire? No, it hasn't always been. No, that's the interesting. interesting thing. I mean, we use empire, especially in the United States, as a pejorative, right? It's like, you know, calling someone a racist or something like that. You don't want to be the

imperialist. Like Star Wars? Yeah, yeah. And it's not an accident that Star Wars came out of the United States. But historically, empire has been the normal form of government for large polities. And the United States at various points in its history has been proud to call itself an empire, proud to be an empire. The pejorative thing gets to be a little unfortunate because the debate about why the United States is an empire becomes a debate about values. If you like the United States, it's a leader. And if you hate it, it's an empire. And I think that often clouds the factual matter, which is that if by empire you mean a country

with colonies, which I think is the sort of minimal definition we could possibly have of an empire, the United States is absolutely an empire. Not because it's bad, just because it just factually has overseas territories. and they're actually quite interesting. Yeah. I mean, just among the territories that are the link to America, we should say, and we'll be discussing from here on in. We're talking about Hawaii.

We're talking about the Philippines. We're talking about Guam. We're talking about Puerto Rico. American Samoa. There has been a period of time where Americans have grown up quite comfortable with the fact that they own other territories or other territories belong to them. Yeah, that's exactly right. So the moment when, there's a moment of kind of around 1898,

when the United States takes a lot of those colonies, leading men in the United States, people like Woodrow Wilson, people like Teddy Roosevelt, spoke of the United States openly as an empire, spoke of it openly as having colonies, and not just openly, proudly, right? That was a way to enter into the sort of superpowers club that, you know, had been led by Britain and included other members like France and Germany. A way for the United States to demonstrate maturity on the world stage was to be an empire. And how did they reconcile, even at that time, being the land of the free, which is one of those bedrock truths that Americans have, to having people who are not free to be Filipinos and the Philippines of their own making? They had a few different ways of doing it.

And there's a really nice essay by Woodrow Wilson in 1902, where he's reflecting all of this. And he says, you know, a lot of things have happened to the United States historically. Wilson was a historian, by the way, he wrote a five-volume history of the United States. A lot of things that happened to the United States historically, Civil War was kind of important. But basically the most important event since our independence has been 1898, the seizure of a large colonial empire. And in some ways, that's the next step in freedom, because not only have we taken freedom, or he calls it, liberty, for ourselves, we are now prepared to give it to other people. Ooh. Yeah, very newspeak.

What I loved, Daniel, in your book was how you say that the name America came to mean something different from the United States in this context. Yeah, so this is really counterintuitive. What is the name of the country? The name of the country is the United States of America. So it's a country with a kind of thesis about what its political character is, but also because its name is a thesis, it's long. and most people don't call it the United States of America, so they go for some kind of a nickname.

There was actually a lot of debate about what the nickname should be. Should we call it Columbia? Should we call it Fredonia? The main anthems in the 19th century, Hail Columbia, Columbia, Columbia Gem of the Ocean, or just Columbia, called it Columbia. That was the kind of literary name. And then there were other names that people used other short names, nicknames, the United States, the Republic, the Union. People did call the people who lived in it. there was some vacillation, but often they called those people Americans, but you see a kind of,

in the late 18th century and 19th century, a lot of lexical avoidance around calling the country America because it's just so clear to everyone that the Americas is more extensive than the United States of America and there are other parts of America. And so I went through all the presidential speech up to 1898, so time when in office presidents are giving public pronouncements. And I could only find 11 instances, unambiguous instances, where a president refers to his country as America. So that's about like one per decade. So it's not that it never happens. And other people use the sometimes call the country America. But it's just, it's not the only nickname that people use and it's not the main official name that people use. Not the reflex name. Yeah, exactly. Right, right.

Right. So what changes? The problem is that all the other, a lot of the other nicknames, the union, the Republic, the United States, those all emphasize the political character of the place. Union suggests that it is made of voluntary combination of different places. States insist that the places are a self-governing states. Republic is also about its political character. And when the United States took a bunch of populace overseas colonies, that felt like such a moment in the way that it did for Wilson. You said, like, this is transformed who we are. that a lot of people started to wonder, are we a union of states? Right.

I mean, like, the Philippines is not going to be a state, is it? Right. Those people cannot possibly be citizens. This was also something which I didn't know until I read your book. I had assumed that overseas territories like Puerto Rico were a state in the way that Hawaii is a state. But there are different levels of American control. Yeah, yeah. No, the term for them, I mean, the kind term for them, the neutral term for them is territorial,

is the term that people used at the time was colonies, and I think there's every reason to call them that. But the clear understanding was that at least some of these places were going to have different political destinies than, for example, Kansas and Nebraska. Political destinies and also rights? I mean, is there sort of an issue if you're not equal? You're not quite a state. Exactly correct. Yeah. So we think of the United States, because it's in the title, as a union of states, but actually it has never been a union of states. From the day it gets, its independence ratified from Britain until now and every day in between, it is an amalgamation of

states and territories. And there's been different sets of rights and it changes over time. But the territories have always been less than in the law. And so if you're in a territory, you'll have fewer rights and less inclusion than you'll have if you're in a state. So to this day, if you're living in Puerto Rico, you cannot vote for the president, but you can if you're in Hawaii, which is a state. Correct. Yeah. So Hawaii and Alaska, where the discontalienable, ambiguous territories that were made states, and we can talk about why. But Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands. Yeah. Extraordinary. I had no idea. We've got so much to talk about clearly. Just very quickly, though, just before we leave off this welter of wonder that

you've just presented to us, the Republic, many people have heard of the United States, America, all of these interchangeable phrases. But Fredonia is probably going to be. Now, tell us a little bit about the fate of Fridonia. I was worried about that, too. It's not a major, it's not a big. But if it comes from freedom? I mean, what was the thought process? Just, like, we are free. People of freedom, right? The Fredonians. Yeah, yeah. Please call us that. No, but it comes from the early republic when people understand the nomenclatural problem. They're like, look, we can't really call ourselves. We've been kind of calling ourselves Americans, but it's a little, it's a little much, especially because there are other American republics who are seizing their independence,

and we're all excited about that moment. So at the same time, what do you think of Bolivia? Yeah, well, basically all of South America. And so Fredonia becomes one sort of circulated idea. It doesn't really take off, but just as a way of acknowledging the problem and, like, we really should have a different way to referring to ourselves than Americans. Can I just say, I love it. It sounds like a film with Peter Sellers in it in multiple roles. Let's talk about where this whole idea actually sort of begins from,

because we've done about 15 episodes now, Daniel, about the inception of the, idea of America. And so far, we've sort of started, or where we left off at the last episode, was this westward expansion. And I wonder is that the start of an empire for you? Is that the start of the building of an empire? Yeah. So it doesn't resemble empire in the sort of classical, pith-hatted, colonialist way that we're used to thinking about. Because it's a different form of empire, it involves the displacement of indigenous people rather than the rule of them. It involves an enormous amount of settlers rather than just a few sort of colonial administrators. But I think there's every reason to think of what the United States is doing within North America as an empire. And so it's not

entirely a surprise when the United States then starts to claim overseas colonies. For people like Teddy Roosevelt, they say, this isn't there. We've been doing this all along. We just were doing it on the North American continent. And you make a wonderful argument in your book about how important whiteness and white supremacy is in this conception. Yeah. So if you think about the United States is always having states and territories, then you have to ask, well, how does a territory become a state? And the answer, up until 1959 when Hawaii and Alaska become states, is that there'd always been the kind of magic dust that you sprinkle over territory to turn it into a state, and that had been white settlement. So there's a lot of

occasions when Congress has to decide if some area should be a territory or should be a state, And always the question is, do they have enough white settlers so that white people can comfortably control the politics? Are they asked or cavil? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there are all these other questions about should the United States expand into Mexico, you know, it's going to take part of Mexico and the war with Mexico, but how much of Mexico should it take? And openly, again, the logic is, well, if we take too many Mexicans who we think of are non-white,

then it will be hard to have white control. So let's curate our borders to make sure that we can ensure that white settlement will dominate politics. Right. So, I mean, Woodrow Wilson, who you mentioned a little earlier, who has put pen to paper and talked about this colonialism being important to America's survival and identity. At the same time, is he also formally segregating within the United States, as we know it now, so that white people have more rights, white people are allowed in certain bathrooms? You know, segregation, as we now think of it as a more modern affair. Is it starting back with Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt? Are they thinking, actually, this is how we will run this country in the strata system?

Yeah, Wilson is so interesting because he's from the South, and he'd come of age during the Civil War. And then he'd grown up during what we call Reconstruction, but you could also call the occupation of the southern provinces, which is how Wilson thought of it. So he felt like he was a victim of colonialism, and his career was marked by an interest in nationalism and nation states and freedom. But the other legacy of coming from the Confederacy was that none of this was a vision of racial liberation. And Anita, what you mentioned is right. When Wilson was president, he formally segregated the federal government. I mean, there was already a sort of Jim Crow system being erected. Yeah, and informal, you know, why it's only cafe, why it's only restaurant.

But this was now sort of almost a statutory stamp of authority on this. Wilson isn't passing laws that cover the entire country, but it is how the federal government manages its, internal affairs, which is deeply symbolically important, and then also since the government is a major employer, you know, substantively important as well. Let's talk about the people who then lived in this sort of disunited states, if you like, under Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt. Do we have a lot from them about what it felt like? Growing up with the big banner, the merch says these here United States, you are all free. And yet their experience of it with this sort of, you know, stratification, even in federal government, as you say, it feels very different.

It does. And the first part of the 20th century is an interesting moment of possibility. So black people in United States, famously W.B. Du Bois think, you know, maybe with Wilson's talk about liberty, we can make something work here. People in the colonized territories look to Wilson and look to the sort of early rule of the United States and think, you know, this place has a history of turning territories into states, that could be our fate as well. And a lot of elite politics in places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines and a little bit in Hawaii is about the possibility of getting statehood. And maybe that's a happy possibility. But the Wilson years tend to be massively disappointing, both for African Americans within the contiguous United States,

but also for colonized people. Just do us a pen portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Who was he? What was he like? We love a Marvel origin story on this podcast. So just tell us what made him, who, he was. Yeah, I mean, he's an academic. He's a historian, so he's one of my tribe. And it's kind of interesting. He was already before being present. Wasn't just writing sort of history memoir. He's quite serious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one way to figure out what he's about is to just read his history of the United States that he wrote. He's just massive history. And it's not bad. Like, he's a really serious academic. He becomes the president of Princeton University again before he's president of the United States. And one thing that is so interesting about his,

history is when it comes out, it's hailed as a really important event because this is a southerner writing U.S. history. So often that have been the kind of domain of northern academics. And people are curious, you know, what does the Southern take going to be? And it turns out that he has a different broad view of the whole history of the countries and other people. But reviewers cannot help but notice a very bizarre twist at the end of the book, right? He gets you right up to like after the Civil War. And it's all kind of fairly what you might expect until the end when the heroes of, you know, the whole thing turn out to be the Ku Klux Klan, right?

These like hot-headed vigilantes who were like, you know, maybe a little violent, but they're ultimately redeeming the project of independence and they're redeeming the South, which is after all his land. So it's this weird, like respectable academic history that then gets like bizarrely clan-heavy, right at the end. And reviewers notice that they're like, interesting take, Woodrow. Like you for your input.

Yeah. And so the, the, the, the, okay, so the, the Ku Klux Klan is not a enormous organization

in the 19th century. It becomes one in the 20th century and becomes one with this movie called, an infamous movie called Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation. Yeah, yeah. And the Birth of a Nation,

it's a silent film, but it does have title cards with text that sort of walk you through things. And it's, title cards. Some of them are drawn from a historian. So this is like an epic film and this is drawn from real history. All of its title cards come from Woodrow Wilson's book. Shut the front door. Are you serious? The guy who wrote the film was his friend at been in graduate school with him. Absolutely. I had no idea about that. And then when the film is released,

it is deeply controversial. People like W. DeBois think, oh my God, this is going to be horrible for the country. And so there's a... Because at that time, there's a lot of local censorship, right? You can get a film banned in Boston. There's this big question of, are we going to show a film this racist? And there are arguments about it. And those arguments are settled when Woodrow Wilson has the film screened in the White House. Yeah.

And, you know, it's like if it's good enough for the president, like, it's got to be good enough for Boston. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I went to the Washington Museum of Savory. I think it was a bad one. Which just completely blew my mind in all different directions. But they have some footage. And I'm trying to remember the data.

It's either 1916 or early 1920s of a Kuklux Klan march in Washington, right? You know, where the Million Man March takes place. And you see hood after hood and regiment after regiment. On whose watch did that happen? Yeah. So the Ku Klux Klan has become such a horrifying symbol in the United States, right? And if you were to discover clan robes in your friend's house, I mean, that would just be the end of everything. It's really hard to remember that not only was this a violent and racist organization,

it was also a deeply respectable organization. Not quite Boy Scouts, but like in that direction, it's a civic organization that stands for respectable values. Those respectable values retrospectively are horrifying to us, but like you have to understand, we think of it as like, you know, it does its work quietly under the cover of night, but no, they march in the daytime. Yeah, and march freely and celebrated and, you know, people running up and giving flowers to something.

of the marches, women with push chairs looking on joyfully. Just one other thing on Woodrow Wilson just before we leave the pen portrait, because I always thought, and just correct me if I'm, isn't he the chap who it is said of him? I mean, he looks like a professor with these tiny pince-nez's kind of glasses on. His wife ended up running the country because he had a massive stroke and it was actually Mrs. Wilson, who was in charge for a bit. How incapacitated he is and who's taking over, you know, that's controversial. But it is, it is true that Woodrow Wilson, this sort of world historic figure who tries to kind of recreate the world order after the First World War, is incapacitated by a massive stroke. And the end of his

presidency, you have a real, like, how there is Woodrow question because he's dealing with massive health issues. Before we head off to Hawaii and start talking about that, finish up for us what we've been talking about over the last few episodes about the place of Native Americans in this American Empire. You were saying it's very important that they're not there, that they're absent for most of the story, that they're driven beyond. I mean, maybe a general statement first might be helpful.

It's really easy to, if you look at official documents and sort of see things through the eyes of people like Thomas Jefferson, it's really easy to see indigenous people as either not there or quickly on their way to not being there. One thing we rarely discuss is that the Constitution is the law of the land and it ostensibly covers all the people in the land, although it makes a sort of three-fifths apportionment compromise for African Americans. It doesn't cover Native Americans.

There's a 14th Amendment that gives citizenship to everyone in the country. It's a little complicated, but there's this category of Indians not taxed, meaning Indians who fall outside of the jurisdiction of the United States when it comes to things like rights who therefore don't count for apportionment, but more importantly, don't have birthright citizenship in the United States. It's not until 1924 that Native Americans get birthright citizenship in the United States. I can't believe we've had six episodes of this series on Native Americans without discovering this fact earlier. Yeah, it's 1924 is the first time. Yeah, so now let's be clear. There are individual and groups of Native Americans who have

citizenship earlier. It's a piecemeal system. And it is also complicated because from an indigenous perspective, you might not want inclusion. You might want sovereignty, right? So it's not exactly, it doesn't have the same kind of civil rights trajectory as the story often comes out and we tell the African-American story. But yeah, there's a way in which Native Americans are sort of haunt the edges of U.S. history when it's told from a Jeffersonian perspective, but are actually the main inhabitants of North America for the majority of the time that there is anything, you know, called quote-unquote America, started by the English-com. But Daniel, tell us about the whole business of Oklahoma, the idea that it was going to be a homeland

for the Native Americans, and then that idea is snatched away again. Once you really acknowledge the fact that North America is not empty of people, then you start asking questions of, well, what is territorially supposed to happen to Native people? So we know that they are, you know, removed from Eastern Centres of Power, but then the question is, where do they go? Where are they supposed to go? And a thing we rarely discuss is that at the same time that the United States is doing, quote, unquote, Indian removal under Andrew Jackson, in order to make that happen, it reserves an enormous portion of the country, not settled by white people, to be, quote, unquote, Indian country or Indian territory, it switches names. And at the start, it's this vaguely delineated, but nevertheless, massive part of the country. And there are maps. You could point me to maps, which have Indian territories.

trees on it. Exactly. Although, it's hard to find them, right? It tends to be this kind of nebulous thing. There are laws that tell you the borders of it, but in my book I had to make my own map because I couldn't find a good contemporary map of it. Is that because they destroyed maps? Because it was all too, pretend we never said that. No, it's because the cartographers, none of the cartographers that are indigenous and they're like, yeah, that doesn't really count. Like, yeah, okay, technically, yes, we reserve that for native people, but like, did we really? We'll come to that later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're talking about initially, we're talking about initially, more than 40% of the country, of the land of the country.

Right. And then that unsurprisingly quickly gets broken up. So they're like, okay, we said that this would only be for native people, but yeah, now we want to build a railroad and like, actually we do have a white settlement we want to go. And so Indian territory gets smaller and smaller. And people who'd been promised permanent settlement within Indian territory, that had been the big promise.

We know we've hassled you in Georgia. We know you've had a really hard time of it. But if you just crossed the Mississippi and just, here you will be safe from us. And then, of course, they're removed yet again and yet again from within what had been Indian territory until the land that present day on the map is called Oklahoma becomes this sort of compressed neutron star of Indian polities where thrice removed groups are budding up against groups who'd initially been given territory in there in their first removal. It's not particularly ecologically satisfying or fertile land, but it's land hopefully

that Indians can have. And it looks like it's going to be the last place that is marked as Indian territory. Whites cannot go there on the map. And then settlers start coming in. And settlers start coming in and demands that the federal government recognize their squatters rights. And as a last-ditch effort, there's a cross-polity group that includes indigenous and different kinds of indigenous groups and some white people who put in for statehood. What name do they want to call it? Sequoia, which is after a Cherokee silversmith who designed the Cherokee syllabary in which the Cherokee newspaper is printed. And so they're like, okay, well, you're not going to lesbian territory. Why don't we just be a state and it will be an Indian controlled state? So they apply

for statehood. They're like, they have a lot of people. So technically that should work. But the magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on a territory to make it a state is not people. It's white people. And so Congress swats that down and then admits a differently shaped territory that has more white people in it, and it has enough to ensure a white majority as a state, and that becomes Oklahoma. What period are we talking about when that happens? Early 20th century. As late as the 20th century?

In 1909. Wow. So by the end of the 19th century, there was still effectively a huge chunk of Indian-ruled territory that was designated Indian country. Yeah, that's into the 20th century. Such recent history. Our jaws are dropped. We are going to take a break here.

Join us after the break, where we are going to talk pure unadulted. rated shit. Don't threaten me with a good time. Welcome back, and we are still in the company of the marvelous, fabulous Daniel Imovar, whose name itself, I just love it, imovar, always true. That's right, isn't it? That's right. And you say you're the only family that has this name? Anyone who's an imovar is your cousin? Every imovar is related to me in ways that can be specified.

Okay. Fantastic. It's like having a dial rumpel. He's related to. He's related to everybody, but they're only a small number of them of us, and they genuinely are all related to you. I did say before the break that we were going to talk shit. You did. We really are. And left our listeners discomfited. I know, going, what's wrong with her? She's got COVID her brain has melted. You're in Chicago, I have to say, it's very hot where you are. It's hidden up in Chicago. Oh, Bertong and Waring. It's a fan and a window have been cracked open, so you might hear something of Chicago. So look, the shit in question that I wanted to talk about is guano, white gold.

Tell us why we are talking about white, gold, and white is so pivotal when it comes to talking about the American Empire. Yeah, look, and I just want to acknowledge, it surprised me, too, as a historian of empire. Things have a way of getting fecal when you talk about empire, but I didn't really, I didn't know we were going to go. It does not normally feature in the history of American expansionism. Exactly. So this is really a story about agricultural chemistry, and you will have to ensure that I keep this short because we could go on. Is this a subject close to your heart, Dan? It is. It is. Well, you know, it is. Well, you know whose card it was close to?

Farmers in the 19th century. Because it turns out, so if you're doing the kind of normal, traditional agriculture, the sort of old McDonald's style, you have chickens and you have cows and you're producing food for your own use, it all kind of works out, right? You're sucking nutrients out of the soil, but you're also defecating and your cows have manure. And it all sort of goes back into the soil. And the nutrients we're particularly thinking about are nitrates. So you really need nitrates if you're going to habitually grow crops.

Nitrates are weird because the air is around us is full of nitrogen, but it is not in plant accessible nitrate form. And there's not a lot of ways to get nitrates into the soil. And if you keep planting things in the soil, you'll use it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why in traditional agriculture, you have rotation. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Allow the soil to recover. Yeah, there are some plants that can weirdly restore nitrates to the soil and so legumes and that kind of thing. So if you plant wheat for a while, you can plant some clover, alfalfa, or lentils, and then you should be okay. Or you can use manure, which is why people do that. However, if you have just, I don't know, transition to industrial agriculture and you have huge cities like New York and Chicago,

and you are trying to provision them with wheat farms in, you know, like upstate New York, you will find, after a while, the wheat that used to be 20 bushels an acre is now like 18 and now 16 and 15. and that starts to get really worse. And so farmers start casting around for what they call soil amendments. Are there things that we can put on the soil to restore it to fertility so that we can keep doing cash crop agriculture, just putting the land to its most economically productive use without having to do crop rotation,

which kind of takes the land out of use for a little bit. And so they just go nuts. They're like, okay, what about like bone shavings? You know, like what about all this stuff from the tanneries? Horrible smelly stuff from tanneries. Just any organic junk you can think of, like maybe that, has nitrates in it and like we can just like literally put it on the land and cycle things back in. And it doesn't tend to overwhelmingly work because if you think about what industrial agricultural

does from a nitrate perspective, it sucks it out of the soil, it transports it to cities, people eat it or consume it and then they flush it into the rivers into the ocean. So the kind of cycle has been broken, the shit cycle, if you will. And the one thing that turns out to work is, well not just feces, but concentrated bird feces. So there are some... Guano. Guano, yeah, yeah. So guano is the name we use for bird or bat feces when used agriculturally.

And so there are some... For bats, it works really well because the bats like go into caves and they all poop in the caves and then that just piles up and you can kind of scrape it. And with birds, there are some islands, rainless islands, that are in the middle of nowhere but are surrounded by like anchovies and really good to eat fish. So the birds all eat to fish and then they all have to land on these small islands where it does not rain a lot. And so they all poop on the islands.

It works even where there's a lot of rain in Scotland. My family have a small rock called the Bass Rock, which is covered in Guano. Louis, can you tell us about your shit rock? Oh, tell us what you did at Cal? What did you do to our poor producer, you mean? So I took Cal, our producer, on a trip to the Bass Rock last summer. We left Northbury, and he'd forgotten his Anorak back in London. So he arrived on the Bass Rock protected by bin liners.

You put him in a bin bag. I put a cowl in a bin bag. Well, because you didn't want him to get pooped on. He was very grateful for them because there are 100,000 or however many, 500,000 Gannets on the Bass Rock. He must have actually thought this was some kind of hazing ritual on Empire. But yeah, okay. Well, he got plopped, but, you know, he was fine.

I would think one of there, too, despite the Scottish raid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So imagine without it, right. And used locally for agriculture too. Exactly, right. So it piles up, ideally dries out. And, you know, you allow this to happen. centuries, you have some very potent stuff. And so that becomes the kind of miracle grow stuff

of the 19th century, so much so that wars nearly started over access to these rocks. And the United States makes a bizarre, unprecedented and not since repeated law, which is, it had always had these arguments about like, should we grow, should there be Louisiana purchase. That had always been an argument, right? It always been like, is this what we want for the future of the United States? It comes up in Congress, Congress just passes a law and it says, okay, anyone who finds an uninhabited rock that is not obviously claimed by someone else can just dibs it for the United States, can just like preemptively annex it and it will become part of the United States. Yes, this has to get rubber stamped later by the U.S. government, but basically we're saying, just call it. And then

merchants can use it and the U.S. Navy will protect their right to do so. And that is how the United States is going to get all the guano it needs. So these are called guano islands. This is the Guano Islands Act. And it is... It's precious. It's actually in statute. 1856, the Guano Island Act. It's marvelous. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, it's huge. And this is an important driver of American imperialism. So important. Okay, one is just in a kind of bar trivia way, what is the first time that the United States expands overseas? And the answer is the guano islands. Ultimately, it claims like 94 of them by 1902, Caribbean and the Pacific mainly. But it's not just bar trivia. It is consequential in two other ways. One is the legality of this. It comes up in the

Supreme Court. Wait, are we allowed to just do this? Is the United States allowed to expand overseas? Hadn't been decided before. It's basically finders keep. Well, now it is. Thank you, Anita. That's the rule now. It wasn't obviously the rule then. Eastaguano Islands that establish the legality of the U.S. overseas empire, the idea that the United States could have overseas places that would have some kind of legal relationship to it, the other legacy is strategic. So at first, these islands are valuable because of what's on them. But in the 20th century, once planes get going, it's because of where the islands are. So those islands become really important to the, not all of them, but some of them become really important to the United States's

aviation empire. And it's actually on her way of one of those islands, how? Island Island that the famed aviatrics, Amelia Earhart, crashes. She's trying to go around the world and you have to go to Guano Island to get there. And what are the other, I mean, are there airbases now that we would recognize as Guano Island air bases? I mean, what are their name? Midway Island, I believe, is originally claimed. Right.

Midway is a Guano Island. Yeah. So there's an airport in Chicago called Midway, and that's because there's also a really important naval battle in World War II. The battle for Midway, yeah. But with Ben Affleck in it, I think, if I'm not. Yeah, he's in the Pearl Heart. that awful pro-barber movie.

But yeah, why would you need a battle over Midway? It's an uninhabited island because it's a really important place to land. Some of those islands have also been used to store nuclear devices. If you want to store a nuclear weapon or position a nuclear weapon, it's kind of useful to be able to do it on an uninhabited island. So when we look for the roots of American Overseas Empire, it's to Guano Islands that we look at. Yeah, you are standing ankle deep in shit.

So shit is the great motivator. I mean, there is such a clear metaphor in that, which... Irresistible. Alluding us somehow. I mean, I just can't put my finger on it at all. Look, we're going to talk about the history of Hawaii in the next episode, Daniel. Just very briefly, how does Hawaii fit into this picture of expansion? And how does it relate to Guano, too?

So, I mean, Hawaii is interesting because the first thing that happens in Hawaii from the U.S. perspective is that missionaries, whalers, traders go out to... Hawaii is a useful place where all kinds of things might happen, but it is not a place where the United States government goes. And there is a long period where there is an American presence in Hawaii, but Hawaii is not part of the United States. And that's because the U.S. government is reluctant to annex Hawaii to enter the game of overseas empire.

However, there is a distinct moment at the end of the 19th century keyed to a war in 1898, where where things switch for the United States. And suddenly the Guano Islands Act, which would become just this kind of trivial thing that we did for agriculture, becomes really important because the United States suddenly has a strategic interest in empire. So suddenly Hawaii, which had been not desirable as a colony, becomes a colony of the United States. And the Guano Islands Act becomes the legal precedent for doing exactly that kind of thing. You know, it is the perfect, perfect way to end this episode. And we're going to hear more from Daniel in a couple of future episodes on the finish. So please do join us next time. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnans. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.